Intelligence without Big Data

When we come into this world, it takes us three years or less to build up in our brain a model box with which to reconstruct in our mind real-time representations of the reality immediately surrounding us. We are then able to speak and be conscious about that reality, act purposefully and start establishing in our memory a personal history. The raw amount of sensory information we have taken up by that time is less than 200 Million sensory patterns -- counting a handful per waking second. A decent nursery could probably be recreated by a compact virtual reality system not bigger than the human genome. Compare this to the flood of information needed to train a deep learning system on a single task like sorting objects on photographs, each into one of a thousand classes.