India, Oct. 9 -- A child learns to recognise a chair from a handful of examples; today's most advanced AI systems require enormous computing power to achieve comparable generalisation. India should compete in the AI race, but also ask the deeper question: what does the 20-watt human brain know that our machines do not?

A child can learn what a chair is from a handful of examples. Give a child a few chairs of different shapes, sizes and colours, and soon the child can recognise a chair they have never seen before. They can distinguish a chair from a table, infer that a stool belongs to the same conceptual family, and apply the idea to objects in unfamiliar settings. Human intelligence generalises from remarkably little data.

Now consider...