IKEA furniture and the Limits of AI
“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—for the first time uniting the worlds of Allen keys and Alan Turing. Now that machines have mastered one of the most baffling ways of spending a Saturday afternoon, can it be long before AIs rise up and enslave human beings in the silicon mines?”
“The research also holds a serious message. It highlights a deep truth about the limitations of automation. Machines excel at the sorts of abstract, cognitive tasks that, to people, signify intelligence—complex board games, say, or differential calculus. But they struggle with physical jobs, such as navigating a cluttered room, which are so simple that they hardly seem to count as intelligence at all. The IKEAbots are a case in point. 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 (see article).”
The Economist, April 19, 2018: “IKEA furniture and the limits of AI”
AI -- “let’s get physical”
“Games like chess and Go, with their finite, regimented boards and well-defined rules, are well-suited to computers. The physical and spatial common sense we learn intuitively as children to navigate the real world is mostly beyond them. To pour a cup of coffee, you effortlessly grasp and balance cup and carafe, and control the arc of the pouring fluid. You draw on the same deep-seated knowledge, and a sense for the motivations of other humans, to interpret what you see in the world around you.
How to give some version of that to machines is a major challenge in AI. Some researchers think that the techniques that are so effective for recognizing speech or images won’t be much help, arguing new techniques are needed. Memisevic took leave from the prestigious Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms to start Twenty Billion because he believes that existing techniques can do much more for us if trained properly. “They work incredibly well,” he says. “Why not extend them to more subtle aspects of reality by forcing them to learn things about the real world?”
Wired, February 9. 2018: “To Make AI Smarter, Humans Perform Oddball Low-Paid Tasks,” by Tom Simonite
TwentyBN: “When humans perform tasks and solve problems, they rely heavily on their common sense knowledge about the world. A detailed understanding of the physical world is however still largely missing from current applications in artificial intelligence and robotics. Our mission is to change that. We are developing new, ground-breaking technology that allows machines to perceive the world like humans.”
