What to Know, How to Learn It

Abstract

What should an educated person know? In school, little time is devoted to answering this question. The school already knows what you need to know: vocabulary about phyla, the plots of various pieces of last century's literature, and how to prove a theorem about triangles. When you try to get computers to know things in order to make them act "intelligently," however, it turns out that these are not at all the sorts of things they need to know. Computers need to know how to do things, how to comprehend what others have done and said, and how to learn from the mistakes it makes in doing all this.