What we lose when we become adults | The Gray Area

0:00 If I take my my 4-year-old grandson for a walk down the block,

0:05 I suddenly realize that I always say it's like

0:08 going to get a pint of milk with William Blake.

0:10 You suddenly realize, "Oh, wait a minute.

0:12 There's gates and [laughter] there's dogs that are barking

0:16 and there's little crates in the pavement and you know,

0:21 all these things that you just literally don't see

0:23 when you're going for a walk as an adult." [music] [music]

0:44 Alison Gopnik, welcome to the show.

0:46 I'm so pleased to be here, Sean.

0:48 What are the biggest differences between the minds

0:51 of children and the minds of adults?

0:53 You have a lovely metaphor for this.

0:56 The kind of classic way of thinking about uh development for a long time,

1:01 or and this is still true.

1:03 You hear this a lot in [laughter] AI world, is that, you know,

1:08 sort of the 35-year-old AI guy is the peak

1:14 of human intelligence and then development is just

1:16 kind of building up to it and then aging

1:18 is just sort of falling off from that peak.

1:21 But that doesn't make a lot of sense from a biological perspective.

1:24 And what I've been arguing is that the right way to think

1:27 about development is that there's a kind of trade-off between exploration,

1:33 what computer scientists call exploration and exploitation.

1:36 So the idea is that the children are the the R&D department.

1:40 They're the ones who are actually designed

1:41 to explore the world around them, to experiment,

1:44 to figure out what's going on around them in in this incredibly motivated way,

1:49 even though it sometimes is sometimes makes

1:53 their evolutionary uh ability to survive and reproduce

1:58 um be [laughter] under under peril if they're

2:00 sticking forks into um into the light sockets.

2:04 Um Uh and then the adults are taking

2:07 that information that you discovered when you were

2:09 a child and then you could put it

2:11 to use to do all the sort of straightforward things,

2:13 the what computer scientists call the exploit things that we all do as adults.

2:17 We, you know, find our way in the pecking

2:19 order and we get resources and we find mates,

2:21 all the sort of typical adult all the sort of typical adult abilities.

2:25 So this explore-exploit trade-off, which is very deep and and very intractable,

2:31 very hard to to get rid of in computer science,

2:34 I think the way that evolution resolves that is by giving us this early period

2:39 of childhood when all we have to do and in fact all we want to do,

2:43 all we're motivated to do,

2:44 is go out into the world and figure out how the world works.

2:47 And then this later period where we can take all

2:49 those discoveries and actually actually put them to use later on.

2:53 Um so like you said, the the 4-year-old, proverbial 4-year-old,

2:57 is seeing all this or doing all this crazy weird stuff.

3:00 Is that because of the the other metaphor that I like,

3:02 the the lantern versus the spotlight consciousness?

3:05 That they're they are just simply seeing

3:07 way more and therefore attuned and aware

3:10 of way more and reacting to that, whereas the adults with the spotlight

3:15 consciousness are just more sort of focused and and targeted and and and blind

3:19 actually to a lot of what's actually happening in front of us.

3:23 Yeah, exactly.

3:24 If you think about this sort of general idea about

3:26 the children are the explorers and the adults are the exploiters,

3:29 you might imagine that that would show up in lots

3:31 of different aspects of their um of their minds and their brains.

3:36 And one of the ones that I've been interested in is their consciousness.

3:39 So the way that they experience the world.

3:43 So if you think about this plan

3:45 that the children are really designed to to learn,

3:48 to try and extract as much information

3:50 from the environment around them as possible,

3:53 and the adults are really designed to do things like,

3:55 you know, fulfill their plans,

3:57 find the things that are most relevant to what they what they want to do,

4:00 the goals they want to accomplish, you might imagine that their consciousness

4:03 of the world would be really different.

4:05 And in fact there's quite a lot of neuroscience evidence

4:09 that what happens with children is that their attentional system,

4:13 which is very closely related to their consciousness, is much broader.

4:16 So it's taking in much more of the world around them.

4:19 They're much worse, you know,

4:21 we say that preschoolers are bad at paying attention,

4:24 but what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention, right?

4:28 They're bad at just paying attention to the things

4:30 we want them to pay attention to and not

4:31 paying attention to the airplane that's way up high

4:35 or the little speck of dust that's on the ground.

4:37 Um and if you're trying to get their jackets on and get them off to preschool,

4:41 that's really a a disadvantage,

4:44 but if what you're trying to do is get them to what if what

4:47 they're trying to do is learn as much as they can about the world,

4:50 this kind of broader lantern picture is is actually really going to be helpful.

4:55 So the typical story about adult attention

4:58 and adult consciousness is that it's like a spotlight.

5:00 You're paying attention to the thing that you're you're really focusing on.

5:04 That's what you're conscious of.

5:05 And again, there's both neuroscience

5:07 and psychology that shows that you literally

5:09 become blind to all the things that you're not paying attention to.

5:12 You just just don't see the things that you're not paying attention to.

5:16 And I think what happens with with little kids is that's kind of the opposite.

5:19 What they're doing is seeing everything that's going on around them.

5:23 Is it possible or is it impossible to explore and exploit simultaneously?

5:30 Can we not be a lantern and a spotlight

5:32 at the same time or at least switch seamlessly between the two?

5:35 Um I think it's not poss- it's definitely

5:38 not possible to do it at the same time.

5:40 You know, you can prove that you can't

5:42 have a system that's maximally exploring and exploiting.

5:45 And I think it's interesting that if you think about you know,

5:48 a question people always ask is, "Well,

5:50 what could grownups do that would make them be able

5:53 to have this wider consciousness like children?" And I think

5:56 grownups grownup humans do have a lot of techniques they

5:59 use to kind of be able to do this exploration.

6:02 Certain kinds of meditation, what's sometimes called open awareness meditation,

6:07 that puts you in a state that's very much like the lantern consciousness.

6:11 But it's interesting that, you know, like the instructions for doing that are,

6:15 "Just sit in one place and don't do anything." Um so what

6:18 you can't do is have that lantern consciousness and then, you know,

6:22 go to the faculty meeting and [laughter and clears throat]

6:25 um deal with the politics and worry about your you know,

6:29 worry about your um uh worry about your profits

6:32 and do all the other things that we do as adults.

6:34 Um one way that I think is actually the you know,

6:38 one of the few ways I can think of that you could

6:40 do both at the same time is taking care of little kids.

6:43 So if you're taking care of little kids,

6:45 you're doing this really important task,

6:47 but you also get to see the world through their eyes,

6:51 which gives you a sense of what this lantern is like.

6:53 You know, if you if I take my my um

6:57 4-year-old grandson for a walk down the block,

7:00 I suddenly realize that I always say it's like

7:03 going to get a pint of milk with William Blake.

7:05 You suddenly realize, "Oh, wait a minute.

7:07 There's gates and there's [laughter] dogs that are barking

7:11 and there's little crates in the pavement and you know,

7:16 all these things that you just literally don't see

7:18 when you're going for a walk um as an adult.

7:21 You know, humans are pretty rare in the animal kingdom in terms of how long.

7:25 It's crazy how long we are fully dependent on our parents to survive.

7:30 Is that just evolution's response to the way our brains develop?

7:34 Well, it's interesting.

7:35 One of the things that seems to be a uh uh you know,

7:40 so there's this puzzle, right?

7:41 We have this very very long childhood, much longer than any other animal.

7:46 Um and we also have a much wider network of caregivers.

7:49 So, you know, if you look at uh chimps, for example,

7:52 the biological mothers are the ones who are doing most of the care.

7:55 But for humans, as long as we've evolved, we've had fathers involved in care.

8:00 We have uh uh what's called pair bonding, which is very unusual in in biology.

8:06 We have what uh people call alloparents,

8:09 so people who aren't even biologically kin who

8:11 are taking helping to take care of the young.

8:13 And we have my personal favorite, the postmenopausal grandmothers,

8:16 which again is pretty much um it's very distinctively human.

8:21 The only other species we know of are

8:23 the orcas who actually have these postmenopausal grandmothers.

8:26 So we have this wide array of species of people

8:30 who are taking care of these helpless children for so long.

8:33 So there's a big investment in the whole species.

8:35 And one of the ideas about, you know,

8:37 what could have triggered this change is that um we

8:43 live in what uh uh AI people call the non-stationary environment.

8:49 So our environment is changing much more and we're

8:52 changing our environment much more than other species are.

8:55 There's just a paper that came out in PNAS like yesterday that was really

8:59 fascinating about this about how how many

9:02 different environments we went to very quickly.

9:05 As soon as humans evolved, we were we were literally going you know,

9:09 we were exploring a much wider range of places

9:12 than any of our other close primate relatives did.

9:15 And you know, our chimps and gorillas are still pretty

9:17 much in the same place that they were when they evolved.

9:20 And and we've ended up, you know,

9:23 thriving at least so far every place on Earth and even,

9:27 you know, even in outer space.

9:29 So what what happened was that that if

9:34 you have that if that's your your ecological niche,

9:37 then having this really long period when you

9:39 can explore and having a lot of people who will take care of you when you're

9:42 doing that exploration is a really good strategy.

9:45 And that seems to be the human strategy.

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10:45 [music] [bell] It's a potentially dumb question,

10:53 but but when does a kid stop being a kid psychologically and neurologically?

10:58 Like what is the age range where the brain changes

11:01 and it becomes what we would consider an adult mind?

11:04 Yeah, it's interesting.

11:05 We've looked at this in uh in one of the studies that we did where

11:10 we actually looked at kids from the time

11:12 they were four up until basically adulthood.

11:16 We looked at people at all these different ages every year.

11:19 And what seems to happen is that there's two important uh transitions.

11:24 One of them is around five, six um or maybe six, seven.

11:31 Um across the world, you see a shift in the way that children are functioning,

11:36 in the way they're being treated in the society.

11:38 Of course, in our culture, it's that they go to school, but in other cultures,

11:42 it's that they start becoming apprentices or they move from the mom's

11:47 um house to the other house where the other children are.

11:50 And that seems to be a shift

11:54 to from this completely wide-ranging exploration to you know,

11:58 how do you make the shift from explore to exploit?

12:00 Well, one way you do it is by having 7, 8,

12:03 9-year-olds who are really learning about the kinds

12:06 of exploit techniques that the adults have.

12:08 So, you know, if you think about a 7 or 8-year-old,

12:10 what they like to do more than anything else is become

12:14 really competent at some specific kind of skill that adults have.

12:18 And that's I think one of the things that I've always thought is

12:20 kind of interesting is when you talk to people about kids in school,

12:25 one of the things they'll say is,

12:26 you know, it's frustrating cuz the kids really want to do things like

12:29 sports or music more than they want to do science and math and English.

12:35 But of course, if you think about it,

12:36 sports and music are the areas where you get

12:38 to become really skilled if you're a 7 or 8-year-old, right?

12:41 And then of course, um puberty, adolescence is the other transition.

12:45 So, you get this transition in adolescence where

12:48 and you can show this in the neuroscience,

12:50 this it's sort of like the brain seems to be pretty constant between,

12:54 you know, seven and and 12, and then with puberty, there are these big changes.

12:59 But even that isn't the end of the story

13:01 because what we discovered and other people have

13:03 discovered is that adolescence itself seems to be

13:06 a period that again is different from in some ways,

13:10 you know, adolescents are temperamentally more like the preschoolers.

13:13 They're exploring.

13:15 But what they're exploring is the social world as opposed to the physical world.

13:19 So, what they're exploring is what are all the different

13:21 ways that people could be related to one another?

13:24 What are all the different kinds of social organization that we could have?

13:27 Um and we actually have some empirical evidence for that.

13:30 And then it's at the end of adolescence, you know, like early 20s,

13:34 that you start to get this shift back

13:35 to something that looks more like a regular adulthood.

13:39 And then one of the other things that I've been very interested

13:41 in is I think there's yet another shift in what you might call elderhood,

13:46 you know, that postmenopausal grandmotherhood,

13:48 but it applies to men as well where you get you get

13:51 a real shift to this kind of care and teaching uh mode,

13:55 kind of care and teaching intelligence

13:57 rather than that exploit 35-year-old intelligence.

14:00 So, in some ways, one of the paradoxes is that as people get older,

14:04 in spite of the fact that they're getting

14:05 creakier and they're not as good at doing things, um they often get happier.

14:10 And I think that's because you're sort of released from the need to fulfill,

14:15 you know, do all the 35-year-old things,

14:16 and then you can focus on teaching or uh passing on the information

14:22 that you've already got or or caring for a new generation of grandchildren.

14:26 Why do you think it's so hard for adults to to enter into that playful mindset?

14:33 Is Is it because we're in spotlight mode and we're not in lantern mode,

14:38 and so we're more self- centered or or more goal- directed,

14:44 so we can't just stop and and be?

14:46 Yeah, I mean, it's you know, as you can tell,

14:49 and I I think there's a bit of a selection effect here, you know.

14:52 I'm a scientist, and in a way,

14:55 being a scientist or an artist or uh even a podcast host

15:00 as an adult activity is kind of has these elements of play and exploration.

15:05 And part of what we do as adults is have different roles.

15:07 Um and so I'm obviously love the 3-year-olds,

15:12 I'm really sympathetic to those wild, crazy poets.

15:15 But the truth is, you would not want them to be running your department.

15:19 Um and we actually have a very vivid example of this recently.

15:23 Like you would not really want to have someone who was taking

15:26 ketamine on a regular basis restructuring

15:28 the uh restructuring the federal government.

15:31 Like we have reason to believe that that would be a really,

15:33 really [laughter] bad idea.

15:35 Um Or maybe building your electric vehicle.

15:38 Yeah, right.

15:39 Exactly.

15:39 The idea would be the same things that might make you

15:42 effective as an innovator or an explorer are not necessarily the same

15:45 things that are going to make you effective in policy

15:48 or in running the running a business well or running a government well.

15:52 And, you know, those children wouldn't

15:54 those children wouldn't be able to survive

15:56 unless there were grown-ups who were not off in their lantern of attention,

16:02 the grown-ups who were spotlighted on, oh my goodness, you know,

16:06 now we have to get groceries and how are do we how are we going to put nap time

16:11 in and how am I going to make enough money

16:14 to take care of these children and send them to school, right?

16:16 I mean, if it weren't for grown-ups who were doing that kind of work,

16:19 um we wouldn't be able to have that a kind of exploration.

16:22 So, I think I think we tend to um

16:25 valorize the exploration and innovation perhaps too much.

16:31 Um my my uh my husband was the um co-founder of Pixar.

16:37 And of course, whenever anybody's talking about something like Pixar,

16:40 they say, oh, you know, how did you manage to manage all of that creativity

16:45 and how did you get that kind of creativity and innovation?

16:48 And he always says, no, no,

16:49 the reason why that company succeeded with logistics.

16:52 It was there were a lot of people who would

16:54 just do the work of um the work of, you know,

16:59 the work of exploit, the work of let's focus,

17:01 let's try and make the uh make this make this actually work.

17:05 So, I think it's really is a trade-off between the two kinds of capacities.

17:09 Well, what do you think for adults is the biggest

17:11 loss in that trade-off moving from explore to exploit?

17:14 Obviously, exploit mode is good for building

17:16 things and getting done in the world, maybe building civilizations.

17:20 Probably couldn't do that without spotlight consciousness,

17:23 but what is the biggest loss in that move?

17:26 Well, again, I mean, you know, I want to emphasize that you couldn't

17:29 not only could you not build civilizations,

17:30 you couldn't raise another generation of kids, right?

17:33 I mean, you know, you you'd have to just to be able to Also that.

17:37 Right.

17:37 Just to be able to keep your children and the other people around you alive,

17:41 um you need to be able to have some of that kind of focus.

17:44 Um I think it's a loss in the sense that again,

17:49 we could emphasize some of these techniques that we use that we we

17:53 could use to have a broader view more in our culture than we do.

17:57 So, in our culture, even though there's kind of lip

18:01 service to the idea that we really want innovation and creativity,

18:04 it's still true that we have this very um

18:07 outcome-based kind of score-based culture where the question is,

18:12 you know, even ironically,

18:14 I've had this conversation with say uh here's a here's a example

18:19 that I think is really terrible and interesting at the same time,

18:24 which is like people in Silicon

18:26 Valley microdosing psychedelics because they want

18:28 their apps to be better and they want to be more creative, right?

18:31 Like that's really kind of destroying the whole idea, right?

18:34 That what you want to do is find the formula for you to be more creative.

18:39 And if you think about being a parent,

18:40 my my um uh book about the gardener and the carpenter,

18:44 I think a real crisis, actually, something that's really destructive,

18:49 is that we have a kind of view of parenting

18:51 that's like this kind of exploit outcome um uh enterprise where,

18:56 you know, we're supposed to be getting a certain kinds of benchmarks.

18:59 So, we want our children to come out in a particular way,

19:01 and we think that if we just do the right kind of parenting,

19:04 then they'll come out that way.

19:06 That whole approach to things,

19:08 which we I think we do really exaggerate in our culture,

19:11 um means [snorts] that you don't have just the time to think or to look

19:16 around or to explore or to hang out with the people that you're close to.

19:21 And I I think that is a real crisis in the way that we run our culture now.

19:25 We have a tendency to think of children as these like ill-formed pre-adults.

19:31 Right.

19:31 We're trying to teach them how to be more more like us,

19:34 rational, calculating, linear, goal-oriented, getting things done.

19:40 And it it just misses the whole point of of who they are at that stage of life.

19:45 And the more I started seeing my child that way,

19:49 the more he became a teacher to me as much

19:53 as I was teaching him because there's so many

19:55 lessons for for for how to live and learn

19:58 by just watching kids in that explorer mode where everything,

20:02 I mean, there's magic in the most mundane stuff of life.

20:06 And right, you can't build a civilization like that.

20:09 Uh but I don't think you can build one without it either.

20:12 Yeah.

20:12 No, I think that's right.

20:13 And I think that's true if you look at, you know,

20:16 sort of general tension between what people

20:20 in cultural evolution call imitation and innovation.

20:23 So, civilizations always depend on the idea that on the one hand humans have

20:29 this amazing capacity to take advantage

20:32 of the cultural discoveries of the previous generation.

20:37 I think of it as being, you know,

20:38 all those grandmothers are telling you about what happened you know,

20:42 50 years ago and that is enabling you to make progress.

20:46 People sometimes call this like the cultural ratchet.

20:49 It's one of the arguably our sort of secret sauce

20:52 that let us succeed in as many different environments as we have.

20:55 But of course doing that wouldn't be do you any

20:59 good unless at somewhere along the line someone was innovating,

21:02 someone was saying, "Oh, no, I'm not going to do it the way grandmom did it.

21:06 I'm going to take what grandmom knew and now

21:08 I'm going to do something that's really different."

21:10 And it's that kind of balance between those two

21:12 capacities that's crucial for actually making making cultural progress.

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22:42 You wrote a paper, I think back in '23

22:45 or or '24 about what children can do that advanced LLMs can't?

22:53 Um what was your argument there?

22:56 Is it about this imitation innovation thing and and, you know

23:01 two or three years in technology time is like an eternity.

23:05 So, the tech has evolved a lot since then.

23:08 So, have you changed your mind at all about any of that?

23:12 So, the question is like what's missing from the current systems.

23:16 And it's a bit of a whack-a-mole game because every time that you say, "Look,

23:20 I did this experiment with kids and they could do this and the you know,

23:26 your your cutting-edge LLM can't." Somebody is sitting in the back

23:29 and training the LLM so it can do exactly that thing.

23:32 But the great um capacity that kids have is

23:36 this being able to deal with the out-of-distribution environment,

23:40 being able to deal with the non-stationary environment,

23:42 being able to figure out something new when something changes.

23:45 And almost by definition,

23:48 that's something that the large models are bad at because

23:50 the whole point of the large models is take all

23:52 the information that's already out there and find the kind

23:56 of average of all of that information that's already out there.

23:59 And what that means is if you're in a situation in which something has changed,

24:03 you're not going to be able to go out there's nothing

24:06 in those systems that lets them go out and figure out,

24:09 "Oh, okay, that training that I had 2 years ago, that really is wrong.

24:13 That's really not capturing the environment cuz

24:15 now the environment is now the environment

24:18 is different." And we have some experiments where we can show, for instance,

24:21 that if you give children a new machine that works in a new way that's

24:25 not like any machine that they've seen

24:26 before doesn't work the way most machines work,

24:29 they're extremely good at figuring out the structure of that machine.

24:33 And interestingly, they're better than grown-ups.

24:35 Grown-ups tend to you give them that kind

24:37 of problem tend to rely on what they already know Yeah.

24:39 as you might imagine given their given their their brains.

24:42 So, they have a hard time if something

24:45 is really different from anything that they've seen before.

24:47 And so do large models.

24:48 That's their that's the that's the problem they have.

24:52 And I think a lot of people feel like the the path

24:57 to something that had an intelligence that was actually like,

25:01 you know, not just human intelligence

25:02 but like kitten intelligence animal biological

25:06 intelligence would be systems that were in a sense more like robots,

25:10 systems that were embedded in the real world that could go

25:15 out and do things in the real world and get new

25:18 data and new information and then take that new data and change

25:21 what they think about the world and then iterate that process.

25:24 That's what that's what humans and indeed, you know, smart um animals are doing.

25:30 And you know, if you go back to um

25:33 that's what feral adults are doing all the time, right?

25:35 They're That's why they love sticks because a stick lets you Sticks, man.

25:40 God, they love sticks.

25:41 They're just fabulous, right?

25:43 They let you go out and find something My kid

25:46 found a musket on the way to school this morning.

25:48 We were walking to school this morning.

25:50 I was walking my kid to school this morning and he found

25:52 a stick on the ground and identified it as a Civil War era musket.

25:57 That's right.

25:58 And he [laughter] he made me take it home and set it by the door

26:02 so that it would be there when he got home.

26:04 I would have walked right past that stick a thousand times.

26:09 [laughter] But it's a musket.

26:09 It was right there.

26:11 Um that kind of pretend play, by the way,

26:13 is another example of this really like you would not think of this is a musket.

26:18 That's just like not in your uh It's a stick.

26:22 Yeah.

26:22 So, sticks are another example that I like is,

26:26 you know, you don't even have to look at 6-year-olds.

26:27 Look at 1-year-olds.

26:29 1-year-olds and the TV remote, right?

26:32 The 1-year-olds think that the remote is

26:34 the most fun thing in the entire universe.

26:38 And think about it, right?

26:39 Like there weren't remotes.

26:41 Like not just not in the place to see but not like when I was growing up, right?

26:47 And remotes work in this incredibly bizarre way.

26:49 They work at a distance.

26:51 You know, you press a button and then

26:53 this bunch of things happen and you press one

26:55 button [clears throat] and Bluey comes on and you

26:57 press another button and Paw Patrol comes on.

27:00 Um uh and and that's an example of something that every 1-year-old, you know,

27:05 this is something that's completely new,

27:07 they've never seen before, that's not part of their background.

27:09 And yet very quickly they're acting on it to try and figure

27:13 out to get new information and figure out how it works.

27:16 And at least the current crop of of AI isn't good at doing that at all.

27:21 And and there's a really striking difference between

27:24 the large models where they're generating text and they're

27:27 very good at generating text and say robotics

27:30 where they're much much further behind where even just,

27:34 you know, picking something up and putting it in a new place

27:36 is is really difficult and expensive and requires enormous amounts of training.

27:41 Okay.

27:41 So, the well, they're not very good at it right now, right?

27:45 Right now these systems are really just

27:47 like hyper hyper hyper efficient exploit machines.

27:50 Right.

27:51 But can you see a world where it evolves and we get

27:55 something like AGI or strong AI and and it actually becomes something different,

28:01 something more, actually becomes capable of the kind

28:04 of exploration that you're talking about with children?

28:08 I mean, would that be the game changer for you?

28:10 Well, I mean, the question is uh I mean,

28:14 the first thing to say is that you're not going to get there just by scale,

28:18 which is the thing that the artificial the AI people keep saying, right?

28:22 So, it is true that scale may let you get more and more language and do

28:27 things that are kind of amazing like

28:30 use syntax and grammar and do coding, right?

28:32 That turns out to be something that you can do by looking

28:35 at the statistics in very large databases and generalizing from them.

28:41 It's really important to say the only reason that you can do that is

28:44 because a bunch of humans have put all of this information out on the internet.

28:48 So, the current AIs like the large models are completely dependent

28:52 on the fact that human beings are actually the ones who've who've made

28:57 these discoveries and understand the world in a particular way and are putting

29:00 all that data about what they know and understand out on the internet.

29:03 That's not trivial.

29:04 I mean, those cultural technologies,

29:06 our ability to organize and access information that's the thing

29:10 that makes us different from any other um from any other species.

29:14 You know, I'm I'm reasonably intelligent but me plus the UC Berkeley library,

29:20 that's orders of magnitude more intelligent than

29:23 I am without the UC Berkeley uh library.

29:26 But just continuing that scale isn't going

29:28 to get you to going out into the world

29:30 and and exploring and changing what you think

29:33 as a result of your exploration and creating I mean,

29:37 I think the the creativity uh question like why decide that the stick

29:41 is a musket as opposed to all the other things that it could be,

29:44 that's something that the systems are not good at uh are not good at doing.

29:48 I mean, another question is what would we want to do it or which

29:52 kinds of cognitive capacities would we would we want to have in another system?

29:57 I mean, you know, calculating numbers, that's definitely a kind of intelligence.

30:03 Everyone would have thought that that was a kind of intelligence 100 years ago.

30:08 We just take for granted.

30:09 Of course, we want to have machines that can do that.

30:11 That's something that is really tiresome and tedious and difficult for humans.

30:15 So, the question is what kinds of cognitive capacities would we like

30:20 to offload and which ones which ones maybe we don't we don't

30:25 want to offload and we need to make conscious decisions about we

30:29 need to make some kind of conscious decisions about how that works.

30:31 And there's actually some interesting work my colleague James Evans who wrote

30:36 this paper in in science with me about AI's being cultural technologies

30:42 has some interesting examples where LLMs for instance seem to reason better

30:47 if instead of just having a single model that is trained on everything,

30:52 you have different models with different kinds of training

30:55 and different different tuning cooperating with one another.

30:59 That actually seems to be a better way of getting

31:01 to the right answer than having the quote unquote super intelligence.

31:06 Well, this is partly why I wanted to talk to you because

31:10 if you listen to enough of those the 35-year-old white tech VC guy [snorts]

31:19 um it's very clear that many of them think of intelligence,

31:23 human intelligence, as just simply a matter of processing power.

31:27 Right, that's all it is.

31:28 And so therefore well, as processing power continues to go up and up and up,

31:34 it's just simply a matter of time before whatever human intelligence is

31:38 we will we will we will we will meet that and surpass it.

31:43 But you seem to think intelligence, human intelligence,

31:46 is a little more complicated than that.

31:48 Is that is that a fair interpretation?

31:51 In fact, I think probably most people who are

31:53 actually working in the field feel that way about it.

31:55 It's it's the it's a relatively small group who have

31:59 this kind of who have this kind of distorted picture.

32:02 But I do think if you're thinking from the perspective

32:04 of cognitive science and I think more and more are saying no,

32:07 it isn't as if what you see in human intelligence

32:10 is some single processing power that's getting to be you know,

32:15 that's getting to be greater and greater.

32:17 What you see is these many different kinds of cognitive capacities.

32:21 One of the important ones for instance,

32:23 so one of them is this one about going out into the world and exploring.

32:26 Another one is building world models, building pictures,

32:30 internal models of how the world works.

32:33 And when you get that kind of model like a theory,

32:36 then you can make brand new predictions again

32:39 that are completely unlike anything that you've seen before,

32:41 which is not the sort of thing that the large models are doing.

32:44 Um and you know, my one of my books is called The Scientist in the Crib.

32:48 I think kids actually are developing those intuitive theories and not just me.

32:52 I think developmentalists have discovered that even little kids

32:55 are developing theories that are a lot like scientific theories.

32:58 And those theories, those models are

33:00 the things that actually enable you with relatively

33:03 little data to make really good generalizations even when the world has shifted,

33:07 even when the world isn't the way that you thought the world was before.

33:10 When parents do come to you and say, all right,

33:12 I'm buying everything you're selling about children and intelligence,

33:16 what what is your what is your simplest, most essential advice?

33:20 Chill out.

33:22 And the chilling out is not only going to be better for the kids,

33:25 but but better for the the caregivers as well.

33:29 That having a an attitude of I'm involved in this relationship

33:35 and it's got terrible features sometimes the way all human relationships do,

33:41 but most of the time it's got these marvelous features.

33:45 Most of the time they're fascinating and beautiful and fun

33:49 to to be with and they love you more than you're ever

33:53 going to be loved ever before and you love them more

33:56 than you ever are going to love anybody else in your life.

33:59 Like that's an amazing thing, right?

34:01 That's just just that's just baseline.

34:03 Um and to be able to sort of appreciate the fact that that's

34:07 happening and to be able to sort of appreciate the fact that you

34:10 got this ringside seat on the biggest human miracle that we know of, which

34:16 is these children being able to learn so much as opposed to thinking,

34:20 okay, this is what I need to do next and this is you know,

34:23 this is what I need to do to get them into the sports

34:27 league or get them into Berkeley or get them into you know,

34:30 the next the next phase.

34:33 I think that's better for grown-ups and for kids.

34:36 So, that would make make the process and you know, I think this is relevant.

34:39 I mean, I think people genuinely are you know,

34:42 not having children because they have this picture about this is a not only is

34:46 this a job that I'm not very well trained for, but it's an incredibly you know,

34:50 difficult job and I don't know what the outcomes are going to be.

34:53 And if you could think of it as more like a relationship um than a job,

34:58 that would at least be a help.

35:04 It's a really hard job.

35:05 And a really a very rewarding relationship, but Yeah.

35:09 It's also very hard.

35:09 Yeah, well, like all rewarding relationships I should just chill out.

35:12 difficult and confusing sometimes, but but you know,

35:16 having human relationships is the great thing that that humans do.

35:20 And I think it's interesting as I've been

35:22 thinking about all this care work that you know,

35:25 in a way there's an argument that that the way what humans did was

35:29 take this biologically induced necessity to take

35:34 care of little kids and and you know,

35:39 generalize it to all these other human relationships.

35:41 So, the fact that we do take care of people who are weaker than we are.

35:46 The fact that we take care of elders.

35:48 The fact that we even you know at least in the old days had US aid that was

35:55 helping to take care of people who were on the other side of the of the globe.

35:58 The fact that we can do that, I think is rooted

36:02 in this impulse to take care of of these young helpless children.

36:06 But then that generalization enables us to to thrive and to function

36:11 in the world in ways that seem like deeply satisfying and and deeply important.

36:16 I love what you say about caregiving work,

36:18 which has been horrendously undervalued in the modern age,

36:23 but you know, I also heard you say

36:25 one time you were talking about care and love.

36:29 Mhm.

36:30 And now we have this tendency to think well,

36:32 of course, you you you care for the people you love.

36:36 But you flipped it and said, no, you you you love the people you care for.

36:40 Yeah.

36:41 That love is actually the act of caring.

36:44 And it was really profound, Alison,

36:46 because I I heard you say that and I'm sorry,

36:48 I I just I heard you say that and it

36:50 really it transformed when I was doing the hard stuff Mhm.

36:57 of parenting, you know, the getting up in the middle of the night

37:00 and and changing the diapers and all that stuff.

37:02 It it transformed my relationship to that where I I thought of it,

37:06 no, like this is actually what love is.

37:09 I am caring for doesn't have to be a parent.

37:11 You can care for for anyone, a friend, a parent, anyone.

37:15 Um but it was the it was the act of caring.

37:18 That is the love.

37:19 Um and I just think it's a profound

37:22 point and we don't know enough caregiving work.

37:27 We don't value caregiving work.

37:28 We don't reward.

37:29 Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm talking too much now, but I just wanted to say that.

37:33 Well, that's just that's very that's very touching to me.

37:37 And you know, I have to say this latest set of work that I've been doing,

37:41 I've been trying to extend the caregiving from thinking

37:44 just about children to as in, you know,

37:46 gardeners to thinking about elders or thinking

37:50 about people who are ill or thinking about all these other cases where I think

37:53 the same thing happens at least to some extent.

37:56 You know, that care is very wound up

37:58 with these these feelings of love and also feelings sometimes of duty,

38:04 but love and duty are you know,

38:06 some of the most deep important things about being human.

38:09 You know, that everyday experience of taking care of children of being taken

38:15 care of, of taking care of elders and people who are ill and students.

38:22 All those things that are have traditionally been part of women's realm,

38:27 but in particular things that have to do with kids.

38:30 I think thinking about that, taking it seriously,

38:33 not treating it as if it's just you know,

38:35 a thing that happens in the background is um

38:39 is a opens up all of these just intellectual horizons,

38:44 intellectual problems, intellectual questions,

38:46 scientific questions in a way that I at least have found very

38:50 satisfying and I think would be good for the the culture at large.

38:55 I think that's a a really good place to end.

38:58 Do you have a website?

38:59 Where can people go to to check out your work?

39:01 Yeah, alison gopnik.com.

39:03 Very simple and there's a bunch of of recent papers like these recent papers

39:08 about AI as well as links to all the other all my other writing.

39:14 And podcasts and talking, too.

39:17 Well, thank you so much, Sean.

39:18 This has really been great.

39:20 Alison, I I I mean, really it's it's so nice to to finally have you on the show.

39:25 I find you to be a tremendously interesting thinker and I've

39:29 learned a lot from from listening to you and and reading you.

39:32 So, it's been a it's been a pleasure.

39:34 So, thank you.

39:35 Well, I love I love hearing about the sticks and the muskets.

39:38 So [laughter] Hey, thanks for watching.

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