The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.
Stephen Pinker, Wikipedia/Moravec's Paradox
What was the ratio of phone time spent talking to human vs computer receptionists when Pinker published this quote in 2007? For that matter, how much non-phone time was being spent using a website to perform a transaction that would have previously required interaction with a human receptionist?
Pinker understood AI correctly (it's still way too hard to handle arbitrary interactions with customers), yet he failed to predict the present, much less the future, because he misunderstood the economics. Most interactions with customers are very non-arbitrary. ...
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
And one new rule: