What the Science of Touch Says About Us
Monday, June 27th, 2016Feel Me by @AdamGopnik
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/what-the-science-of-touch-says-about-us It’s easier for AI to win at chess than move pieces on the board – cf http://www.NYTimes.com/1997/05/13/opinion/l-how-smart-can-it-be-084328.html
Sensory Studies
MAY 16, 2016 ISSUE
Feel Me
What the new science of touch says about ourselves.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
QT:{{”
““Haptic intelligence is vital to human intelligence,” she concludes. “It’s not just dexterity. It’s finding your way in the world: it’s embodiment, emotion, attack. Haptic intelligence is human
intelligence. We’re just so smart with it that we don’t know it yet. It’s actually much harder to make a chess piece move correctly—to pick up the piece and move it across the board and put it down
properly—than it is to make the right chess move.” She adds, slyly, “When I took A.I. as a student, I was so dismayed to find that most A.I. is just stupid brute force, just running through the
possibilities a machine can look at quickly. Computer chess looks intelligent, but it’s under-the-hood stupid. Reaching and elegantly picking up the right chess piece fluidly and having it land in the right place in an uncontrolled environment—that’s hard. Haptic intelligence is an almost irreproducible miracle! Because people are so good at that, they don’t appreciate it. Machines are good at finding the next move, but moving in the world still baffles them.”” “}}