Listen to article (2 minutes) Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. In A.I., you sort of have a choice often between just doing the thing thats the obvious thing that youve been trained to do or just doing something thats kind of random and noisy. And it takes actual, dedicated effort to not do things that feel like work to me. Thank you for listening. Thats really what you want when youre conscious. Theres a certain kind of happiness and joy that goes with being in that state when youre just playing. But if we wanted to have A.I.s that had those kinds of capacities, theyd need to have grandmoms. It kind of makes sense. And what I like about all three of these books, in their different ways, is that I think they capture this thing thats so distinctive about childhood, the fact that on the one hand, youre in this safe place. As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work. Everything around you becomes illuminated. 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. When Younger Learners Can Be Better (or at Least More Open-Minded) Than Older Ones - Alison Gopnik, Thomas L. Griffiths, Christopher G. Lucas, 2015 Mind & Matter, now once per month (Click on the title for text, or on the date for link to The Wall Street Journal *) . And I think having this kind of empathic relationship to the children who are exploring so much is another. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-emotional-benefits-of-wandering-11671131450. Thats a really deep part of it. We spend so much time and effort trying to teach kids to think like adults. And were pretty well designed to think its good to care for children in the first place. She is the author of The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and the Carpenter. And thats exactly the example of the sort of things that children do. Anyone can read what you share. And we can think about what is it. Im going to keep it up with these little occasional recommendations after the show. 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. Customer Service. I feel like thats an answer thats going to launch 100 science fiction short stories, as people imagine the stories youre describing here. Another thing that people point out about play is play is fun. You get this different combination of genetics and environment and temperament. Babies' brains,. So, a lot of the theories of consciousness start out from what I think of as professorial consciousness. Paul Krugman Breaks It Down. I mean, obviously, Im a writer, but I like writing software. And I think for adults, a lot of the function, which has always been kind of mysterious like, why would reading about something that hasnt happened help you to understand things that have happened, or why would it be good in general I think for adults a lot of that kind of activity is the equivalent of play. And suddenly that becomes illuminated. So the A.I. So even if you take something as simple as that you would like to have your systems actually youd like to have the computer in your car actually be able to identify this is a pedestrian or a car, it turns out that even those simple things involve abilities that we see in very young children that are actually quite hard to program into a computer. 50% off + free delivery on any order with DoorDash promo code, 60% off running shoes and apparel at Nike without a promo code, Score up to 50% off Nintendo Switch video games with GameStop coupon code, The Tax Play That Saves Some Couples Big Bucks, How Gas From Texas Becomes Cooking Fuel in France, Amazon Pausing Construction of Washington, D.C.-Area Second Headquarters. And that kind of goal-directed, focused, consciousness, which goes very much with the sense of a self so theres a me thats trying to finish up the paper or answer the emails or do all the things that I have to do thats really been the focus of a lot of theories of consciousness, is if that kind of consciousness was what consciousness was all about. And if theyre crows, theyre playing with twigs and figuring out how they can use the twigs. our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. And then as you get older, you get more and more of that control. Now, were obviously not like that. Alison Gopnik, Ph.D., is at the center of highlighting our understanding of how babies and young children think and learn. A.I. One of the things thats really fascinating thats coming out in A.I. What does taking more seriously what these states of consciousness are like say about how you should act as a parent and uncle and aunt, a grandparent? How so? And the same way with The Children of Green Knowe. Youre going to visit your grandmother in her house in the country. So theyre constantly social referencing. Just trying to do something thats different from the things that youve done before, just that can itself put you into a state thats more like the childlike state. Theyre not just doing the obvious thing, but theyre not just behaving completely randomly. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. And theyre going to the greengrocer and the fishmonger. And each one of them is going to come out to be really different from anything you would expect beforehand, which is something that I think anybody who has had more than one child is very conscious of. Try again later. Low and consistent latency is the key to great online experiences. According to this alter So what kind of function could that serve? thats saying, oh, good, your Go score just went up, so do what youre doing there. When I went to Vox Media, partially I did that because of their great CMS or publishing software Chorus. And then youve got this later period where the connections that are used a lot that are working well, they get maintained, they get strengthened, they get to be more efficient. So its another way of having this explore state of being in the world. And then yesterday, I went to see my grandchildren for the first time in a year, my beloved grandchildren. The psychologist Alison Gopnik and Ezra Klein discuss what children can teach adults about learning, consciousness and play. will have one goal, and that will never change. One of the things I really like about this is that it pushes towards a real respect for the childs brain. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. . agents and children literally in the same environment. The peer-reviewed journal article that I have chosen, . I have so much trouble actually taking the world on its own terms and trying to derive how it works. And then the ones that arent are pruned, as neuroscientists say. So if you think from this broad evolutionary perspective about these creatures that are designed to explore, I think theres a whole lot of other things that go with that. Yeah, thats a really good question. I have some information about how this machine works, for example, myself. So its also for the children imitating the more playful things that the adults are doing, or at least, for robots, thats helping the robots to be more effective. Well, I have to say actually being involved in the A.I. And it seems as if parents are playing a really deep role in that ability. Or send this episode to a friend, a family member, somebody you want to talk about it with. Tweet Share Share Comment Tweet Share Share Comment Ours is an age of pedagogy. 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. Theyre going out and figuring things out in the world. Seventeen years ago, my son adopted a scrappy, noisy, bouncy, charming young street dog and named him Gretzky, after the great hockey player. And an idea that I think a lot of us have now is that part of that is because youve really got these two different creatures. Empirical Papers Language, Theory of Mind, Perception, and Consciousness Reviews and Commentaries And those two things are very parallel. The role of imitation in understanding persons and developing a theory of mind. So if youre looking for a real lightweight, easy place to do some writing, Calmly Writer. Articles by Ismini A. Is this interesting? That doesnt seem like such a highfalutin skill to be able to have. This byline is mine, but I want my name removed. Theres a book called The Children of Green Knowe, K-N-O-W-E. 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. So one thing is to get them to explore, but another thing is to get them to do this kind of social learning. She spent decades. So, let me ask you a variation on whats our final question. The philosophical baby: What children's minds tell us about truth, love & the meaning of life. And that was an argument against early education. She studies the cognitive science of learning and development. Syntax; Advanced Search can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim, right? So, the very way that you experience the world, your consciousness, is really different if your agenda is going to be, get the next thing done, figure out how to do it, figure out what the next thing to do after that is, versus extract as much information as I possibly can from the world. And then he said, I guess they want to make sure that the children and the students dont break the clock. Support Science Journalism. .css-i6hrxa-Italic{font-style:italic;}Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. So just look at a screen with a lot of pixels, and make sense out of it. And empirically, what you see is that very often for things like music or clothing or culture or politics or social change, you see that the adolescents are on the edge, for better or for worse. Whats lost in that? They mean they have trouble going from putting the block down at this point to putting the block down a centimeter to the left, right? And you dont see the things that are on the other side. I mean, theyre constantly doing something, and then they look back at their parents to see if their parent is smiling or frowning. One way you could think about it is, our ecological niche is the unknown unknowns. One of my greatest pleasures is to be what the French call a "flneur"someone. The adults' imagination will limit by theirshow more content And I think the period of childhood and adolescence in particular gives you a chance to be that kind of cutting edge of change. And to go back to the parenting point, socially putting people in a state where they feel as if theyve got a lot of resources, and theyre not under immediate pressure to produce a particular outcome, that seems to be something that helps people to be in this helps even adults to be in this more playful exploratory state. But its the state that theyre in a lot of the time and a state that theyre in when theyre actually engaged in play. My colleague, Dacher Keltner, has studied awe. And then you kind of get distracted, and your mind wanders a bit. Its not random. Its that combination of a small, safe world, and its actually having that small, safe world that lets you explore much wilder, crazier stranger set of worlds than any grown-up ever gets to. Patel Show author details P.G. Now, of course, it could just be an epiphenomenon. For the US developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, this experiment reveals some of the deep flaws in modern parenting. Parents try - heaven knows, we try - to help our children win at a . And theres a very, very general relationship between how long a period of childhood an organism has and roughly how smart they are, how big their brains are, how flexible they are. And the idea is maybe we could look at some of the things that the two-year-olds do when theyre learning and see if that makes a difference to what the A.I.s are doing when theyre learning.