On Moravec's Paradox
You know AI can automate tasks and create art, but did you know AI can bring robots to life?
Let’s dive in!
The future of AI is embodied.
To realize the promise of AI, we believe it needs to be grounded in physical understanding and interaction. But this isn't as easy as it sounds.
Physical action may seem straightforward compared to job automation or artistic expression, but for AI, it's exactly the opposite. What we perceive to be hard as humans is actually easy for computers, whereas what we perceive to be easy is actually hard.
There’s an obscure contradiction known as Moravec’s Paradox that summarizes this perfectly:
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 regarding perception and mobility.
But why?
Moravec continues:
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. 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.
As a species, humans have spent a shockingly small fraction of our evolutionary time learning abstract thought compared to physical motion. So it's unsurprising that what seems simple to us, is so difficult for AI.
If the future of AI needs embodiment, we need to brave Moravec's paradox to achieve it.
That's why we're developing Mels.
Mels are digital robots that are physically simulated and powered by state of the art AI, including deep neural networks and reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making and actions:
They're physically intelligent and embodied like robots, with the ability to sense, learn, and act based on real-world physics simulations. They aren't just computing - they are embodying:
While many are crowding into applying the current state of AI, we're veering off the beaten path to help bring embodiment to AI's future.
Two roads to AGI diverged in a wood, we took the one less traveled.
