ABSTRACT
Hannah and Tom are in the kitchen, talking; Hannah, momentarily distracted, stares intently out the kitchen window, which is outside the range of Tom’s vision. “What are you looking at?” he says. “A cat,” Hannah answers. “A big black and white one with a smudge on its nose. It’s Max, the neighbors’ cat. He’s stalking birds. If I raised the bird feeders another three feet, Max couldn’t get the birds so easily; but then the feeders would be a lot harder for me to fill, too. I should really talk to the neighbors about putting a bell on that cat.” In this unremarkable exchange, Hannah does several very remarkable things, ranging from describing what she sees to reasoning discursively. There is currently an intense research effort to build machines that can do even the simplest part of what Hannah does so effortlessly here, but these attempts have not so far been remarkable for their success. How does Hannah do it?
