Nature, Nurture, and Knowledge Acquisition

The nature vs. nurture dualism has framed the modern conversation in biology and psychology. There is an analogous distinction for Knowledge Acquisition and Artificial Intelligence. in the context of building intelligent systems, Nature means acquiring knowledge by being programmed or modeled that way. Nurture means acquiring knowledge by machine learning from data and information in the world. This paper develops the nature/nurture analogy in light of the history of Knowledge Acquisition, the current state of the art, and the future of intelligent machines learning from human knowledge.