The case for thinking like a child

Summary

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The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Episode: The Case for Thinking Like a Child

Guest: Alison Gopnik (Developmental Psychologist & Philosopher, UC Berkeley)
Release Date: April 27, 2026

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Overview

In this thought-provoking episode, Sean Illing explores the cognitive differences between children and adults with renowned developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik. The conversation challenges the conventional view of childhood as mere immaturity to be outgrown and instead frames it as a vital period of exploration, learning, and openness—a mindset adults would do well to revisit or at least value. Key topics include the evolutionary tradeoffs between "explore" and "exploit" cognition, the neurological and social transitions from childhood to adulthood, the undervaluing of caregiving, and what children can teach us about intelligence, learning, and the future of AI.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Two Types of Minds: Children vs. Adults

• Childhood as Exploration:

  • Children represent a vital "R&D department" in human cognition; they are intensely motivated to explore, experiment, and absorb as much as possible from their environment—even at the cost of safety or efficiency.
  • Adults, by contrast, are wired for "exploitation": efficiently applying known skills and information to achieve goals and navigate established routines.
  • This difference emerges as a necessary evolutionary adaptation ([03:28], Gopnik).

  "Kids are wired to explore, adults are wired to exploit... seeing it through Alison's framework shows that growing up isn’t just an expansion, it’s also a particular kind of cognitive narrowing, and there are real trade offs involved."
  — Sean Illing [02:15]

2. Lantern vs. Spotlight Consciousness

• Attentional Breadth:

  • Children operate with a "lantern consciousness"—taking in much more sensory information, aware of many stimuli at once (even those adults overlook).
  • Adults employ a "spotlight consciousness"—more focused, aware mostly of what’s relevant to current goals, missing peripheral details ([05:26]; [05:55]).

  "...preschoolers are bad at paying attention, but what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention. They're bad at just paying attention to the things we want them to pay attention to."
  — Alison Gopnik [06:37]

• Tradeoff: You can't be in maximum exploration and exploitation modes simultaneously, though activities like caring for children or certain meditation practices can temporarily widen adult attention ([08:08]).

3. The Uniquely Long Human Childhood

• Humans invest heavily in prolonged childhood, enabled by a wide network of caregivers (parents, extended family, even non-kin), likely as an adaptation to "non-stationary" environments that require ongoing learning and flexibility ([09:53]; [10:07]).
• This broad care system is rare among animals, with only orcas sharing similar patterns, and is deeply tied to the human capacity for cultural adaptation ([10:07]).

4. Developmental Transitions

• Phases Identified:

  • Early childhood: Pure exploration.
  • Around age 6–7: Transition toward skill acquisition and "exploitation"—children become obsessed with mastering specific tasks (sports, music).
  • Adolescence: A renewed period of exploration, focused on social organization and relationships.
  • Adulthood: Predominantly exploit-focused.
  • "Elderhood": A renewed focus on care, teaching, and transmitting knowledge ([15:00]).

  "Adolescents are temperamentally more like the preschoolers; they're exploring, but what they're exploring is the social world as opposed to the physical world."
  — Alison Gopnik [16:36]

5. Challenges for Adults: Losing Playfulness and Exploration

• Adult life’s "spotlight" focus can make it hard to enter playful, exploratory states. While these states may fuel creativity (as in art, science), they’re not suitable for ensuring societal functioning or survival ([18:22]; [18:42]).

• Civilization requires both types—explorers/innovators and focused executors ([19:34]).

  "Those children wouldn't be able to survive unless there were grownups who were not off in their lantern of attention."
  — Alison Gopnik [20:11]

• The downside of over-valuing outcome-based, exploitative mindsets: crisis in parenting and creativity, as society expects parents and children to hit benchmarks rather than value open-ended exploration ([21:21]).

6. Children as Teachers: The Value of Seeing Like a Child

• Adults often treat children as "ill-formed preadults," focusing on shaping them to be more rational and linear.

• Instead, adults can learn and reengage with wonder, curiosity, and the magic in the mundane by observing or joining in their child's mode ([23:21]).

  "There's so many lessons for how to live and learn by just watching kids in that explorer mode..."
  — Sean Illing [23:33]

• Imitation vs. Innovation: Civilizations depend on both—passing on what works (imitation), but also ushering in change and progress (innovation) ([24:08]; [24:29]).

7. What Children (Still) Do Better Than AI

• Despite LLM (large language model) advances, children outperform AI in novel, shifting situations—especially where data are sparse or the world has changed.

• AI excels at exploiting pre-existing patterns but lacks the innate drive for exploration, causal theory-building, and creative reinterpretation (e.g., a stick becoming a Civil War musket) ([27:57]; [28:46]; [31:14]).

  "The great capacity that kids have is being able to deal with the out-of-distribution environment... And, interestingly, they're better than grownups."
  — Alison Gopnik [29:27]

8. The Limits and Possibilities of AI

• AI's leap to true intelligence requires more than scaling up processing power; it demands embodiment in the real world, adaptability, and the ability to build and revise internal models—like children do ([33:44]; [37:25]).

  "Just continuing that scale isn't going to get you to going out into the world and exploring and changing what you think as a result of your exploration and creating."
  — Alison Gopnik [34:39]

9. Parental Advice: Let Go of the Outcome

• Gopnik’s core advice to parents: relax and appreciate the child/adult relationship as a unique and rewarding experience, not a project with quantifiable outcomes.

• Reframing parenting as a relationship, not a job, is beneficial for all ([38:54]).

  "Chill out. And the 'chilling out' is not only going to be better for the kids, but better for the caregivers as well."
  — Alison Gopnik [38:54]

10. The Deep Value of Caregiving

• The act of care is itself an act of love—love is not just the motivation for care but is created and deepened by the act itself ([41:50]; [43:09]).

• Expanding the value and recognition of caregiving (children, elders, the ill) is both scientifically intriguing and culturally vital.

  "It was the act of caring that is the love. And I just think it's a profound point. And we don't do enough caregiving work. We don't value caregiving work."
  — Sean Illing [42:34]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "You know, we say that preschoolers are bad at paying attention, but what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention." — Alison Gopnik [06:37]
• "I always say it's like going to get a pint of milk with William Blake." — Alison Gopnik on seeing the world with children [09:06]
• "You love the people you care for. That love is actually the act of caring." — Sean Illing referencing Gopnik [41:57]
• "Sticks, man. God, they love sticks." — Sean Illing [31:14]
• "Adults are wired to exploit. Kids are open and plastic and constantly learning. Adults love routines." — Sean Illing [01:01]
• "Chill out." — Alison Gopnik, on her top advice to parents [38:54]

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Recommended Timestamps

• 01:01 — Main theme and guest introduction
• 03:28 — Explore vs. exploit tradeoff explained
• 05:55 — Lantern vs. spotlight consciousness
• 08:08 — Why adults can't explore & exploit at the same time
• 10:07 — The evolutionary roots of long human childhood
• 15:00 — Transitions between childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood
• 18:42 — Why adults struggle to play and be open
• 21:21 — The tradeoffs and consequences of 'exploit' mindset
• 23:21 — Children as "teachers"; lessons for adults
• 28:46 — Why children are still more flexible than even the most advanced AI
• 34:39 — Why scaling AI won’t lead to true exploration or adaptability
• 38:54 — Parental advice: chill out and enjoy the relationship
• 41:57 — The link between caring and loving
• 43:09 — Valuing care across all generations

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Resources & Further Reading

• Alison Gopnik's website: allisongopnik.com
• Noted books by Alison Gopnik: The Philosophical Baby, The Gardener and the Carpenter, The Scientist in the Crib

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Episode Tone

Warm, reflective, and at times playful; a balance of deep scientific insight and accessible, relatable anecdotes. Both Sean Illing and Alison Gopnik encourage curiosity and a reconnection with the child’s-eye view—not just for parents, but for the culture as a whole.

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This episode is a compelling case for holding space for wonder, exploration, and caregiving—not only in children, but throughout our lives and societies.

Transcript

[Sean Illing]

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[Sean Illing]

Imagine you're walking down the street with your three year old daughter. You're trying to get somewhere, maybe work, maybe the gym, wherever. But she's not. She stops for a crack in the sidewalk or some random stick on the ground, or maybe an airplane zooming by. Of course you're getting annoyed because she's distracted and it's holding you up, but the truth is that she's not actually distracted, she's just noticing way more than you are. We tend to think of childhood as this period of immaturity that we have to outgrow so that we can eventually become rational, productive adults. But what if that's the wrong way to think about childhood? I'm Sean Illing and this is the Gray area. Today's guest is Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and philosopher at UC Berkeley and the author of several great books including the Philosophical Baby and the Gardener and the Carpenter. Alison's idea is that children and adults are walking around with very different kinds of minds. Kids are wired to explore, adults are wired to exploit. Kids are open and plastic and constantly learning. Adults love routines. We're efficient and very good at getting things done. And of course we need both of these mindsets. But seeing it through Alison's framework shows that growing up, becoming an adult, isn't just an expansion, it's also a particular kind of cognitive narrowing, and there are real trade offs involved. Alison and I talk about those trade offs and how she's come to think about them. Allison Gopnik, welcome to the show.

[Alison Gopnik]

I'm so pleased to be here.

[Sean Illing]

Sean, what are the biggest differences between the minds of children and the minds of adults? You have a Lovely metaphor for this,

[Alison Gopnik]

the kind of classic way of thinking about development for a long time when, or, and this is still true, you hear this a lot in the AI world is that, you know, sort of the 35 year old AI guy is the peak of human intelligence and then development is just kind of building up to it and then aging is just sort of falling off from that peak. But that doesn't make a lot of sense from a biological perspective. And what I've been arguing is that the right way to think about development is that there's a kind of trial trade off between exploration, what computer scientists call exploration and exploitation. So the idea is that the children are the R&D department. They're the ones who are actually designed to explore the world around them, to experiment, to figure out what's going on around them in this incredibly motivated way, even though it sometimes makes their evolutionary ability to survive and reproduce be under peril. If they're sticking forks into the light sockets and then the adults are taking that information that you discovered when you were a child and then you could put it to use to do all the sort of straightforward things, what computer scientists call the exploit things that we all do as adults. We find our way in the pecking order and we get resources and we, we find mates. All the sort of typical adult, all the sort of typical adult abilities. So this explore, exploit trade off, which is very deep and very intractable, very hard to get rid of in computer science. I think the way that evolution resolves that is by giving us this early period of childhood when all we have to do, and in fact all we want to do, all we're motivated to do is go out into the world and figure out how the world works and then this later period where we can take all those discoveries and actually, actually put them to use later on.

[Sean Illing]

So like you said, the four year old, proverbial four year old is seeing all this, or doing all this crazy weird stuff. Is that because of the, the other metaphor that I like, that the lantern versus the spotlight consciousness, that they are just simply seeing way more and therefore attuned and aware of way more and reacting to that. Whereas the adults with the spotlight consciousness are just more sort of focused and targeted and blind actually to a lot of what's actually happening in front of us?

[Alison Gopnik]

Yeah, exactly. If you think about this sort of general idea about the children are the explorers and the adults are the exploiters, you might imagine that that would show up in lots of different aspects of their, of their minds and their brains and One of the ones that I've been interested in is their consciousness, so the way that they experience the world. So if you think about this plan that the children are really designed to learn to try and extract as much information from the environment around them as possible. And the adults are really designed to do things like fulfill their plans, find the things that are most relevant to what they want to do, the goals they want to accomplish. You might imagine that their consciousness of the world would be really different. In fact, there's quite a lot of neuroscience evidence that what happens with children is that their attentional system, which is very closely related to their consciousness, is much broader. So it's taking in much more of the world around them. They're much worse. You know, we say that preschoolers are bad at paying attention, but what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention. Right? They're bad at just paying attention to the things we want them to pay attention to and not paying attention to the airplane that's way up high or the little speck of dust that's on the ground. And if you're trying to get their jackets on and get them off to preschool, that's really a disadvantage. But if what you're trying to do is get them to. If what they're trying to do is learn as much as they can about the world, this kind of broader lantern picture is. Is actually really going to be helpful. So the typical story about adult attention and adult consciousness is it's like a spotlight. You're paying attention to the thing that you're. You're really focusing on. That's what you're conscious of. And again, there's both neuroscience and psychology that shows that you literally become blind to all the things that you're not paying attention to. You just don't see the things that you're not paying attention to. And I think what happens with little kids is that's kind of the opposite. What they're doing is seeing everything that's going on around them.

[Sean Illing]

Is it possible or is it impossible to explore and exploit simultaneously? Can we not be a lantern and a spotlight at the same time, or at least switch seamlessly between the two?

[Alison Gopnik]

I think it's not possible. It's definitely not possible to do it at the same time. You know, you can prove that you can't have a system that's maximally exploring and exploiting. And I think it's interesting that if you think about, you know, a question people always ask is, well, what could grownups do that would make them be able to have this wider consciousness like children. And I think grownups, grownup humans do have a lot of techniques they use to kind of be able to do this exploration, certain kinds of meditation, what's sometimes called open awareness meditation, that puts you in a state that's very much like the lantern consciousness. But it's interesting that, you know, like the instructions for doing that are just sit in one place and don't do anything. So what you can't do is have that lantern consciousness and then, you know, go to the faculty meeting and deal with the politics and worry about your, you know, worry about your, worry about your profits and do all the other things that we do as adults. One way that I think is actually one of the few ways I can think of that you could do both at the same time is taking care of little kids. So if you're taking care of little kids, you're doing this really important task, but you also get to see the world through their eyes, which gives you a sense of what this lantern is like. If I take my 4 year old grandson for a walk down the block, I suddenly realized that I always say it's like going to get a pint of milk with William Blake. You suddenly realize, oh, wait a minute, there's gates and there's dogs that are barking and there's little grates in the pavement and you know, all these things that you just literally don't see when you're going for a walk as an adult.

[Sean Illing]

You know, humans are pretty rare in the animal kingdom in terms of how long, it's crazy how long we are fully dependent on our parents to survive. Is that just evolution's response to the way our brains develop?

[Alison Gopnik]

Well, it's interesting. One of the things that seems to be a, you know, so there's this puzzle, right? We have this very, very long childhood, much longer than any other animal. And we also have a much wider network of caregivers. So, you know, if you look at chimps, for example, the biological mothers are the ones who are doing most of the care. But for humans, as long as we've evolved, we've had fathers involved in care. We have what's called pair bonding, which is very unusual in biology. We have what people call alloparents, so people who aren't even biologically kin, who are helping to take care of the young. And we have my personal favorite, the postmenopausal grandmothers, which again, is pretty much very distinctively human. The only other species we know of are the orcas who actually have these postmenopausal grandmothers. So we have this wide array of species of people who were taking care of these helpless children for so long. So there's a big investment in the whole species. And one of the ideas about what could have triggered this change is that we live in what AI people call the non stationary environment. So our environment is changing much more and we are changing our environment much more than other species are. There's just a paper that came out in PNAS like yesterday that was really fascinating about this, about how many different environments we went to very quickly. As soon as humans evolved, we were literally going, we were exploring a much wider range of places than any of our other close primate relatives did. And our chimps and gorillas are still pretty much in the same place that they were when they evolved. And we've ended up thriving at least so far, every place on Earth and even in outer space. So what happened was that if that's your ecological niche, then having this really long period when you can explore and having a lot of people who will take care of you when you're doing that exploration is a really good strategy. And that seems to be the human strategy.

[Sean Illing]

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[Sean Illing]

It's a potentially dumb question, but, but when does a kid stop being a kid psychologically and neurologically? Like, what is the age range where the brain changes and it becomes what we would consider an adult mind?

[Alison Gopnik]

Yeah, it's interesting. We've looked at this in, in one of the studies that we did where we actually looked at kids from the time they were up until basically adulthood. We looked at people at all these different ages every year. And what seems to happen is that there's two important transitions. One of them is around five, six or maybe six, seven. Across the world you see a shift in the way that children are functioning and the way they're being treated in the society. Of course, in our culture it's that they go to school, but in other cultures it's that they start becoming apprentices or they move from the mom's house to the other house where the other children are. And that seems to be a shift to, from this completely wide ranging exploration to, you know, how do you make the shift from explore to exploit? Well, one way you do it is by having 7, 8, 9 year olds who are really learning about the kinds of exploit techniques that the adults have. So, you know, if you think about a 7 or 8 year old, what they like to do more than anything else is become really competent at some specific kind of skill that adults have. And that's, I think one of the things that I've always thought is kind of interesting is when you talk to people about kids in school, one of the things they'll say is, you know, it's frustrating because the kids really want to do things like sports or music more than they want to do science and math and English. But of course, if you think about it, sports and music are the areas where you get to become really skilled if you're a 7 or 8 year old, right? And then of course, puberty, adolescence is the other transition. So you get this transition in adolescence where, and you can show this in the Neuroscience, it's sort of like the brain seems to be pretty constant between 7 and 12, and then with puberty there are these big changes. But, but even that isn't the end of the story. Because what we discovered and other people have discovered is that adolescence itself seems to be a period that again is different from. In some ways, you know, adolescents are temperamentally more like the preschoolers they're exploring, but what they're exploring is the social world as opposed to the physical world. So what they're exploring is what are all the different ways that people could be related to one another? What are all the different kinds of social organization that we could have? And we actually have some empirical evidence for that. And then it's at the end of adolescence, you know, like early 20s, that you start to get this shift back to something that looks more like regular adulthood. And then one of the other things that I've been very interested in is I think there's yet another shift in what you might call elderhood, you know, that postmenopausal grandmotherhood, but it applies to men as well, where you get a real shift to this kind of care and teaching mode, kind of care and teaching intelligence rather than that exploit 35 year old intelligence. So in some ways one of the paradoxes is that as people get older, in spite of the fact that they're getting creakier and they're not as good at doing things, they often get happier. And I think that's because you're sort of released from the need to fulfill, you know, do all the 35 year old things and then you can focus on teaching or passing on the information that you've already got, or caring for a new generation of grandchildren?

[Sean Illing]

Why do you think it's so hard for adults to enter into that playful mindset? Is it because we're in spotlight mode and we're not in lantern mode and so we're more self centered or more goal directed, so we can't just stop and be.

[Alison Gopnik]

Yeah, I mean it's, you know, as you can tell, and I think there's a bit of a selection effect here. You know, I'm a scientist and in a way being a scientist or an artist or even a podcast host as an adult activity is kind of has these elements of play and exploration. And part of what we do as adults is have different roles. And so I obviously love the three year olds, really sympathetic to those wild crazy poets. But the truth is, you know, you would not want them to be running your department. And we actually have a Very vivid example of this recently. Like you would not really want to have someone who was taking ketamine on a regular basis restructuring the federal government. Like we have reason to believe that that would be a really, really bad idea.

[Sean Illing]

Or maybe building your electric vehicle.

[Alison Gopnik]

Yeah, right, exactly. The idea would be the same things that might make you effective as an innovator or an explorer are not necessarily the same things that are going to make you effective in policy or in running the, running a business well or running a government well. And you know, those children wouldn't, those children wouldn't be able to survive unless there were grownups who were not off in their lantern of attention. Grownups who were spotlighted on, oh my goodness, you know, now we have to get groceries and how are we going to put nap time in and how am I going to make enough money to take care of these children and send them to school? Right. I mean, if it weren't for grownups who were doing that kind of work, we wouldn't be able to have that kind of exploration. So I think we tend to valorize the exploration and innovation perhaps too much. My husband was the co founder of Pixar and of course whenever anybody's talking about something like Pixar, they say, oh, you know, how did you manage to manage all of that creativity and how did you get that kind of creativity and innovation? And he always says, no, no. The reason why that company succeeded with logistics, it was there were a lot of people who would just do the work of, the work of, you know, the work of, exploit the work of, let's focus, let's try and make the, make this actually work. So I think it really is a trade off between the two kinds of capacities.

[Sean Illing]

Well, what do you think for adults is the biggest loss in that trade off? Moving from explore to exploit. Obviously exploit mode is good for building things and getting shit done in the world. Maybe building civilizations. Probably couldn't do that without spotlight consciousness. But what is the biggest loss in that move?

[Alison Gopnik]

Well, again, I mean, you know, I want to emphasize that you couldn't, not only could you not build civilizations, you couldn't raise another generation of kids. Right. I mean, you know, you'd have to just to be able to also that. Right. Just to be able to keep your children and the other people around you alive. You need to be able to have some of that kind of focus. I think it's a loss in the sense that again, we could emphasize some of these techniques that we use that we could use to have a broader view more in our culture than we do. So in our culture, even though there's kind of lip service to the idea that we really want innovation and creativity, it's still true that we have this very outcome based kind of score based culture where the question is, even ironically, I've had this conversation with, say, here's a example that I think is really terrible and interesting at the same time, which is like people in Silicon Valley microdosing psychedelics because they want their apps to be better and they want to be more creative. Right? Like that's really kind of destroying the whole idea, right, that what you want to do is find the formula for you to be more creative. And if you think about being a parent, my book about the gardener and the carpenter, I think a real crisis, actually something that's really destructive is that we have a kind of view of parenting that's like this kind of exploit outcome enterprise where you know, we're supposed to be getting certain kinds of benchmarks. So we want our children to come out in a particular way and we think that if we just do the right kind of parenting then they'll come out that way. That whole approach to things which we, I think we do really exaggerate in our culture means that you don't have just the time to think or to look around or to explore or to hang out with the people that you're close to. And I, I think that is a real crisis in the way that we run our culture now.

[Sean Illing]

We have a tendency to think of children as these ill formed pre adults. We're trying to teach them how to be more like us, rational, calculating, linear, goal oriented, getting things done. And it just misses the whole point of who they are at that stage of life. And the more I started seeing my child that way, the more he became a teacher to me as much as I was teaching him. Because there's so many lessons for how to live and learn by just watching kids in that explorer mode where everything, I mean, there's magic in the most mundane stuff of life. And. Right. You can't build a civilization like that, but I don't think you can build one without it either.

[Alison Gopnik]

No, I think that's right and I think that's true if you look at sort of general tension between what people in cultural evolution call imitation and innovation. So civilizations always depend on the idea that on the one hand humans have this amazing capacity to take advantage of the cultural discoveries of the previous generation. I think of it as being, you know, all those grandmothers are telling you about what happened, you know, 50 years ago and that is enabling you to make progress. People sometimes call this like the cultural ratchet. It's one of the arguably our sort of secret sauce that let us succeed in as many different environments as we have. But of course, doing that wouldn't be do you any good unless at somewhere along the line someone was innovating, someone was saying, oh no, I'm not going to do it the way grandmom did it. I'm going to take what grandma knew and now I'm going to do something that's really different. And it's that kind of balance between those two capacities that's crucial for actually making, making cultural progress.

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women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic and the ups and downs that come on the

[Alison Gopnik]

path to achieving greatness.

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We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs

[Alison Gopnik]

and other individuals who have inspired me

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so much in my own journey.

[Alison Gopnik]

Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sean Illing]

So we are 250 years into this American experiment and I'd say it's going okay. I give us like a C. There

[Alison Gopnik]

is no perfect past, but there is also no exclusively negative past because humans are gonna human. That's what we do. I think the story of America is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of America to expand those principles to include more people.

[Sean Illing]

What's gonna determine the next 250 years of America? And how do we write a new social contract that can give us a the democracy we deserve?

[Alison Gopnik]

Okay, so I'm just gonna be a jerk here because I'm a historian. So we have to have a prologue explaining, you know, we the people.

[Sean Illing]

Okay. You know, I do still remember it from Schoolhouse Rock. We the people anointed the former war perfect union established justice. What is it? Ensure domestic tranquility.

[Alison Gopnik]

So you're talking about a foundational document. So I'm building a document that will protect American democracy.

[Sean Illing]

That's this Week on America. Actually. You wrote a paper, I think back in 23 or 2024 about what children can do that advanced education LLMs can't. What was your argument there? Is it about this imitation innovation thing? And two or three years in technology time is like an eternity. So the tech has evolved a lot since then. So have you changed your mind at all about any of that?

[Alison Gopnik]

So the question is what's missing from the current systems? And it's a bit of a whack a mole game because every time that you say, look, I did this experiment with kids and they could do this and your cutting edge LLM can't, somebody is sitting in the back and training the LLM so it can do exactly that thing. But the great capacity that kids have is this being able to deal with the out of distribution environment, being able to deal with the non stationary environment, being able to figure out something new when something changes, almost by definition that's something that the large models are bad at. Because the whole point of the large models is take all the information that's already out there and find the kind of average of all of that information that's already out there. And what that means is if you're in a situation in which something has changed, you're not going to be able to go out. There's nothing in those systems that lets them go out and figure out, oh, okay, that training that I had two years ago, that really is wrong. That's really not capturing the environment because now the environment is different. And we have some experiments where we can show for instance, that if you give children a new machine that works in a new way that's not like any machine that they've seen before, doesn't Work the way most machines work. They're extremely good at figuring out the structure of that machine. And interestingly, they're better than grownups. Grownups tend to. You give them that kind of problem, tend to rely on what they already know, as you might imagine, given their. Given their brains. So they have a hard time if something is really different from anything that they've seen before. And so do large models. That's the problem they have. And I think a lot of people feel like the path to something that had an intelligence that was actually like not just human intelligence, but like kitten intelligence, animal biological intelligence would be systems and that were in a sense more like robots. Systems that were embedded in the real world that could go out and do things in the real world and get new data and new information and then take that new data and change what they think about the world and then iterate that process. That's what humans and indeed smart animals are doing. And if you go back to. That's what four year olds are just doing all the time, right? They're. That's why they love sticks, because a stick lets you.

[Sean Illing]

Sticks, man. God, they love sticks.

[Alison Gopnik]

Yeah, sticks, they're just fabulous, right? They let you go out and find something.

[Sean Illing]

My kid found a musket on the way to school this morning. We were walking to school this morning. I was walking my kid to school this morning and he found a stick on the ground and identified it as a Civil War era musket.

[Alison Gopnik]

That's right.

[Sean Illing]

And he made me take it home and set it by the door so that it would be there. What do you got? Now I would have walked right past that stick a thousand times over, but it's a musket. It was right there.

[Alison Gopnik]

That kind of pretend play, by the way, is another example of this really. Like you would not think of. This is a musket that's just like not in your.

[Sean Illing]

It's a stick.

[Alison Gopnik]

Yeah. So sticks are another example that I like is, you know, you don't even have to look at 6 year olds. Look at 1 year olds, 1 year olds and the TV remote, right? The 1 year olds think that the remote is the most fun thing in the entire universe. And think about it, right? Like there weren't remotes like not just. Not in the Pleistocene, but not like when I was growing up, right? And remotes work in this incredibly bizarre way. They work at a distance. You know, you press a button and then this bunch of things happen. And you press one button and bluey comes on and you press another button. And paw patrol comes on and that's an example of something that every one year old. This is something that's completely new, they've never seen before, that's not part of their background. And yet very quickly they're acting on it to try and figure out, to get new information and figure out how it works. And at least the current crop of AI isn't good at doing that at all. And there's a really striking difference between the large models where they're generating text and they're very good at generating text and say robotics, where they're much, much further behind, where even just, you know, picking something up and putting it in a new place is, is really difficult and expensive and requires enormous amounts of training.

[Sean Illing]

Okay, so. Well, they're not very good at it right now. Right? Right now these systems are really just like hyper, hyper, hyper efficient exploit machines.

[Alison Gopnik]

Right?

[Sean Illing]

But can you see a world where it evolves and we get something like AGI or strong AI and it actually becomes something different, something more actually becomes capable of the kind of exploration that you're talking about with children? I mean, would that be the game changer for you?

[Alison Gopnik]

Well, I mean, the question is, I mean, the first thing to say is that you're not going to get there just by scale, which is the thing that the artificial, the AI people keep saying. Right? So it is true that scale may let you get more and more language and do things that are kind of amazing, like use syntax and grammar and decoding. Right. That turns out to be something that you can do by looking at the statistics in very large databases and generalizing from them. It's really important to say the only reason that you can do that is because a bunch of humans have put all of this information out on the Internet. So the current AIs like the large models are completely dependent on the fact that human beings are actually the ones who've made these discoveries and understand the world in a particular way and are putting all that data about what they know and understand out on the Internet. That's not trivial. I mean those cultural technologies, our ability to organize and access information, that's the thing that makes us different from any other species. I'm reasonably intelligent, but me plus the UC Berkeley library, that's orders of magnitude more intelligent than I am without the UC Berkeley library. But just continuing that scale isn't going to get you to going out into the world and exploring and changing what you think as a result of your exploration and creating. I mean, I think the creativity question, like why decide that the stick is a musket as opposed to all the other things that it could be. That's something that the systems are not good at, are not good at doing. I mean, another question is what would we want to do it? Or which kinds of cognitive capacities would we, would we want to have in another system? I mean, you know, calculating numbers, that's definitely a kind of intelligence. Everyone would have thought that that was a kind of intelligence 100 years ago. We just take for granted. Of course we want to have machines that can do that. That's something that is really tiresome and tedious and difficult for humans. So the question is, what kinds of cognitive capacities would we like to offload and which ones? Maybe we don't want to offload? And we need to make conscious decisions about. We need to make some kind of conscious decisions about how that works. And there's actually some interesting work. My colleague James Evans, who wrote this paper in Science with me about AI as being cultural technologies, has some interesting examples where LLMs, for instance, seem to reason better if instead of just having a single model that is trained on everything, you have different models with different kinds of training and different tuning, cooperating with one another. That actually seems to be a better way of getting to the right answer than having the superintelligence.

[Sean Illing]

Well, this is partly why I wanted to talk to you, because if you listen to enough of those, the 35 year old white tech VC guy, it's very clear that many of them think of intelligence, human intelligence as just simply a matter of processing power. Right? That's all it is. And so therefore, well, as processing power continues to go up and up and up, it's just simply a matter of time before whatever human intelligence is, we will meet that and surpass it. But you seem to think intelligence, human intelligence is a little more complicated than that. Is that a fair interpretation?

[Alison Gopnik]

In fact, I think probably most people who are actually working in the field feel that way about it. It's a relatively small group who have this kind of distorted picture. But I do think if you're thinking from the perspective of cognitive science, and I think more and more are saying, no, it isn't as if what you see in human intelligence is some single processing power that's getting to be, you know, that's getting to be greater and greater, what you see is these many different kinds of cognitive capacities. One of the important ones, for instance. So one of them is this one about going out into the world and exploring. Another one is building world models, building pictures, internal models, of how the world works. And, and when you get that kind of model, like a theory, then you can make brand new predictions again that are completely unlike anything that you've seen before, which is not the sort of thing that the large models are doing. And one of my books is called the Scientist in the Crib. I think kids actually are developing those intuitive theories and not just me. I think developmentalists have discovered that even little kids are developing theories that are a lot like scientific theories. And those theories, those models are the things that actually enable you to, with relatively little data, to make really good generalizations even when the world has shifted, even when the world isn't the way that you thought the world was before.

[Sean Illing]

When parents do come to you and say, all right, I'm buying everything you're selling about children and intelligence, what is your, what is your simplest, most essential advice?

[Alison Gopnik]

Chill out. And the chilling out is not only going to be better for the kids, but, but better for the, the caregivers as well. That having an attitude of, I'm involved in this relationship and it's got terrible features sometimes the way all human relationships do, but most of the time it's got these marvelous features. Most of the time. They're fascinating and beautiful and fun to be with, and they love you more than you're ever going to be loved ever before, and you love them more than you ever are going to love anybody else in your life. Like, that's an amazing thing, right? That's just, just, that's just baseline and to be able to sort of appreciate the fact that that's happening and to be able to sort of appreciate the fact that you got this ringside seat on the biggest human miracle that we know of, which is these children being able to learn so much as opposed to thinking, okay, this is what I need to do next. And this is, you know, this is what I need to do to get them into the sports league or get them into Berkeley or get them into, you know, the next, the next phase. I think that's better for grownups and for kids that that would make, make the process. And, you know, I think this is relevant. I mean, I think people genuinely are, you know, not having children because they have this picture about this is a, not only is this a job that I'm not very well trained for, but it's an incredibly, you know, difficult job, and I don't know what the outcomes are going to be. And if you could think of it as more like a relationship than a job, that would at least be a Help.

[Sean Illing]

It's a really hard job and really a very rewarding relationship, but it's also very hard.

[Alison Gopnik]

Yeah, well, like all rewarding relationships, but

[Sean Illing]

maybe I should just chill out.

[Alison Gopnik]

Difficult and confusing sometimes. But, you know, having human relationships is the great thing that humans do. And I think it's interesting, as I've been thinking about all this care work that, you know, in a way, there's an argument that what humans did was take this biologically induced necessity to take care of little kids and generalize it to all these other human relationships. So the fact that we do take care of people who are weaker than we are, the fact that we take care of elders, the fact that we even, you know, at least in the old days, had USAID that was helping to take care of people who were on the other side of the. Of the globe. The fact that we can do that, I think is rooted in this impulse to take care of. Of these young, helpless children. But then that generalization enables us to. To thrive and to function in the world in ways that seem like deeply satisfying and. And deeply important.

[Sean Illing]

I love what you say about caregiving work, which has been horrendously undervalued in the modern age. But, you know, I also heard you say one time, you were talking about care and love, and now we have this tendency to think, well, of course, you, You, You. You care for the people you love. But you flipped it and said, no, you, You. You. You love the people you care for. That love is actually the act of caring. And it was really profound, Allison, because I. I heard you say that, and I'm sorry, I just. I heard you say that, and it really. It transformed when I was doing the hard stuff of parenting, you know, the getting up in the middle of the night and. And changing the diapers and all that stuff transformed my relationship to that where I thought of it. No, like, this is actually what love is. I'm caring for. Doesn't have to be a parent or you could care for. For anyone, a friend or parent, anyone. But it was the. It was the act of caring that is the love. And I just think it's a profound point. And we don't do enough caregiving work. We don't value caregiving work. We don't reward. Yeah, yeah, I'm. I'm talking too much now, but I just wanted to say that. And you can say anything else you want about that.

[Alison Gopnik]

That's very touching to me. And, you know, I have to say, this latest set of work that I've been doing, I'VE been trying to extend the caregiving from thinking just about children to, as in, you know, gardeners, to thinking about elders or thinking about people who are ill, or thinking about all these other cases where I think the same thing happens, at least to some extent. You know, that care is very wound up with these feelings of love and also feeling sometimes of duty. But love and duty are, you know, some of the most deep, important things about being human. You know, that everyday experience of taking care of children, of being taken care of, of taking care of elders and people who are ill and students. All those things that are have traditionally been part of women's realm. But in particular, things that have to do with kids. I think thinking about that, taking it seriously, not treating it as if it's just, you know, a thing that happens in the background is, is a opens up all of these just intellectual horizons, intellectual problems, intellectual questions, scientific questions in a way that I at least have found very satisfying and I think would be good for the, the culture at large.

[Sean Illing]

I think that's a really good place to end. Do you have a website? Where can people go to check out your work?

[Alison Gopnik]

Yeah, allisongopnik.com very simple. And there's a bunch of recent papers like these recent papers about AI, as well as links to all my other writing and podcasts and talking too. Well, thank you so much, Sean. This has really been great, Alison.

[Sean Illing]

It really is. It's so nice to finally have you on the show. I find you to be a tremendously interesting thinker and I've learned a lot from listening to you and reading you. So it's been a pleasure. So thank you.

[Alison Gopnik]

Well, I love hearing about the sticks and the muskets.

[Sean Illing]

All right, friends, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I absolutely love Allison and I'm so glad I finally got her on the show. But as always, we want to know what you thought. So drop us a line at the gray [e-mail] or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Please also rate Review subscribe to the Podcast It Helps Us Grow Our show. This episode was produced by Thor Neuerider and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the joint engineered by Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is part of Vox Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this here show, let us know. Foreign. Support for the Gray Area comes from Mint Mobile. Generally speaking, most of us like our money. Unfortunately, big wireless companies also like your money, and it seems like they're always coming up with new and innovative ways to get it. Mint Mobile says they exist to make sure you're not overpaying on your wireless bill. They offer a premium wireless plan. Premium just 15 bucks a month. All of their plans come with high speed 5G data and unlimited talk and text. Plus you can keep your same phone and the existing number. It only takes a few minutes to activate your ESIM and you can start saving immediately. You can ditch your overpriced wireless plan and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint mobile for just 15 bucks a month. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop [e-mail] greyaa that's mintmobile.com gray area. Upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5GB plan required equivalent to $15 a month new customer offer for first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.

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