Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history among the primates? What use is the undisciplined child brain with its tendencies to drift, scatter, and explore in a world that adults understand in such very different terms? And what can we transpose from the study of human cognition as a developmental, stage-      wise process to the refinement and application of machine learning technologies?Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.This week we talk to SFI External Professor Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, author of numerous books on psych, cognitive science, childhood development. She writes a column at The Wall Street Journal, alternating with Robert Sapolsky. Slate said that Gopnik is “where to go if you want to get into the head of a baby.” In our conversation we discuss the tension between exploration and exploitation, the curious evolutionary origins of human cognition, the value of old age, and she provides a sober counterpoint about life in the age of large language machine learning models.Be sure to check out our extensive show notes with links to all our references at complexity.simplecast.com. If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us at santafe.edu/engage.Lastly, we have a bevy of summer programs coming up! Join us June 19-23 for Collective Intelligence: Foundations + Radical Ideas, a first-ever event open to both academics and professionals, with sessions on adaptive matter, animal groups, brains, AI, teams, and more.  Space is limited! Apps close February 1st.OR Apply to participate in the Complex Systems Summer School.OR the Graduate Workshop on Complexity in Social Science.OR the Complexity GAINS UK program for PhD students.Thank you for listening!Join our Facebook discussion group to meet like minds and talk about each episode.Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.Follow us on social media:Twitter • YouTube • Facebook • Instagram • LinkedInMentioned & Related Links:Alison Gopnik at WikipediaAlison Gopnik’s Google Scholar pageExplanation as Orgasmby Alison GopnikTwitter thread for Gopnik’s latest SFI Seminar on machine learning and child developmentChanges in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthoodby Gopnik et al.Pretense, Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Mattersby Deena Weisberg & Alison GopnikChildhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensionsby Alison GopnikThe Origins of Common Sense in Humans and Machinesby Kevin A Smith, Eliza Kosoy, Alison Gopnik, Deepak Pathak, Alan Fern, Joshua B Tenenbaum, & Tomer UllmanWhat Does “Mind-Wandering” Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigationby Zachary C. Irving, Aaron Glasser, Alison Gopnik, Verity Pinter, Chandra SripadaModels of Human Scientific Discoveryby Robert Goldstone, Alison Gopnik, Paul Thagard, Tomer UllmanLove Lets Us Learn: Psychological Science Makes the Case for Policies That Help Childrenby Alison Gopnik at APSOur Favorite New Things Are the Old Onesby Alison Gopnik at The Wall Street JournalAn exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligenceby Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, & David Wolpert#DEVOBIAS2018 on SFI TwitterCoarse-graining as a downward causation mechanismby Jessica FlackComplexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human DataomeComplexity 15: R. Maria del-Rio Chanona on Modeling Labor Markets & Tech UnemploymentLearning through the grapevine and the impact of the breadth and depth of social networksby Matthew Jackson, Suraj Malladi, & David McAdamsThe coming battle for the COVID-19 narrativeby Wendy Carlin & Sam BowlesComplexity 83: Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous WorldComplexity 97: Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized SocietyDerek Thompson at The Atlantic on the forces slowing innovation at scale (citing Chu & Evans)