Imitating the mind of a child

Such feats of work are a testament to modern machine learning. But for all its power, Facebook's world-mapping AI has a severe weakness – it did not understand what it had done. If asked to explain itself, it wouldn't even understand the question. Unlike a human, Facebook's superhuman mapping system is completely incapable of even ordering a cup of coffee, let alone speaking French or shooting hoops. This is typical of modern artificial intelligence, which is built around a technique that apes the human visual system: deep learning.