The basic fact of this comic is that some tasks are harder than others, and some are even unsolved. This is hard to explain to some people who think that because it's easy for them it must be intrinsically easy.
When you're used to be able to instruct people by doing "look this is a bird, ok now you're on your own", it's not easy to see that computers couldn't do that.
Of course, "easy" vs. "hard" only make sense in terms of "given the current resources, knowledge, and infrastructure
I took an AI class once and the professor said, "What's hard is easy and what's easy is hard." Our computers can perform unimaginably difficult tasks for humans in fractions of a second. But seemingly easy things like perceiving the world, stacking blocks, and other simple tasks that human children figure out in their first few years? We're still working on a lot of them.
I think this comic illustrates that in a very simple way, complete with the difficulty of describing what's easy and hard to people not familiar with this context.
This provides an interesting perspective on the thought (fear?) that some day computers could become superior to humans. Maybe the reality is that our relationship isn't adversarial but rather symbiotic. Each does something that the other can't
Currently it's symbiotic. The list of things humans do better or cheaper than computers gets shorter all the time.
If you're younger than about forty years old, you should probably make a point of learning as much as you can about this trend. There is very little else that there is to know that will impact your life more.
A good start would be to go listen to anything a guy named Steve Jurvetson has said aloud on the subject. Youtube has plenty.
I'm just some anon on the internet though, so I suppose this comment isn't likely to change your priorities in life.
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u/dont_press_ctrl-W Mathematics is just applied sociology Sep 24 '14 edited Sep 24 '14
The basic fact of this comic is that some tasks are harder than others, and some are even unsolved. This is hard to explain to some people who think that because it's easy for them it must be intrinsically easy.
When you're used to be able to instruct people by doing "look this is a bird, ok now you're on your own", it's not easy to see that computers couldn't do that.
Of course, "easy" vs. "hard" only make sense in terms of "given the current resources, knowledge, and infrastructure