As artificial intelligence continues to both dominate the news and stimulate our imagination, many questions remain. One such question was explored in a recent Article. As the authors describe, artificial intelligence still needs to bridge the gap between mastering cerebral games like chess and Go and translating that impact to the physical world. The latter remains a bigger challenge.
However, if you blink these days, you might miss a major advancement. In this case, the advancements begin to address these bigger challenges. The article above describes a robot named Curly that uses deep reinforcement learning to compete with world-class curling champions. We can see through this example the bridging of the gap between the cerebral and the physical. Curly can make improvements as it corrects its own errors, and that ability allowed the AI-enabled robot to beat top-ranked human opponents from South Korean teams three out of four games. The video below captures the competition.
Reimagining the Future 
Of course robots, especially with AI or ML and proper data sets, can do many physical tasks much better than humans with more precision, strength and dexterity. It will be much easier to “program” these robots to do those tasks with AI. That still leaves your initial question of how do we “bridge the gap between mastering cerebral games like chess and Go and translating that impact to the physical world?” Indeed, the latter remains a bigger challenge.
Do we want to be served in our restaurants by AI robots? How about healthcare, teaching and any or all of the other service industries (which will also put underpaid humans out of work and potentially destitute)? Will the ailing and elderly be better served by AI robots as orderlies and nurses? What about the human interactions that impact mental health and well being?
There are certainly things where AI robots and just AI can help like helping a patient to the bathroom, serving a meal or repetitive teaching or therapy drills, but if AI robots take over most of these how will the isolation from other human being affect our elderly, ailing and children in the long run? I think we have only just begun to even consider these aspects and the effect on employment and working people and it is high time we begin to do so.
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