Danny ChaiSo Abby’s sick. Repeated vomiting. It’s funny how being a parent changes you. I used to be really… prissy about gross stuff like vomit. I remember years ago we took a trip to Oregon, and Ann was sick and threw up on the coach. The next day, my gomohalmuni came and sat on that same couch. It had been immediately cleaned the day before, but I couldn’t imagine ever sitting on that couch, which once had vomit on it, again. Such was my aversion to gross stuff – as far as I was concerned, it left a permanent stain.
I was also prissy about my hands, didn’t like them getting dirty. When I ate foods that required getting your hands dirty, like ribs or crab, I always used a maximum of two fingers on each hand. Actually, I still do this. Fascinatingly, Abby is the same way. When we go to the park, which is a lot, she prefers to crawl on her wrists, as if she doesn’t want to get her hands dirty. I’m just like that. Seeing her do that really made me think about how much our behavior is genetically influenced.
It’s all different when you become a parent. Vomit ain’t no thang. Late last night I was picking throw up chunks off her blankets and pillow (and sadly, her hair – she had apparently thrown up some time before we checked on her and she slept in it, so it had caked on… our poor, poor baby) with my bare hands. No big whoop.
Sickness notwithstanding, this is hands down Abby’s funniest stage right now. She’s developing personality, humor, and the verbal ability to express it. She repeats everything we say (“What the heck” and “Oh my goodness” are particular faves). What I find hilarious is that she thinks she’s funniest person she knows. She regularly cracks herself up then says “Abby funny”. If I ask if Daddy, Mommy, or anyone else is funny, it varies, although more often than not it’s no. But Abby is always funny. This trait I think she picked up from her mom, who, when she reads her own blog, thinks it’s the funniest thing she’s ever read.
I’m also coming to grips that she’s more of a dancer than a musician. Her cousin Matthew is clearly musical. Abby, not as much, but she’s into dancing. She gets really into these 2 Wiggles dances that involve specific dance “moves” and she’s pretty good at it.
Umm, the rest is weirdo thought meanderings, probably boring.
So my concentration both for undergrad and grad school was Artificial Intelligence. I’m by no means an expert, but I think I have a pretty broad understanding of the field. Anyway, because of those classes, I find child development amazing, maybe even a miracle, because I realize how difficult it is for machines to do it. In fact, it’s impossible for a machine to do what a 2 year old does. And that amazes me.
Like language acquisition. If you stop and think about it, it’s an absolutely amazing thing. Or again, maybe this is because I’m coming from an A.I. framework. But they’re nowhere close to getting machines that can truly understand language. Just parsing language is pretty bad; look at how frustrating Dragon Naturally Speaking and other speech recognition programs are. Programs that have simulated understanding, even passed superficial Turing tests, are nothing more than hacks. But toddlers can really understand language. It’s incredible. Even more so when you think about how difficult it is to learn languages as an adult. Really, learning a language is extremely difficult, and for adults, takes dedication, and even with that, people like our parents will make English mistakes after decades of speaking their new language regularly. And when we pick up a new language, it’s only by using the frame of reference of an old one. This word means that, this grammar form maps to that. Toddlers pick up their first language with no frame of reference at all. It’s a miracle.
Chomsky thought human language acquisition was so amazing and unique that he posited that language was built into the human brain, that we are hard-wired to learn language, and that separates us from the animals. He theorized that we all have a universal grammar, and that every human language is just a specific form of that general thing. So all kids everywhere acquire language kind of by the same processes, making the same mistakes, and not making certain mistakes that you would expect, or that machines do. Machines have yet to algorithmically learn language. All humans learn it easily. Incredible.
I also find her capacity for analogy and pretend amazing, because, again, it’s just something you cannot teach a machine to do. Like, she will go into her toy trunk and say she’s taking a bubble bath. I ask her where the bubbles are, and she points inside. I ask where her rubber duckie is, and she’ll point to a random toy in the trunk.
Any normal person will think nothing of this. Me, with my A.I. background, I find it fascinating. I once heard a talk from D0ug L3nat, this researcher who has spent decades developing this massive A.I. system by hand-defining the thousands of rules that he believes composes human knowledge. Like, if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, than A is bigger than C could be one rule. When the sky gets dark, it’s “night” could be another. And it’s thousands of them. The theory being, that’s what human knowledge is. A bunch of rules.
I came out of the talk doubtful, and just watching Abby makes me more so. Because you can encode all the rules you want, but a machine will never be able to make a jump that this toy chest is a bubble bath. Maybe I’m wrong. But at the very least, current machines are nowhere near that capacity. Toddlers all engage in pretend play. And the most powerful machines in the world just can’t do it. That’s amazing to me.
Machines becoming smarter than humans is a common theme in movies from The Terminator to The Matrix. I’m not that worried yet. But when you get a system that calls a toy chest a bubble bath, watch out.