In my previous editorial I compared my daughter's early behaviour to that of a simple computer program. A few people got in touch and called me a nerd. Can't think why.

What quickly became apparent, though, is that the early 'Basic' stage of development I had written about didn't last long. No more than a week or two after I had written that editorial, my daughter was smiling, laughing, standing (with help) and taking an interest in her surroundings in ways that I couldn't predict, let alone attempt to program.

For example, today she successfully opened the fridge and tried to lever the tops off wine bottles with her tiny two front teeth (the sound of glass on tooth enamel is like hard chalk on a blackboard). She climbs, crawls so fast that it's sometimes hard to catch her, walks (if I hold her hands) and makes noises that are almost, but not quite, words, though it's clear that she believes they mean something.

It's very obvious to me, as I'm sure it is to any parent, that she is not simply an empty machine or 'blank slate'. She is learning of her own volition, taking in information from us and her surroundings at an alarming rate and acting on it according to her own personality. She has different tastes in food (which we didn't teach her), gets bored if she's not doing new things (which we definitely didn't teach her) and has far more energy than either of her parents.

In a way, in computing or mathematical terms she's become an NP-hard problem. Well, not a 'problem' in that sense, but she's now at the stage where no computer program could predict what she will do next. The only way to see what she will do is... to wait and see what she will do.

I'm not sure if there's a point to this editorial, except that part of my psychology degree involved different ways of looking at child development, some of which (generally from the previous century) did assume that a child was a blank slate, an automaton to be conditioned and trained by parents or carers, much as one would train a dog (though dog owners would doubtless argue that their pets also have their own innate personalities).

That attitude has gone from modern psychological development theories, most of which now allow for at least some innate (genetic) influence on personality in conjunction with environmental influences, but it got me thinking about the various ways in which robotics companies are attempting to make their products more empathic and people-friendly, generally without huge success.

While I was at primary school, reading the books of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, it occurred to me that the best way to make a human-like robot would be to create a learning machine that looks like a child, then send it to live with a family, go to school, socialise with children its own 'age', and so on. Actually I was probably hoping that the robot child could take my place at school, but never mind. The thought remains, and it would be a fascinating experiment that could probably be carried out in the not-too-distant future.

But would such a creature develop its own personality if none were present at its creation? Current psychological theory and my own experiences with my daughter suggest not, so would it simply react in a dull, predictable manner to its surroundings, with no preferences, desires or frustrations? And if the experiment were a success and the robot child did develop a personality merely from the stimuli of its environment, who could ever switch it off?

I'll stop there, as this is starting to sound like the script for a Hollywood film. And anyway, now she's trying to climb into the washing machine.