mental tasks that seem hard to humans—like square-rooting large numbers and remembering large amounts of information—are comparatively easy for computers. Conversely, mental tasks that are effortless to humans—like recognizing a face or keeping one’s balance while walking—are much more difficult for AI. The likely reason is that these latter functions have evolved over tens or hundreds of millions of years and run in the backgrounds of our brains, whereas “higher” cognition is powered by the neocortex, which is the center of our consciousness and which didn’t reach its roughly modern form
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