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LiveScience
Cognitive scientists hope to bottle up a baby's brain — and the imagination and air of possibility that comes with it — and use the result to make computers smarter.
"Children are the greatest learning machines in the universe," Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a statement. "Imagine if computers could learn as much and as quickly as they do," said Gopnik, author of the books "The Scientist in the Crib" (William Morrow, 2000) and "The Philosophical Baby" (Picador, 2010).
Scientists such as Gopnik have known a healthy newborn brain contains a lifetime's supply of some 100 billion neurons; as a baby matures, these brain cells grow a vast network of synapses or connections (about 15,000 by the age of 2 or 3), which allow tots to learn languages and social skills, all the while figuring out how to survive and thrive in their environment.
Adults, meanwhile, tend to focus more on the goal at hand rather than letting their powers of imagination run wild. It's this combination — goal-minded adults and open-minded children — that may be ideal for teaching computers new tricks, the researchers suspect.
"We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning," said Gopnik.
Gopnik and her colleagues are tracking the cognitive steps that children use to solve problems in the lab, and then turning the blueprint into computational models.
Their various experiments, whether using different-colored lollipops, spinning toys or music makers, suggest babies, toddlers and preschoolers are already testing hypotheses, estimating statistical odds, and coming to conclusions based on old and new evidence. This childlike exploratory and "probabilistic" reasoning could make computers not just smarter, but more adaptable and more human, the team says.
"Young children are capable of solving problems that still pose a challenge for computers, such as learning languages and figuring out causal relationships," Tom Griffiths, director of UC Berkeley's Computational Cognitive Science Lab, said in a statement. "We are hoping to make computers smarter by making them a little more like children."
For instance, in one experiment, preverbal babies are shown two jars, one holding more pink lollipops than black and the other more black than pink. Next, the researchers cover one lollipop in each jar to hide its color and then remove and place that lollipopin a covered canister next to the jar. The babies are then allowed to take a lollipop, and in most cases, rather than randomly choosing a side, they crawl toward the canister closest to the jar with more pink lollipops.
"We think babies are making calculations in their heads about which side to crawl to, to get the lollipop that they want," said study researcher Fei Xu, UC Berkeley psychologist.
The researchers foresee childlike computers that could interact more intelligently and responsively with humans, resulting in better computer tutoring programs and phone-answering robots, among other technologies, including artificial intelligence.
This spring, Gopnik, Griffiths and other UC Berkeley psychologists, computer scientists and philosophers plan to launch a multidisciplinary center at the campus's Institute of Human Development to pursue further this line of research.
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Waiting for the religious nuts to jump in against "harvesting baby brains"...
LOL very funny Bro... actually... Imagine what computers could be capable of if they could learn or change their behavior based on past experience. Could be dangerous... or it could be spectacular... or dangerously spectacular.
HA! Shouldn't be long.
UD... why not? 1000's of pounds of brain matter are wasted each year. If harvesting stem cells is ok then why not brain cells as well?
another selfish, intolerant atheist who wants to start another online war with the first comment.
apparently the atheist camp is having a dull moment right now. equating abortions and cloning with computer algorithms?
brown, take a deep breath and hold off on the discussion page holy war for now.
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.
yes.. the baby's name was Abby.. Abby Normal ...
Never verbally or physically abused my human or animal babies. Now my computer? I plead guilty to all counts, especially the verbal.
@ UDunno; Good point. I am just waiting for the Right to jump on the bandwagon proclaiming conception begins in the factory.
Newborn babies have not developed the subconscious cognitive screening (or filter) mechanisms in their brains which help to selectively determine later on in life what their brains take in and what they don't (usually based upon what they understand or what they don't), so their baby brains are basically like tape recorders which record pretty much everything. But the newborn brain also uses a primitive (subconscious) memory format for storing this early information, and usually somewhere around the age of 18 months old a more advanced multimedia memory system takes over in most people's conscious brains. It is only as we age that our brains develop these unconscious filtering systems which largely determine what our brains take in and what they don't. Gaining conscious access to this deep early primitive memory information later on in life can be a very arduous process, especially once it has become buried (in a layered way) under many intervening years of later conscious experience. It can be much like doing an archaeologic dig in your head to accomplish the retrieval of this early information, especially when it comes to translating this early format information into something which is understandable by the conscious brain. I personally had even a more difficult time doing this, because I effectively had a memory vault in my brain which was created by an early painful surgical operation at the age of six months. The brain likes to wall off these abnormal painful experiences so it does not adversely affect brain operation and development. I was only able to break into this deep memory vault under general anesthesia after many years of consciously trying for most of my life. BTW, the human brain stores long term memory in a quantum mechanical way, which is the only way that our small brains can possibly store up a lifetime of daily multimedia information, but this quantum mechanical storage basically ensures that this long term memory carries over to the (quantum mechanical or so called "spiritual") afterlife. Sleep is very essential to the well being of our brains, since this is when our biological 'computer' systems (intelligent analogue systems) do much of their daily maintenance, compression and backup which keep them operating at top performance. - Rick Carter
(I am hoping that soon we will be able to build very advanced complex artificial intelligence systems by selectively depositing artificial neurons (fed on pure light by a matrix of light guide capillaries) into a liquid filled chamber in a gradual sedimentary way. Ideally this clear dielectric fluid environment would later be solidified once this sedimentary deposition process was complete. These artificial neurons would hopefully link up to each other locally in a virtual axion way through the use of nano lasers which operate on a different light spectrum than the light capillaries which are used to feed these artificial neurons.) - RC
Dear Friends:
Medicine has the ability to wire the brain of adults in quadrapalegics to operate equipment. Are they using this on the brains of newborns? Is it ethical and legal and moral? Who is doing this? Want this in your baby?
Chips and wires or electrodes. God Help us and have no mercy if this is the small nanotech size and bio science and technical development that would generate this type of article.
God help us! Amen.