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The World’s Smartest A.I. Is Still Dumber Than a Baby
An interview with the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, author of ‘How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… For Now’
Algorithms have thrown the gauntlet down. They’re challenging our distinctive status as the most advanced learning species on the planet. In the past several years, machines have “learned” to instantaneously transcribe a foreign language and detect typos in our Google Docs; they’ve predicted the superfecta of the Kentucky Derby, provided well-wrought medical advice, composed classical music albums, and humbled us at chess. And yet, according to the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, the most sophisticated artificial intelligence technologies are still far less smart than the learning capabilities contained in even an infant’s brain.
While the iPhone’s voice-controlled assistant Siri can recognize and “learn” a word, a feat that takes a multitude of training attempts, a slew of big data, and high-power servers, a young child can learn one in a repetition or two. In his new book, How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… For Now, Dehaene grapples with how humans learn, and ways engineers are attempting to use A.I. — and still falling short — to mimic our learning abilities.
