"This is the year that people really realized that you can build general-purpose robots," a Google roboticist said recently.
BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.
In the first days of my son's life, during the fall of 2023, he spent much of eating engaged in what some cognitive scientists call "motor babbling."His arms and legs wiggled; his eyes wandered and darted, almost mechanically. One night, as he was drifting off to sleep, he smiled for the first time. As I admired him, wondering what he might be thinking about, his expression suddenly went blank and then, in quick succession, he looked upset, then surprised, and then happy again. It was as if the equipment were being calibrated. That is apparently the purpose of motor babbling: random movements help the brain get acquainted with the body it's in.
Our intelligence is physical long before it is anything else. Most of our brain mass exists to coördinate the activity of our bodies. (Neuroscientists have found that even when you navigate an abstract space contemplating, say, your company's org chart you use the same neural machinery you'd use to navigate a real space.) A disproportionate amount of the primary motor cortex, a region of the brain that controls movement, is devoted to body parts that move in more complicated ways. An especially large portion controls the face and lips; a similarly large portion controls the hands.
この記事は The New Yorker の December 02, 2024 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The New Yorker の December 02, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
ART OF STONE
\"The Brutalist.\"
MOMMA MIA
Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.
NATURE STUDIES
Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
Ask not just where it came from but what it does for us
THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
What is the world's largest music-streaming platform really costing us?
THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.
TALK SENSE
How much sway does our language have over our thinking?
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.