And without taking anything away from that tradition, it made me wonder if one reason that has become so dominant in America, and particularly in Northern California, is because its a very good match for the kind of concentration in consciousness that our economy is consciously trying to develop in us, this get things done, be very focused, dont ruminate too much, like a neoliberal form of consciousness. Im Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.. The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Rog Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld. And its worth saying, its not like the children are always in that state. It could just be your garden or the street that youre walking on. 2022. 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. Whos this powerful and mysterious, sometimes dark, but ultimately good, creature in your experience. Unlike my son and I dont want to brag here unlike my son, I can make it from his bedroom to the kitchen without any stops along the way. 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. What you do with these systems is say, heres what your goal is. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. The other change thats particularly relevant to humans is that we have the prefrontal cortex. Rising costs and a shortage of workers are pushing the Southwest-style restaurant chain to do more with less. Now its not so much about youre visually taking in all the information around you the way that you do when youre exploring. Theres a book called The Children of Green Knowe, K-N-O-W-E. You go out and maximize that goal. But its the state that theyre in a lot of the time and a state that theyre in when theyre actually engaged in play. Alison Gopnik Creativity is something we're not even in the ballpark of explaining. Those are sort of the options. Because theres a reason why the previous generation is doing the things that theyre doing and the sense of, heres this great range of possibilities that we havent considered before. Advertisement. And he was absolutely right. My colleague, Dacher Keltner, has studied awe. I mean, they really have trouble generalizing even when theyre very good. And thats the sort of ruminating or thinking about the other things that you have to do, being in your head, as we say, as the other mode. And then he said, I guess they want to make sure that the children and the students dont break the clock. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where she runs the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab; shes also the author of over 100 papers and half a dozen books, including The Gardener and the Carpenter and The Philosophical Baby. What I love about her work is she takes the minds of children seriously. Anyone can read what you share. 2021. So if youve seen the movie, you have no idea what Mary Poppins is about. It can change really easily, essentially. That ones a dog. So thats the first one, especially for the younger children. You get this different combination of genetics and environment and temperament. It was called "parenting." As long as there have. A child psychologistand grandmothersays such fears are overblown. For example, several stud-ies have reported relations between the development of disappearance words and the solution to certain object-permanence prob-lems (Corrigan, 1978; Gopnik, 1984b; Gopnik I feel like thats an answer thats going to launch 100 science fiction short stories, as people imagine the stories youre describing here. But a mind tuned to learn works differently from a mind trying to exploit what it already knows. Several studies suggest that specific rela-tions between semantic and cognitive devel-opment may exist. You have the paper to write. The murder conviction of the disbarred lawyer capped a South Carolina low country saga that attracted intense global interest. What does look different in the two brains? And we do it partially through children. But I think that babies and young children are in that explore state all the time. So the acronym we have for our project is MESS, which stands for Model-Building Exploratory Social Learning Systems. Is This How a Cold War With China Begins? When people say, well, the robots have trouble generalizing, they dont mean they have trouble generalizing from driving a Tesla to driving a Lexus. And its much harder for A.I. agents and children literally in the same environment. Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer. The childs mind is tuned to learn. Thats the kind of basic rationale behind the studies. Now its not a form of experience and consciousness so much, but its a form of activity. But its not very good at putting on its jacket and getting into preschool in the morning. Both parents and policy makers increasingly push preschools to be more like schools. Gopnik explains that as we get older, we lose our cognitive flexibility and our penchant for explorationsomething that we need to be mindful of, lest we let rigidity take over. 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. The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. Theres a programmer whos hovering over the A.I. 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. And then yesterday, I went to see my grandchildren for the first time in a year, my beloved grandchildren. By Alison Gopnik Dec. 9, 2021 12:42 pm ET Text 34 Listen to article (2 minutes) The great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget used to talk about "the American question." In the course of his long. So those are two really, really different kinds of consciousness. Alison Gopnik is a renowned developmental psychologist whose research has revealed much about the amazing learning and reasoning capacities of young children, and she may be the leading . Try again later. So, what goes on in play is different. And they wont be able to generalize, even to say a dog on a video thats actually moving. And why not, right? 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. When you look at someone whos in the scanner, whos really absorbed in a great movie, neither of those parts are really active. We should be designing these systems so theyre complementary to our intelligence, rather than somehow being a reproduction of our intelligence. One of my greatest pleasures is to be what the French call a "flneur"someone. And we dont really completely know what the answer is. What AI Still Doesn't Know How to Do (22 Jul 2022). Patel* Affiliation: Two Days Mattered Most. And I suspect that they each come with a separate, a different kind of focus, a different way of being. But of course, its not something that any grown-up would say. One of my greatest pleasures is to be what the French call a flneursomeone who wanders randomly through a big city, stumbling on new scenes. Contrast that view with a new one that's quickly gaining ground. And he looked up at the clock tower, and he said, theres a clock at the top there. Just do the things that you think are interesting or fun. So it actually introduces more options, more outcomes. And often, quite suddenly, if youre an adult, everything in the world seems to be significant and important and important and significant in a way that makes you insignificant by comparison. So if youre looking for a real lightweight, easy place to do some writing, Calmly Writer. But I do think something thats important is that the very mundane investment that we make as caregivers, keeping the kids alive, figuring out what it is that they want or need at any moment, those things that are often very time consuming and require a lot of work, its that context of being secure and having resources and not having to worry about the immediate circumstances that youre in. And in robotics, for example, theres a lot of attempts to use this kind of imitative learning to train robots. But if you look at their subtlety at their ability to deal with context, at their ability to decide when should I do this versus that, how should I deal with the whole ensemble that Im in, thats where play has its great advantages. And suddenly that becomes illuminated. Younger learners are better than older ones at learning unusual abstra. 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. 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 gradually, it gets to be clear that there are ghosts of the history of this house. Syntax; Advanced Search The movie is just completely captivating. Theres all these other kinds of ways of being sentient, ways of being aware, ways of being conscious, that are not like that at all. And you yourself sort of disappear. So instead of asking what children can learn from us, perhaps we need to reverse the question: What can we learn from them? And what weve been trying to do is to try and see what would you have to do to design an A.I. Everything around you becomes illuminated. And we can compare what it is that the kids and the A.I.s do in that same environment. Early acquisition of verbs in Korean: A cross-linguistic study. Well, from an evolutionary biology point of view, one of the things thats really striking is this relationship between what biologists call life history, how our developmental sequence unfolds, and things like how intelligent we are. : MIT Press. Now, were obviously not like that. Theres a clock way, way up high at the top of that tower. By Alison Gopnik. The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. Theyre much better at generalizing, which is, of course, the great thing that children are also really good at. And the same thing is true with Mary Poppins. Thats what lets humans keep altering their values and goals, and most of the time, for good. So what play is really about is about this ability to change, to be resilient in the face of lots of different environments, in the face of lots of different possibilities. Im sure youve seen this with your two-year-old with this phenomenon of some plane, plane, plane. Well, if you think about human beings, were being faced with unexpected environments all the time. So you just heard earlier in the conversation they began doing a lot of work around A.I. So with the Wild Things, hes in his room, where mom is, where supper is going to be. And another example that weve been working on a lot with the Bay Area group is just vision. And meanwhile, I dont want to put too much weight on its beating everybody at Go, but that what it does seem plausible it could do in 10 years will be quite remarkable. Cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik has been studying this landscape of children and play for her whole career. Yeah, theres definitely something to that. You do the same thing over and over again. And the difference between just the things that we take for granted that, say, children are doing and the things that even the very best, most impressive A.I. 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 I have done a bit of meditation and workshops, and its always a little amusing when you see the young men who are going to prove that theyre better at meditating. Each of the children comes out differently. The psychologist Alison Gopnik and Ezra Klein discuss what children can teach adults about learning, consciousness and play. Because I think theres cultural pressure to not play, but I think that your research and some of the others suggest maybe weve made a terrible mistake on that by not honoring play more. She's also the author of the newly. Im a writing nerd. So when they first started doing these studies where you looked at the effects of an enriching preschool and these were play-based preschools, the way preschools still are to some extent and certainly should be and have been in the past. 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. We describe a surprising developmental pattern we found in studies involving three different kinds of problems and age ranges. Theyre not just doing the obvious thing, but theyre not just behaving completely randomly. I didnt know that there was an airplane there. And again, thats a lot of the times, thats a good thing because theres other things that we have to do. What do you think about the twin studies that people used to suggest parenting doesnt really matter? So what youll see when you look at a chart of synaptic development, for instance, is, youve got this early period when many, many, many new connections are being made. Sign In. Scientists actually are the few people who as adults get to have this protected time when they can just explore, play, figure out what the world is like.', 'Love doesn't have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. Walk around to the other side, pick things up and get into everything and make a terrible mess because youre picking them up and throwing them around. In this Aeon Original animation, Alison Gopnik, a writer and a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, examines how these unparalleled vulnerable periods are likely to be at least somewhat responsible for our smarts. Your self is gone. Now heres a specific thing that Im puzzled about that I think weve learned from looking at the A.I. You can even see that in the brain.