When you are born, you know nothing

What I find amazing are problems like this:

What is the probability of a chopper crashing or someone shooting a rocket at it? I don't know, but I can say that when I see a chopper on TV, the probability is around 80%. Still, when I see a real life chopper, I know that it's probably not going to crash or getting shot at.

Do I know that because of any experience I have? No, I haven't seen many choppers in real life and not once have I seen one take off or land. But I know about the workings of the media. I know about why people use choppers and that they wouldn't use them if they always ended up crashing and burning.

Even if a program is very artificially intelligent, it's still very hard to get training data that matches that mixture of sensual experience and logical reasoning.

It's a hard problem. I still believe it can be done, but we're not nearly there yet. I hope Hawkins makes some progress without a big disppointment that discourages further research.

The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned. -- Bruce Ediger

(pedantry: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.editors/msg/882fd4ef853e... )

It's definitely intuitive for marsupials. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pouch_%28marsupial%29

I highly recommend his book, "On Intelligence".

It's also very interesting the way recent research into the way our vision systems do object recognition match recent advancements in object recognition software. It's all about feature extraction to find invariant information matched against a corpus of extracted features.

Knowing how to learn is "something". And if you include non-conscious activities apart from those that involve systems normally considered conscious (bodily functions), then we "know" almost everything just in our brain stems.

"I was born brilliant. See what education did!" :)

So instincts don't exist?