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by ben_w
271 days ago
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> And no, I'm not joking here, not anymore. The more I think about it, the more I feel we'll eventually have to deal with the problem that machines we build are naturally better at the things we want to be doing, and naturally worse at the things we want them to do for us. Perhaps, but also "what they are good at" != "what they want to do", for any interpretation of "want" that may or may not anthropomorphise, e.g. I want to be more flirtatious but I was never good at it and now I'm nearly 42. That said, I think you're underestimating the machines on physicality. Artifical muscle substitutes have beaten humans on raw power since soon after the steam engine, and on fine control whenever precision engineering passed below the thickness of a human hair. |
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Right. Still, same can be said about flying machines and birds; our technology outclasses them on any individual factor you can think of, but we still can't beat them on all relevant factors at the same time. We can't build a general-purpose bird-equivalent just yet.
Maybe it's not a fundamental hardship, and merely economics of the medium - it's much easier and cheaper to iterate on software than on hardware. But then, maybe this is fundamental - physical world is hard and expensive; computation is cheap and easy. Thinking happens in computational space.
My point wasn't about whether or not robots can be eventually made to be better than us in both physical and mental aspects - rather, it's that near-term, we'll be dealing with machines that beat us on all cognitive tasks simultaneously, but are not anywhere close to us in dealing with physical world in general. Now, if those compete with us for jobs or place in society, we get to the situation I was describing.