Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by saalweachter 2316 days ago
There's like fifty caveats that go along with this statement, but this is the internet so I'm just going to skip all that.

Something like half your human brain is devoted to visual processing.

There's a tendency to think that things like language is what makes the human brain special, or our ability to plan or think abstractly, and we talk about things like "eagle eyes", but the truth is humans are seeing machines with most everything else as an afterthought.

The reason your cat will attack paint spots on glass for hours and flips the hell out about laser pointers is because their visual systems are too simple to distinguish between those and the objects that actually interest them, like insects.

Vision is not the easy part of AI.

2 comments

> Vision is not the easy part of AI.

I think it is, actually. Going from raw pixels to objects is the (relatively speaking) easy part. It's the next part (using that for planning and common-sense reasoning) that's the hard part. Machine learning has already advanced past humans in this regard for many classes of problems - which is part of the reason why captchas are getting so hard.

This was several years ago, hence the move away from obfuscated text (which was getting harder and harder to read): https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/...

I'd be surprised if basic perception tasks as human-ness tests last more than a few more years.

citation for "half your human brain is devoted to visual processing"?
Since the internet places no weight on things like "common knowledge to anyone in the field" or "I took a bunch of classes on the brain in college", here's a random quote from someone at MIT: http://news.mit.edu/1996/visualprocessing