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 approximately the limitations of automation. Machines excel at the sorts of summary, cognitive tasks that, and to people,signify intelligence—complex board games, say, and 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, and pre-programmed by humans,more than 20 minutes to assemble a chair that a...
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Source: economist.com