Are friends electric?
# Are Friends Electric?
Three books examine our relationship with robots, AI, and technology.
By Bryan Gardiner
And yet, like other humans who are routinely asked to prove this fact with photos, deciphering distorted boxes that affirm my non-automated public part, are supposed to help prevent spam and data scraping, although it now appears that bots are better at solving them than humans. Go figure.
Thankfully, the difference between humans and machines in the real world is much easier to discern, at least for now. One of the more robust differentiators involves our unique skill sets. While machines tend to excel at things adults find difficult—playing world-champion-level chess, say, or multiplying really big numbers—they find it difficult (or impossible) to accomplish the stuff a five-year-old can do with ease, such as catching a ball or walking around a room without bumping into things.
## Will We Ever Trust Robots?
This discrepancy between the relative ease of teaching a machine abstract thinking and the difficulty of teaching it basic sensory, social, and motor skills is what's known as Moravec's paradox. Named after an observation the roboticist Hans Moravec made back in the late 1980s, the paradox states that what's hard for humans (math, logic, scientific reasoning) is easy for machines, and what's hard for machines (tying shoelaces, reading emotions, having a conversation) is easy for humans.
If most robots still need remote human operators to be safe and effective, why should we welcome them into our homes?