In 1997, legendary computer scientist Hans Moravec wrote¹:

Imagine a “landscape of human competence,” having lowlands with labels like “arithmetic” and “rote memorization”, foothills like “theorem proving” and “chess playing,” and high mountain peaks labeled “locomotion,” “hand−eye coordination” and “social interaction.” We all live in the solid mountaintops, but it takes great effort to reach the rest of the terrain, and only a few of us work each patch. Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century.

20 years later physicist Max Tegmark visualized “Moravec’s flood” in his lovely 2017 book, Life 3.0:²

“During the decades since he wrote those passages, the sea level has kept rising relentlessly, as he predicted, like global warming on steroids, and some of his foothills (including chess) have long since been submerged. What comes next and what we should do about it is the topic of the rest of this book. As the sea level keeps rising, it may one day reach a tipping point, triggering dramatic change. This critical sea level is the one corresponding to machines becoming able to perform AI design. Before this tipping point is reached, the sea-level rise is caused by humans improving machines; afterward, the rise can be driven by machines improving machines, potentially much faster than humans could have done, rapidly submerging all land. This is the fascinating and controversial idea of the singularity…”

In 2023 when I worked at OSTP, I kept a copy of this image on my door, periodically hand-coloring updates to the waterline as new capabilities emerged (and submerged).

In the first quarter of 2026, AI can’t quite yet “zero shot” researching the current state of AI capabilities to update the image accordingly, then draft this post. But it is remarkably capable (with coaxing) of crafting each element piecemeal. I’d guess before the year is out, it will be able to execute this task end to end.

With some liberties taken from both human and AI laziness, here is a quick and dirty update to the graphic as of Q1 2026 and data determining the sealevel.

#	Feature	Status	Source
01	Arithmetic	Deep submerged	AIME 2025: Gemini 3 Pro 100%
02	Rote memorization	Submerged Partially wet on max-context multi-hop	Long-Context Leaderboard (MRCR/RULER)
03	Chess	Deep submerged	Stockfish 18 Elo ~3650 vs Carlsen 2840
04	Go	Deep submerged Adversarial residual	KataGo Distributed Training
05	Jeopardy-class trivia	Deep submerged HLE at waterline	HLE: Gemini 3.1 Pro 44.7%
06	Speech recognition	Deep submerged English clean	MLPerf Inference v5.1 (Whisper)
07	Vision	Submerged MMMU-Pro at human-expert ceiling	MMMU-Pro: Gemini 3.1 Pro 88.21%
08	Translation	SubmergedWaterline High-resource submerged; literary/classical at waterline	WMT25 en-zh: Algharb/Qwen3-14B ESA 88.4 · PoetMT (classical Chinese)
09	Winograd test	Submerged Partially wet on adversarial paraphrase	HuggingFace Eval Guidebook 2025
10	Investment	SubmergedDry Algorithmic submerged; discretionary tier dry — no benchmark covers it	Alpha Arena S1: Qwen3-Max +22.32% · StockBench: Kimi-K2 #1 DJIA · FinTrust: all LLMs fail fiduciary
11	Driving	SubmergedDry Geofenced submerged; unstructured/weather dry	Waymo Safety Impact Hub
12	Theorem verification	SubmergedWaterline Textbook submerged; research autoformalization at waterline	miniF2F-Lean Revisited: HILBERT 99.2%
13	Programming	SubmergedWaterline Verified submerged; Pro at waterline	SWE-Bench Pro: Claude Opus 4.5 45.9%
14	Art	Submerged Technically submerged; residual is socio-legal	Market signal: Fiverr “AI-first” / illustrator income collapse
15	Book writing	SubmergedDry Short-form submerged; novel-length dry	EQ-Bench Creative Writing v3 + Longform
16	Cinematography	SubmergedDry Short-clip submerged; feature-length dry	Runway AI Film Festival 2026
17	Management	SubmergedDry Deliverables submerged; long-horizon coherence dry	GDPval v2: GPT-5.2 Pro 74.1% wins-or-ties
18	Theorem proving	SubmergedWaterlineDry Olympiad submerged; research at waterline; Tier 4 dry	IMO 2025: Gemini Deep Think gold (35/42) · FrontierMath Tier 4: GPT-5.4 Pro 38%
19	Science	Waterline	FutureHouse Robin (end-to-end discovery)
20	Social interaction	SubmergedDry Routine submerged; high-stakes dry	Capability: EQ-Bench 3 · Counter-signal: Klarna reversal
21	AI design Red peak	Partially wet ~70% submerged at peak	METR Time Horizon 1.1 · OpenAI Preparedness Framework v2
22a	Locomotion (unstructured) Moravec	Dry Lower slopes wet	Tien Kung 3.0 wins Beijing Robot Warrior Challenge · HumanoidBench · Musk: zero Optimus do useful work
22b	Dexterous manipulation Moravec	WaterlineDry Structured pick-and-place at waterline; deformables/assembly dry	π*0.6: ~97% adversarial shirt-folding · GarmentLab · FMB peg-in-hole: ~60%
22c	Tacit social judgment Moravec	Dry Mostly dry on peak; extrapolation unreliable	FANToM: GPT-4o vs human 87.5 · ExploreToM: GPT-4o ~9% · SimpleToM: 95% explicit / 15% applied

With no sign of the underlying trend abating, I expect several more inundations before the year ends.

Moravec’s proposal, “that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life! ” seems increasingly sage…

1. https://s10251.pcdn.co/pdf/1997-moravec.pdf
2. https://lifearchitect.ai/flood/