How do we teach a software agent?

If software agents are to become truly "intelligent", the question arises of how to endow them with knowlege.

The immediate reply is to directly state that feeding them pre-digested knowledge is not the way to go, but teaching them how to learn on their own seems much more promising.

So, the question can be restated as "How do we endow software agents with the ability to learn?".

Sure, we will in fact "feed" agents plenty of pre-digested knowledge, in much the same way we feed ourselves knowledge, using books, text, numbers, diagrams, images, media, etc.

The real essence of the point is that intelligence is much more than simply a large library of knowledge. The learning process is all about figuring out how to integrate and mesh all of that knowledge to form a cognitive structure that can support reasoning, logic, intuition, creativity, decision-making, planning, execution of plans, flexibility, risk assessment, risk-taking, and learning itself.