Release Message:  Logical thought is hard for humans and easy for computers, but picking a screw from a box of screws is an unsolved problem. Authored by Hans Moravec.

Description:  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. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. As Moravec writes, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility." Linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker considers this the most significant discovery uncovered by AI researchers. In his book The Language Instinct, he writes: The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come. Marvin Minsky emphasizes that the most difficult human skills to reverse engineer are those that are unconscious. "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best," he writes, and adds "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly."