The Strange Possibility of Machine Childhood. Human intelligence begins in weakness.
The Strange Possibility of Machine Childhood Human intelligence begins in weakness. A baby cannot walk, cannot speak, cannot survive alone. For years it must learn the basic rules of the world through imitation, error, and play. This long childhood is one of the defining features of our species. But machines have no childhood. When an artificial intelligence system is activated, it often begins life already trained on enormous quantities of data. Millions of texts. Billions of images. Entire libraries of human knowledge compressed into mathematical weights. In a sense, machines are born as adults. They skip the messy, confusing years where humans learn what objects are, how emotions work, or why people behave irrationally. Yet this shortcut may also be the greatest limitation of artificial intelligence. Childhood is not merely a stage of learning. It is the stage in which values and instincts are formed . Children learn empathy through dependency. They learn fair...