This was original a social video post
I want AI to do my dishes and laundry so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so I can do more dishes and laundry.
That 2024 tweet went viral. And there’s a name for this: Moravec’s Paradox, and it dates back to 1988, from a machine learning researcher.
AI researchers 40 years ago identified that high-level reasoning like chess, statistics, and mathematics needs relatively little computation. But low-level motor skills like walking or picking up a cup of coffee requires immense resources.
That gets at an elegant idea: that physical tasks that we evolved for hundreds of thousands or even in some sense millions of years to do are brutally hard for machines. Yet because we’ve been able to do them for so long, we don’t quite think of them as intelligent.
That’s in contrast to things that we’ve invented or discovered a lot more recently like poetry and painting and even calculus. We consider them as so advanced and intelligent because we’re relatively new to them. We discount all the old stuff we’ve done for a long time.
But computers and machines remind us how difficult that is and how remarkable evolution has been to us.
Here thenis a distinction I make about creative work. Poetry and painting might be evolutionarily new, at least newer than walking. But what we’re getting at with painting and poetry (explaining the human condition) is one of the oldest, maybe the defining characteristics of being human.
Moravec’s Paradox teaches that the old stuff is hard and the new stuff is easier. So
let’s remember that so much of what we do with art and creative work is very
old indeed.