PERSON
Hans Moravec
The roboticist who discovered, in hardware, that intelligence is upside down—that the skills of a toddler are computationally vast while chess and calculus are cheap—and who drew from that discovery the most unsettling and coherent vision of the machine future anyone has written.
Hans Moravec is the engineer who followed the logic of artificial intelligence all the way to its end before almost anyone else was willing to look. Born in Austria in 1948 and trained at Stanford, he spent his youth coaxing a contraption called the Stanford Cart across a cluttered room, one painful meter at a time, and the failure taught him the insight that now bears his name.
Moravec’s paradox—that the summit of human intellectual achievement is computationally cheap while the floor of animal competence is nearly unreachable—is the most durable single observation in the history of
embodied cognition. From that observation he built outward into prophecy: in
Mind Children (1988) he argued that intelligent machines are our evolutionary heirs, “mind children” who will carry our culture forward after our bodies are gone, and he welcomed the prospect with the equanimity of a parent watching a gifted child surpass them. The machines