His numbers are also based off the difference between humans and chimps for some reason? We can't replicate the intelligence of a chimp on a computer, so why that is a valid basis of comparison is beyond me.
Quite. You would suspect that if we were able to produce an AI with the intelligence of a chimp then a human-level AI would be in reach. The harder step is probably getting to the level of chimp intelligence; you'd have managed to create consciousness and solved the hard problem for a start.
Mind if I go a little off-topic here? This paradox reminds me of some other conclusion I've had, which is the fact that energy requirements of many physical processes are completely counterintuitive. For instance, it probably takes more energy to light a light bulb for a day, than it takes a small processor to run a set of calculations equivalent to a lifetime's worth of arithmetic done by every human being alive today.
>Kind of renders all of his information theoretic calculations moot.
The stuff in the article isn't information theory. Information theory, in the senses of Shannon and Chaitin, is actually very useful for studying cognition, because it tells us about how much we can try to learn, via what methods, from noisy sensory data.
Moravec's paradox is not an experimental result. It's just one guys musings on intelligence. It says a lot more about the misguided things people thought about intelligence in the early days of AI than the actual inherent difficulty of achieving human-level AI.
According to the linked article, several notable researchers were of the same opinion (and one might also say that relativity was just one guy's musings - though admittedly experimental evidence wasn't long in coming.)
I do, however, agree with your second sentence, and I think the paradox is also weakened by the fact that when 'high-level' mental tasks are computerized (chess-playing, for example), it is often through brute-force calculation that is not a model of how humans use their general intelligence to perform the task.
> Chimps are remarkable thinkers in their own right. Maybe the key to intelligence lies mostly in the mental abilities (and genetic information) that chimps and humans have in common. If this is correct, then human brains might be just a minor upgrade to chimpanzee brains, at least in terms of the complexity of the underlying principles.
Of course this still kills the argument that it's at most 125MiB in my opinion. Moravec's paradox [1] implies a lot of the actually-hard tasks related to inference and learning are already solved in chimps, because they can see and hear and balance just fine. I think if we actually understood how chimps reasoned, in high-level and low-level terms, then we could easily tweak and improve that process to function beyond human level.
I believe Moravec's paradox is a consequence of the fact that we do not consciously recognise the effort our brains/bodies do in sensorimotor computation. When we add up numbers consciously in our head, using arithmetic, it takes us quite some effort, but in the meanwhile our visual cortex is doing similar operations (unconsciously) millions of times more efficiently.
It's as if the conscious arithmetic runs on some kind of stack of virtualization layers, using millions of neurons to build a mental image of the concept of "the number five", whereas a handful of neurons would suffice to do the actual arithmetic.
I often wonder if those rare people who can do calculations in their head faster than calculators, may have - unconsciously - found a way to unlock the native hardware of their brain, bypassing all of the symbol abstractions required by us muggles. A bit like GPGPU vs CPU for certain algorithms - only orders of magnitude more pronounced.