Sam Adams is a research engineer at IBM. He discussed the Joshua Blue Project that ran from 2000 through 2002. The project was intended apply lessons learned in human toddler development to AGI development. Even toddlers have the ability to accomplish many tasks that are hard problems for AGI. With this in mind, researchers attempted to develop a human-mind-like computer system that could learn how to successfully function in any number of embodiments and environments, with an emphasis on modeling a toddler’s mind.
The work was modestly successful in pointing out areas of further research. Adams suggested that hardware advances would benefit further research. He then concluded that the path to AGI may very well require following human child development.