They like understanding the big picture and seeing how their jobs contribute to that.
They have led to advances like understanding the importance of breast-feeding, oral rehydration for diarrhea and vaccines for measles and tetanus.
You learn to feel an order to the world, like understanding how to move with traffic, and quickly sense when something is amiss".
Neuromorphic engineering and deep learning are genuinely exciting, but whether they will really produce human-level A.I. is unclear — especially, as I have written before, when it comes to challenging problems like understanding natural language.
Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the authors say, are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and recognizing patterns.
If you're in a school situation where you completely justifiably want to teach one thing, like understanding geometry, shapes or math, the kind of guided play Kathy Hirsh-Pasek talks about turns out to be a very effective way of teaching specific things, partly because it's so involved and engaging for children.
"He gave me the courage to do things I didn't want to do," she said -- like understanding car guts.
What's not to like about understanding and empathy?
They are trained from a basic level, where they are taught how to carry out maintenance checks on vehicles, before they are confident enough to handle more complex tasks like understanding a car's electronics.
"The two domains we were looking at with HANDS were social skills function, things like understanding how to act in social contexts, and life skills functioning, like being able to go on the bus or make a piece of toast," he tells me.
