Special report : Can we copy the brain? - From animal intelligence to artificial intelligence

Today's artificial intelligence systems can destroy human champions at sophisticated games like chess, Go, and Texas Hold 'em. In flight simulators, they can shoot down top fighter pilots. They're surpassing human doctors with more precise surgical stitching and more accurate cancer diagnoses. But there are some situations when a 3-year-old can easily defeat the fanciest AI in the world: when the contest involves a type of learning so routine that humans don't even realize they're doing it. That last thought occurred to David Cox-Harvard neuroscientist, AI expert, and proud father of a 3-year-old-when his daughter spotted a long-legged skeleton at a natural history museum, pointed at it, and said, "Camel!" Her only other encounter with a camel had been a few months earlier, when he showed her a cartoon camel in a picture book.