IKEA furniture and the limits of AI

COMPUTERS have already proved better than people at playing chess and diagnosing diseases. But now a group of artificial-intelligence researchers in Singapore have managed to teach industrial robots to assemble an IKEA chair--for the first time uniting the worlds of Allen keys and Alan Turing. Now that machines have mastered one of the most baffling ways of spending a Saturday afternoon, can it be long before AIs rise up and enslave human beings in the silicon mines? The research also holds a serious message. It highlights a deep truth about the limitations of automation.