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Comment by ticulatedspline | Hacker News Reader

Makes me think of our current quest with creating AGI, that the metrics for measuring animal brains don't necessarily correlate nicely with "intelligence" or capability.

I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundamental properties that actually create intelligence.

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It’s always amazed me how much capability baby animals have right when they’re born, when they have near zero experience with their muscles and balance and senses. Or even just the instinct of a cat to chase a string is universal.

There’s something intrinsic to the structure of brains that seems to pre-encode a lot of evolutionarily useful content without a training phase.

I’d love to take a course on just this topic and what do we know about it.

To be fair, it's not like the baby animals pop into existence at birth, starting from scratch at that moment, but instead they've been growing/incubating for quite some time. Who knows, maybe that's the actual "training phase" for the animals, as what you say is true, they seem to have a lot of instincts already at birth, while human babies seem to almost "popped into existence at birth" with not a whole lot of instincts yet, compared to other animals at least.

You’re right on that.

They’ll have heard noises, experienced gyroscopic forces and gravity. But a calf being born and standing up within minutes to an hour is pretty neat. Same with vision, going from no sensory input to seeing.

Apparently piglets have full motor control in 8 hours after birth.

As I said, I would love to have the time and go back to school to learn way more about all of this. Nature and evolution are pretty amazing.

What's also fun to think about is the compression ratio of that data. the human genome is in the 725MB range.

Also illustrates an adaptability-ability trade-off. A human baby is supplied a SOTA brain and sensors and actuators it can make sense of given time. A deer baby is preprogrammed to handle its sensors and actuators. In time, the human baby surpasses the deer baby in general ability.

Evolution is kinda like pre-training in a sense.

that would make for a cute short story where a robot nurses a pet biological that suddenly displays hints of true intelligence after no less than 32 years of parrot-like behavior

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