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62 Biomimetics: Biologically Inspired Technologies

portals for conversational data (for sound knowledge), public location video (for vision know-
ledge), and multi-camera video of moving humans with colored dots pasted to their bodies (for
motor knowledge). Paying for training data will probably not be feasible for most confabulation
startup companies.
The above comments also raise the technical legal question of whether the knowledge in
confabulation-based systems can itself be copyrighted (this would seem reasonable); or must it
be protected as a trade secret? Methods of training and education can probably be patented. The
legal implications and ramifications of confabulation are clearly going to be complicated and
probably contentious. An overriding consideration should be the irreplaceable value of the work
output that intelligent machines (which can potentially produce prodigiously, but not consume
significantly) will quickly add to the world economic product. It will be fun to watch this saga
unfold in the courts and in diplomacy over the coming decades.
Knowledge created by training is limited to situations such as that considered above; namely,
where extensive, highly conditioned and prepared, data sets exist. In more general situations,
online, active, expert human supervision must be employed to carefully select meaningful symbol
co-occurrences for use in learning. Such a carefully sequenced program of sophisticated and
controlled exposure of the machine to meaningful examples is termed education; which is the
subject of the next subsection.

3.2.2 Education

A critical aspect of development, particularly in higher mammals, is the limited, deliberately con-
trolled exposure to progressively more complicated stimuli, and intelligent responses thereto, that
characterizestheearlyphasesofananimal’slife(whichincats,mightoccupy afewweeks;whereasin
humans it occupies tens of years — which is often not enough!). During this development period, the
sequenceofexposureoftheanimaltoinformationisinsomemannercontrolled(oftenbyconfiningthe
animal to a particular limited range, such as a nest, home, or school and its immediate surround).
For example, a human baby learning to see has eyes that are physically incapable of focusing
much beyond its reach. Thus, most visual stimuli are the baby’s own limbs or individual objects that
the baby itself is holding and manipulating. During this period, the visual system develops its ability
to segment individual objects in single views and also develops higher-level visual lexicons
containing symbols that are pose-insensitive (see Section 3.5). Knowledge related to the integration
of form, color, texture, and internal object motion is also developed during this initial phase. In
order for this phase to properly complete, the baby must have spent a large amount of time holding
and viewing a reasonably rich collection of objects.
Once the initial phase of human visual development is completed, the baby begins to acquire
distant vision and begins to learn about a much richer visual environment. Again, parental provision
of appropriate stimuli and response examples during this period is critical. Persons who are deprived
of visual input during these early phases (e.g., due to disease that temporarily impairs visual
function) are never able to complete their visual development, even if their visual input is restored
at some later point. Such persons can respond to light in some limited ways, but can never see. Some
persons with restored sight actually voluntarily limit their exposure to visual input (Gregory, 2004).
As with the initial stage of visual development, the most important source of educational input
in the later stages of visual development is the children themselves. By holding an object and
examining it (e.g., in an exploration of its function or component parts), knowledge in the visual
domain, as well as in the linkage of vision to the language (and other) faculties, is expanded. Unlike
intellectual knowledge (which is subject to various distortions such as philosophical or ideological
brainwashing), visual knowledge is ‘‘safe’’ to rapidly gather and store because it is essentially never
erroneous (except in cases where optical distortions exist — which when corrected too late in the
development process, often cause a permanent reduction in visual capability). Parents
often endlessly admonish their children not to handle everything they fancy in stores; yet, this is