How babies learn –
and why robots can’t compete
Alex Beard notes:
“Until recently,
scientists had tended to think of infants as irrational, illogical and
egocentric. … This understanding had contributed to a mechanistic view of
learning, and the idea that the sheer repetition of words was what mattered
most. But it wasn’t true.
Even in utero,
babies are learning. At that stage, they pick up sounds. One-hour-olds can
distinguish their mother’s voice from another person’s. They arrive in the
world with a brain primed to learn through sensory stimulation. …
“We enter the world
ready to ‘read the perfect cues out of the environment’,” said Hirsh-Pasek. I
thought back to Toco. He read the environment, too – or at least what his eye
cameras saw and ear microphones heard. But robots can only reach out in ways
they have been programmed to, can only learn from stimuli they were instructed
to pay attention to. It limits them to a small range of experiences that would
shape their behaviours. There is no meaning in their methods. Babies, on the
other hand, are social learners.”