DARPA, the Defense Department’s advanced research agency, is embracing this approach. It recently invited proposals from interdisciplinary teams of computer scientists and developmental psychologists, which will work to create AI systems capable of learning the things babies learn in the first few years of life.
To the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, this approach is the obvious way to go….
[Gopnik]: When you give AIs a large data set, they can figure out the difference between cats and dogs. That’s very impressive. But they’re not good if you introduce a change, or if there’s data coming from a different source, or if you alter some high-order characteristic of the environment. They have what’s called “catastrophic forgetting” — they have to relearn what they’d already learned. But somehow kids can be facing a brand new task, something they’ve never seen before, and they can figure out what the right thing to do is….
The puzzle for development psychology is we don’t really understand how it is that kids can easily do what they do. We know they can make these wide-ranging inferences from very small amounts of data. They’ve got a lot of [innate] knowledge through evolution. But how can they make good inferences about things that weren’t part of our evolutionary ancestry? Look at a 4-year-old with a smartphone. They can manage it better than you can! This system hasn’t been out in the world before, yet kids are very good at mastering it. We don’t have a clue how that’s possible.
h/t Enlightened Robot Daily
Leave A Comment