GETTING A GRIP

Robots learn to use their hands.

- JAMES SOMERS

"This is the year that people really realized that you can build general-purpose robots," a Google roboticist said recently.

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.

In the first days of my son's life, during the fall of 2023, he spent much of eating engaged in what some cognitive scientists call "motor babbling."His arms and legs wiggled; his eyes wandered and darted, almost mechanically. One night, as he was drifting off to sleep, he smiled for the first time. As I admired him, wondering what he might be thinking about, his expression suddenly went blank and then, in quick succession, he looked upset, then surprised, and then happy again. It was as if the equipment were being calibrated. That is apparently the purpose of motor babbling: random movements help the brain get acquainted with the body it's in.

Our intelligence is physical long before it is anything else. Most of our brain mass exists to coördinate the activity of our bodies. (Neuroscientists have found that even when you navigate an abstract space contemplating, say, your company's org chart you use the same neural machinery you'd use to navigate a real space.) A disproportionate amount of the primary motor cortex, a region of the brain that controls movement, is devoted to body parts that move in more complicated ways. An especially large portion controls the face and lips; a similarly large portion controls the hands.