An article in the Economist reports on efforts of AI researchers in Singapore to automatically assemble an IKEA chair. They call it the Kamprad test – named after the founder of IKEA:
COMPUTERS have already proved better than people at playing chess and diagnosing diseases. But now a group of artificial-intelligence researchers in Singapore have managed to teach industrial robots to assemble an IKEA chair
It took a pair of them, pre-programmed by humans, more than 20 minutes to assemble a chair that a person could knock together in a fraction of the time.
Clearly Moravec’s paradox is that play here. The paradox is:
Moravec’s paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources.
It can even explain the difficulties Elon Musk and Tesla face to fully automate their production line.
Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 13, 2018