Knowing a solution is at hand is a huge advantage; it’s like not having a “none of the above” option. Anyone with reasonable competence and adequate resources can solve a puzzle when it is presented as something to be solved. We can skip the subtle evaluations and move directly to plugging in possible solutions until we hit upon a promising one. Uncertainty is far more challenging. Instead of immediately looking for solutions to the crisis, we have to maintain a constant state of asking, “Is there a crisis* forming?”
-- Garry Kasparov – How Life Imitates Chess
I have been spending quite a bit of time with AI of late, both on the theory and practical aspects. One of the questions that keeps coming up is the idea of AGI - Artificial General Intelligence. Although there is no real agreement on what exactly would qualify as AGI, many of the definitions come back around to the idea of "as good as a human" or "better than a human". (Yes, I know that is a gross over simplification.)
It was in that context that this quote from Garry Kasparov recently came back into my mind.