The well-designed child

This article is inspired by recent psychological studies confirming that a child is not born a blank slate but has important innate capabilities. An important part of the "learning" required to deal with the three dimensional world of objects, processes, and other beings was done by evolution. Each child need not do this learning itself. By the 1950s there were already proposals to advance artificial intelligence by building a child machine that would learn from experience just as a human child does. What innate knowledge the child machine should be equipped with was ignored. I suppose the child machine was supposed to be a blank slate. Whatever innate knowledge a human baby may possess, we are interested in a well-designed that has all we can give it. To some extent, this paper is an exercise in wishful thinking. The innate mental structure that equips a child to interact succesfully with the world includes more than the universal grammar of linguistic syntax postulated by ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: AI
• Authors: John McCarthy
• Keywords: AI 2008, Artificial Intelligence, Blank Slate, Child Machine, Mental Structures