That was a key takeaway from a conversation between economist Daniel Kahneman and MIT professor of brain and cognitive science Josh Tenenbaum at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) recently. The pair spoke during the virtual event about the shortcomings of humans and what we can learn from them while building A.I.

Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in economic sciences and the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, noted an instance in which humans use judgment heuristics—shortcuts, essentially—to answer questions they don’t know the answer to. In the example, people are given a small amount of information about a student: She’s about to graduate, and she was reading fluently when she was 4 years old. From that, they’re asked to estimate her grade point average.

Using this information, many people will estimate the student’s GPA to be 3.7 or 3.8. To arrive there, Kahneman explained, they assign her a percentile on the intelligence scale—usually very high, given what they know about her reading ability at a young age. Then they assign her a GPA in what they estimate to be the corresponding percentile.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Korea has developed a robot hand that has abilities similar to human hands. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes how they achieved a high level of dexterity while keeping the hand’s size and weight low enough to attach to a robot arm.

Creating robot hands with the dexterity, strength and flexibility of human hands is a challenging task for engineers—typically, some attributes are discarded to allow for others. In this new effort, the researchers developed a new robot hand based on a linkage-driven mechanism that allows it to articulate similarly to the human hand. They began their work by conducting a survey of existing robot hands and assessing their strengths and weaknesses. They then drew up a list of features they believed their hand should have, such as fingertip force, a high degree of controllability, low cost and high dexterity.

The researchers call their new hand an integrated, linkage-driven dexterous anthropomorphic (IDLA) robotic hand, and just like its human counterpart, it has four fingers and a thumb, each with three joints. And also like the human hand, it has fingertip sensors. The hand is also just 22 centimeters long. Overall, it has 20 joints, which gives it 15 degrees of motion—it is also strong, able to exert a crushing force of 34 Newtons—and it weighs just 1.1.kg.

Why AI will completely take over science by the end of the next decade:

‘’It can take decades for scientists to identify physical laws, statements that explain anything from how gravity affects objects to why energy can’t be created or destroyed. Purdue University researchers have found a way to use machine learning for reducing that time to just a few days.’‘.

Prof. Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.