Srinagar, July 22 -- Mohammad Yasir Shah

Watch a child pick up a stone she has never seen before. She turns it over, taps it against another stone, and puts it in her mouth despite every warning not to. Nobody taught her to do this. Curiosity, in moments like these, looks less like a skill someone imparts and more like a basic condition of being alive. That raises an uncomfortable question for anyone building artificial intelligence today. If curiosity can appear in a child without instruction, could it ever appear in a machine the same way, without an engineer writing the code that tells it to explore?It is not an idle question. As AI systems take on more open-ended tasks, whether they merely simulate curiosity or possess some version o...