Thomas B

“University of Michigan psychologist Felix Warneken walks across the room, carrying a tall stack of magazines, toward the doors of a closed wooden cabinet. He bumps into the front of the cabinet, exclaims a startled “Oh!,” and backs away. Staring for a moment at the cabinet, he makes a thoughtful “Hmm,” before shuffling forward and bumping the magazines against the cabinet doors again. Again he backs away, defeated, and says, pitiably, “Hmmm . . .” It’s as if he can’t figure out where he’s gone wrong. From the corner of the room, a toddler comes to the rescue. The child walks somewhat unsteadily toward the cabinet, heaves open the doors one by one, then looks up at Warneken with a searching expression, before backing away. Warneken, making a grateful sound, puts his pile of magazines on the shelf.1 Warneken, along with his collaborator Michael Tomasello of Duke, was the first to systematically show, in 2006, that human infants as young as eighteen months old will reliably identify a fellow human facing a problem, will identify the human’s goal and the obstacle in the way, and will spontaneously help if they can—even if their help is not requested, even if the adult doesn’t so much as make eye contact with them, and even when they expect (and receive) no reward for doing so.2”
― Brian Christian, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values