Have you heard of Moravec’s Paradox? This is a principle discovered by AI robotics expert Hans Moravec in the 1980s. He discovered that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires relatively little computation power, whereas low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources. This explains why we can now create specialized AI, such as predictive coding software to help lawyers find evidence, or AI software that can beat the top human experts at complex games such as Chess, Jeopardy and Go, but we cannot create robots as smart as dogs, much less as smart as gifted two-year-olds like my granddaughter.

Hans Moravec is a legend in the world of AI. An immigrant from Austria, he is now serving as a research professor in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. His work includes attempts to develop a fully autonomous robot that is capable of navigating its environment without human intervention. Aside…