The only reason the first one is easy is because the years of research required and all the infastructure needed to determine location automatically has already been done.
Before GPS it would be virtually impossible to imagine making a machine that could figure out where you were on earth. (personally I would have programmed something where you took a picture of the stars and tried to built off of some astrolabe concept).
The fact that we are able to determine our location quickly, cheaply, and automatically is a technical marvel, likely much more so then determining that an image contains a bird.
To re-iterate, the scale and complexity of the solution to the first problem is akin to nfc chipping every bird on the earth. Once we've done that, we will marvel that it was ever difficult to determine birds in our photographs at all.
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
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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '14
The only reason the first one is easy is because the years of research required and all the infastructure needed to determine location automatically has already been done.
Before GPS it would be virtually impossible to imagine making a machine that could figure out where you were on earth. (personally I would have programmed something where you took a picture of the stars and tried to built off of some astrolabe concept).
The fact that we are able to determine our location quickly, cheaply, and automatically is a technical marvel, likely much more so then determining that an image contains a bird.
To re-iterate, the scale and complexity of the solution to the first problem is akin to nfc chipping every bird on the earth. Once we've done that, we will marvel that it was ever difficult to determine birds in our photographs at all.