&gt; In contrast, a two-year-old’s ability to learn by extrapolating and generalizing—albeit imperfectly—is far more sophisticated.<p>How does he know? He only sees the output and not how the brain works or how much information has been processed before hand. So it seems like the brain took an easy shortcut and generated a new rule, and you could just write a bit of code to do that as well.<p>But isn&#x27;t this rule learning just a few more layers in a learning network. Basically a learning network that operates on concepts not on just raw pixels.<p>One thing I noticed with my kids is they have a ridiculously good memory. For a while they almost fooled me that they could read. They would remember a word in a book and then a month later point to it and pronounce the word. So I thought, oh wow, you could read that. But then realized they just remembered it. It seems a lot of how a brain learns is just be absorbing and processing massive amounts of data, not unlike a learning project Google or these other companies have.<p>Now on the subject at hand, haven&#x27;t there been expert systems that do what he proposes. In a way IBM&#x27;s Watson is a successor to many of those expert systems. So one can say this has already been implemented and tried, it works in some instances but not others.