Backflips are easy, stairs are hard: Robots still struggle with simple human movements, experts say

Whether it’s running down a track, doing a backflip, dancing to music, or kickboxing, there are more and more videos of humanoid robots doing increasingly impressive things.

Yet speakers at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference on Tuesday warned against getting too dazzled by the acrobatic feats. A robot doing a backflip–something difficult for a person–looks impressive. But ask a robot to perform seemingly easy tasks, say, climbing up stairs or grabbing a glass of water, and many of todays droids still struggle.

“What looks hard is easy, but what looks easy is really hard,” Stephanie Zhan, a partner at Sequoia Capital, explained, paraphrasing an observation from computer scientist Hans Moravec. In the late Eighties, Moravec and other computer scientists noted that it was easier for compu