I was traveling on a bus going uptown on 3rd Avenue in New York City. A young child and her grand mother sat in a double-seat immediately next to the rear exit door. I was a seat behind them.
A man was seen exiting, and as quickly he stepped back in and then he exited again. He was stepping up and stepping down the bus back exit with no apparent reason, and I was beginning to think that he was weird. Finally, the bus started to move, and the man was left standing on the sidewalk. When the exit door finally closed, the child cried out “Spider-Man!” while laughing heartily. It took me a better part of the journey to figure out the meaning of a happy little girl’s apt analogy.
It was huge leap of imagination for any one—let alone from a little girl—to see a parallel between a city bus and tall skyscraper buildings of Spider-Man movies! In her mind, the behavior of the man was something like the Spider-Man hopping on and hopping off tall skyscraper buildings.
This ability to see something as another thing can’t be the same stuff that went into computers to make them smart. Even computers that manage hedge funds, that plays master level chess, that manage orbital flights, that manage electricity grids of large cities, that suggest diagnosis of a complex disease must be considered dullards when we compare them with the brain of a human child.
