Moravec's paradox

Moravec's Paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, the uniquely human faculty of reason (conscious, intelligent, rational thought) requires very little computation, but that the unconscious sensorimotor skills and instincts that we share with the animals require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. As Moravec writes: "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility."

Marvin Minsky, in the Society of Mind, wrote "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best," and adds "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly."

The biological basis of human skills

The explanation of the paradox is the theory of evolution. All human skills are implemented biologically, using machinery designed by the process of natural selection. In the course of their evolution, natural selection has preserved every design improvement and optimization. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design. Abstract thought developed only very recently, and consequently, we should not expect its implementation to be particularly efficient.

As Moravec writes:

“Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.”

A compact way to express this argument would be:

• We should expect the difficulty of reverse engineering any human skill to be roughly proportional to the amount of time that skill has been evolving in animals.
• The oldest human skills are largely unconscious and so appear to us to be effortless.
• Therefore, we should expect skills that appear effortless to be difficult to reverse engineer, but skills that require effort may not necessarily be difficult to engineer at all.

Some examples of skills that have been evolving for millions of years: recognizing a face, moving around in space, judging people’s motivations, catching a ball, recognizing a voice, setting appropriate goals, paying attention to things that are interesting; anything to do with perception, attention, visualization, motor skills, social skills and so on.

Some examples of skills that have appeared more recently: mathematics, engineering, human games, logic and much of what we call science. These are hard for us because they are not what our bodies and brains were primarily designed to do. These are skills and techniques that were designed recently, in historical time, and have had at most a few thousand years to be refined, mostly by cultural evolution.

Historical influence on artificial intelligence

In the early days of artificial intelligence research, leading researchers often predicted that they would be able to create thinking machines in a just a few decades. (see history of artificial intelligence). Their optimism stemmed in part from the fact that they had been successful at writing programs that used logic, solved algebra and geometry problems and played games like checkers and chess. Logic and algebra are difficult for people and are considered a sign of intelligence. They assumed that, having (almost) solved the "hard" problems, the "easy" problems of vision and commonsense reasoning would soon fall into place. They were wrong, of course, and one reason is that these problems are not easy at all, but incredibly difficult. The fact that they had solved problems like logic and algebra was irrelevant, because these problems are extremely easy for machines to solve.

Rodney Brooks explains that, according to early AI research, intelligence was "best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging", such as chess, symbolic integration, proving mathematical theorems and solving complicated word algebra problems. "The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence."

This would lead Brooks to pursue a new direction in artificial intelligence and robotics research. He decided to build intelligent machines that had "No cognition. Just sensing and action. That is all I would build and completely leave out what traditional was thought of as the intelligence of artificial intelligence." This new direction, which he called "Nouvelle AI" was highly influential on robotics research and AI.

See also

• Embodied philosophy
• Embodiment
• Nouvelle AI
• Subsumption architecture
• Hans Moravec
• History of artificial intelligence

References

• Brooks, Rodney (1986), Intelligence Without Representation, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
• Brooks, Rodney (2002), Flesh and Machines, Pantheon Books
• Campbell, Jeremy (1989), The Improbable Machine, Simon and Schuster, pp. 30–31
• Minsky, Marvin (1986), The Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster, p. 29
• Moravec, Hans (1988), Mind Children, Harvard University Press
• McCorduck, Pamela (2004), Machines Who Think (2nd ed.), Natick, MA: A. K. Peters, Ltd., p. 456, ISBN 1-56881-205-1.