India, Oct. 21 -- When you're in the Indian bureaucracy, you're expected to know everything from crop insurance to quantum physics, sometimes both before lunch.

So, when an assignment on artificial intelligence landed on my desk, I did what any self-respecting officer would: Pretended I knew all about it, and quietly enrolled in an online course. Somewhere between algorithms and machine-learning modules, I stumbled upon Moravec's paradox - the odd truth that machines find complex tasks like playing chess easy, but struggle miserably with simple ones like walking. Naturally, the bureaucrat in me stopped thinking about robots and started thinking about. us. If there's any species that embodies this paradox in human form, it's the bureaucra...