The essence of intelligence is the ability to predict, because predicting the future is a very special case of “filling in the blanks” about the state of the world, LeCun says. Common sense enables humans and animals to fill in missing information based on their knowledge of how the world works. That is why human drivers do not need to crash into a tree 50,000 times before they realize that is a bad idea; humans already have a sense of what might happen if they steer their car into a tree.

Source: Will the Future of AI Learning Depend More on Nature or Nurture? – IEEE Spectrum