Leaders | The Kamprad test

IKEA furniture and the limits of AI

Humans have had a good run. But with the most recent breakthrough in robotics, it is clear that their time as masters of planet Earth has come to an end

Apr 21st 2018

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?

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “The Kamprad test”