And Peter Godfrey-Smiths wonderful book Ive just been reading Metazoa talks about the octopus. And then once youve done that kind of exploration of the space of possibilities, then as an adult now in that environment, you can decide which of those things you want to have happen. She is the author of The Gardener . But nope, now you lost that game, so figure out something else to do. agents and children literally in the same environment. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC Berkeley. So they have one brain in the center in their head, and then they have another brain or maybe eight brains in each one of the tentacles. This is the old point about asking whether an A.I. Im a writing nerd. She spent decades. And as you probably know if you look at something like ImageNet, you can show, say, a deep learning system a whole lot of pictures of cats and dogs on the web, and eventually youll get it so that it can, most of the time, say this is the cat, and this is the dog. Two Days Mattered Most. You sort of might think about, well, are there other ways that evolution could have solved this explore, exploit trade-off, this problem about how do you get a creature that can do things, but can also learn things really widely? We talk about why Gopnik thinks children should be considered an entirely different form of Homo sapiens, the crucial difference between spotlight consciousness and lantern consciousness, why going for a walk with a 2-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake, what A.I. And all of the theories that we have about play are plays another form of this kind of exploration. And in empirical work that weve done, weve shown that when you look at kids imitating, its really fascinating because even three-year-olds will imitate the details of what someone else is doing, but theyll integrate, OK, I saw you do this. A message of Gopniks work and one I take seriously is we need to spend more time and effort as adults trying to think more like kids. And we better make sure that were doing the right things, and were buying the right apps, and were reading the right books, and were doing the right things to shape that kind of learning in the way that we, as adults, think that it should be shaped. But you sort of say that children are the R&D wing of our species and that as generations turn over, we change in ways and adapt to things in ways that the normal genetic pathway of evolution wouldnt necessarily predict. Its not very good at doing anything that is the sort of things that you need to act well. So they put it really, really high up. It really does help the show grow. Theyre imitating us. Understanding show more content Gopnik continues her article about children using their past to shape their future. So if you look at the social parts of the brain, you see this kind of rebirth of plasticity and flexibility in adolescence. And its worsened by an intellectual and economic culture that prizes efficiency and dismisses play. Shes part of the A.I. So just by doing just by being a caregiver, just by caring, what youre doing is providing the context in which this kind of exploration can take place. So you see this really deep tension, which I think were facing all the time between how much are we considering different possibilities and how much are we acting efficiently and swiftly. And if you look at the literature about cultural evolution, I think its true that culture is one of the really distinctive human capacities. Seventeen years ago, my son adopted a scrappy, noisy, bouncy, charming young street dog and named him Gretzky, after the great hockey player. Their health is better. Whats something different from what weve done before? And I think for grown-ups, thats really the equivalent of the kind of especially the kind of pretend play and imaginative play that you see in children. Its not just going to be a goal function, its going to be a conversation. And those two things are very parallel. So Ive been collaborating with a whole group of people. And he comes to visit her in this strange, old house in the Cambridge countryside. So theres a really nice picture about what happens in professorial consciousness. And I just saw how constant it is, just all day, doing something, touching back, doing something, touching back, like 100 times in an hour. The most attractive ideological vision of a politics of care combines extensive redistribution with a pluralistic recognition of the many different arrangements through which care is . ALISON GOPNIK: Well, from an evolutionary biology point of view, one of the things that's really striking is this relationship between what biologists call life history, how our developmental. And you yourself sort of disappear. But if you think that actually having all that variability is not a bad thing, its a good thing its what you want its what childhood and parenting is all about then having that kind of variation that you cant really explain either by genetics or by what the parents do, thats exactly what being a parent, being a caregiver is all about, is for. Theyd need to have someone who would tell them, heres what our human values are, and heres enough possibilities so that you could decide what your values are and then hope that those values actually turn out to be the right ones. 1623 - 1627 DOI: 10.1126/science.1223416 Kindergarten Scientists Current Issue Observation of a critical charge mode in a strange metal By Hisao Kobayashi Yui Sakaguchi et al. Customer Service. She takes childhood seriously as a phase in human development. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, and a member of the Berkeley AI Research Group. Explore our digital archive back to 1845, including articles by more than 150 Nobel . [MUSIC PLAYING]. And I said, you mean Where the Wild Things Are? PhilPapers PhilPeople PhilArchive PhilEvents PhilJobs. Anyone can read what you share. So theres really a kind of coherent whole about what childhood is all about. Sign in | Create an account. thats saying, oh, good, your Go score just went up, so do what youre doing there. Theyre seeing what we do. So for instance, if you look at rats and you look at the rats who get to do play fighting versus rats who dont, its not that the rats who play can do things that the rats cant play can, like every specific fighting technique the rats will have. We spend so much time and effort trying to teach kids to think like adults. Thats what were all about. Her writings on psychology and cognitive science have appeared in the most prestigious scientific journals and her work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles. On the other hand, the two-year-olds dont get bored knowing how to put things in boxes. But, again, the sort of baseline is that humans have this really, really long period of immaturity. But I think that babies and young children are in that explore state all the time. That doesnt seem like such a highfalutin skill to be able to have. And one idea people have had is, well, are there ways that we can make sure that those values are human values? How so? So, going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake. It was called "parenting." As long as there have. And the neuroscience suggests that, too. Now, were obviously not like that. Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Do you still have that book? Slumping tech and property activity arent yet pushing the broader economy into recession. Alex Murdaugh Receives Life Sentence: What Happens Now? Just watch the breath. The wrong message is, oh, OK, theyre doing all this learning, so we better start teaching them really, really early. Do you think theres something to that? Im curious how much weight you put on the idea that that might just be the wrong comparison. We keep discovering that the things that we thought were the right things to do are not the right things to do. And you look at parental environment, and thats responsible for some of it. will have one goal, and that will never change. And I think that thats exactly what you were saying, exactly what thats for, is that it gives the adolescents a chance to consider new kinds of social possibilities, and to take the information that they got from the people around them and say, OK, given that thats true, whats something new that we could do? And then yesterday, I went to see my grandchildren for the first time in a year, my beloved grandchildren. Its especially not good at doing things like having one part of the brain restrict what another part of the brain is going to do. But now, whether youre a philosopher or not, or an academic or a journalist or just somebody who spends a lot of time on their computer or a student, we now have a modernity that is constantly training something more like spotlight consciousness, probably more so than would have been true at other times in human history. You can listen to our whole conversation by following The Ezra Klein Show on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. And another example that weve been working on a lot with the Bay Area group is just vision. As they get cheaper, going electric no longer has to be a costly proposition. The robots are much more resilient. Because I have this goal, which is I want to be a much better meditator. Whats lost in that? So the acronym we have for our project is MESS, which stands for Model-Building Exploratory Social Learning Systems. Theyre not always in that kind of broad state. As always, if you want to help the show out, leave us a review wherever you are listening to it now. . So if you think about what its like to be a caregiver, it involves passing on your values. When Younger Learners Can Be Better (or at Least More Open-Minded) Than Older Ones - Alison Gopnik, Thomas L. Griffiths, Christopher G. Lucas, 2015 Children are tuned to learn. Yeah, so I think a really deep idea that comes out of computer science originally in fact, came out of the original design of the computer is this idea of the explore or exploit trade-off is what they call it. Those are sort of the options. And again, theres this kind of tradeoff tension between all us cranky, old people saying, whats wrong with kids nowadays? Chapter Three The Trouble with Geniuses, part 1 by Malcolm Gladwell. So, my thought is that we could imagine an alternate evolutionary path by which each of us was both a child and an adult. Then youre always going to do better by just optimizing for that particular thing than by playing. We should be designing these systems so theyre complementary to our intelligence, rather than somehow being a reproduction of our intelligence. So my five-year-old grandson, who hasnt been in our house for a year, first said, I love you, grandmom, and then said, you know, grandmom, do you still have that book that you have at your house with the little boy who has this white suit, and he goes to the island with the monsters on it, and then he comes back again? (A full transcript of the episode can be found here.). And of course, youve got the best play thing there could be, which is if youve got a two-year-old or a three-year-old or a four-year-old, they kind of force you to be in that state, whether you start out wanting to be or not. It feels like its just a category. But I think you can see the same thing in non-human animals and not just in mammals, but in birds and maybe even in insects. Read previous columns here. And I think its called social reference learning. Could you talk a bit about that, what this sort of period of plasticity is doing at scale? Sign in | Create an account. Thats a really deep part of it. A Very Human Answer to One of AIs Deepest Dilemmas, Children, Creativity, and the Real Key to Intelligence, Causal learning, counterfactual reasoning and pretend play: a cross-cultural comparison of Peruvian, mixed- and low-socioeconomic status U.S. children | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Love Lets Us Learn: Psychological Science Makes the Case for Policies That Help Children, The New Riddle of the Sphinx: Life History and Psychological Science, Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow review - the new thinking about feelings, What Children Lose When Their Brains Develop Too Fast, Why nation states struggle with social care. Cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik has been studying this landscape of children and play for her whole career. Theres Been a Revolution in How China Is Governed, How Right-Wing Media Ate the Republican Party, A Revelatory Tour of Martin Luther King Jr.s Forgotten Teachings, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-alison-gopnik.html, Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Kathleen King. And its especially not good at things like inhibition. You go out and maximize that goal. Youre not deciding what to pay attention to in the movie. But I think its important to say when youre thinking about things like meditation, or youre thinking about alternative states of consciousness in general, that theres lots of different alternative states of consciousness. Another thing that people point out about play is play is fun. And that was an argument against early education. And of course, once we develop a culture, that just gets to be more true because each generation is going to change its environment in various ways that affect its culture. Alison GOPNIK, Professor (Full) | Cited by 16,321 | of University of California, Berkeley, CA (UCB) | Read 196 publications | Contact Alison GOPNIK This is her core argument. And the way that computer scientists have figured out to try to solve this problem very characteristically is give the system a chance to explore first, give it a chance to figure out all the information, and then once its got the information, it can go out and it can exploit later on. And the children will put all those together to design the next thing that would be the right thing to do. But setting up a new place, a new technique, a new relationship to the world, thats something that seems to help to put you in this childlike state. Both parents and policy makers increasingly push preschools to be more like schools. It illuminates the thing that you want to find out about. GPT 3, the open A.I. Reconstructing constructivism: causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms, and the theory theory. Gopnik's findings are challenging traditional beliefs about the minds of babies and young children, for example, the notion that very young children do not understand the perspective of others an idea philosophers and psychologists have defended for years. And you say, OK, so now I want to design you to do this particular thing well. Or theres a distraction in the back of your brain, something that is in your visual field that isnt relevant to what you do. Alison Gopnik: There's been a lot of fascinating research over the last 10-15 years on the role of childhood in evolution and about how children learn, from grownups in particular. Were talking here about the way a child becomes an adult, how do they learn, how do they play in a way that keeps them from going to jail later. She's been attempting to conceive for a very long time and at a considerable financial and emotional toll. The philosophical baby: What children's minds tell us about truth, love & the meaning of life. She received her BA from McGill University, and her PhD. So the question is, if we really wanted to have A.I.s that were really autonomous and maybe we dont want to have A.I.s that are really autonomous. And this constant touching back, I dont think I appreciated what a big part of development it was until I was a parent. The peer-reviewed journal article that I have chosen, . (if applicable) for The Wall Street Journal. So open awareness meditation is when youre not just focused on one thing, when you try to be open to everything thats going on around you. I like this because its a book about a grandmother and her grandson. Because I know I think about it all the time. And then the central head brain is doing things like saying, OK, now its time to squirt. And then the other thing is that I think being with children in that way is a great way for adults to get a sense of what it would be like to have that broader focus. One kind of consciousness this is an old metaphor is to think about attention as being like a spotlight. But a mind tuned to learn works differently from a mind trying to exploit what it already knows. And that could pick things up and put them in boxes and now when you gave it a screw that looked a little different from the previous screw and a box that looked a little different from the previous box, that they could figure out, oh, yeah, no, that ones a screw, and it goes in the screw box, not the other box. Any kind of metric that you said, almost by definition, if its the metric, youre going to do better if you teach to the test. And then the other one is whats sometimes called the default mode. She is the author or coauthor of over 100 journal articles and several books, including "Words, thoughts and theories" MIT Press . Theres even a nice study by Marjorie Taylor who studied a lot of this imaginative play that when you talk to people who are adult writers, for example, they tell you that they remember their imaginary friends from when they were kids. Our Sense of Fairness Is Beyond Politics (21 Jan 2021) Contrast that view with a new one that's quickly gaining ground. So with the Wild Things, hes in his room, where mom is, where supper is going to be. Anxious parents instruct their children . And I actually shut down all the other things that Im not paying attention to. The system can't perform the operation now. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com, if youve got something to teach me. When he visited the U.S., someone in the audience was sure to ask, But Prof. Piaget, how can we get them to do it faster?. Support Science Journalism. Youre watching language and culture and social rules being absorbed and learned and changed, importantly changed.