Alison Gopnik

@alisongopnik.bsky.social

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Cognitive scientist, philosopher, and psychologist at Berkeley, author of The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter and grandmother of five.

Posts Replies Media

Very interesting conversation between Melanie Mitchell and me about all the ways current AI is different from the powerful natural intelligence we find in organisms from brine shrimp to two-year-olds. lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-...

How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell | Los Angeles Review of Bookslareviewofbooks.org Julien Crockett interviews Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell about complexity and learning in AI systems, and our roles as caregivers....

Great psychologist turned philosopher Mariel Goddu and I wrote this Nature review of the development of human causal learning, 20 years worth of comparative, developmental, philosophical and computational work. Empowerment included. Free to read at this link. nature.com/articles/s44...

The development of human causal learning and reasoningnature.com Nature Reviews Psychology - Humans have a unique capacity for objective and general causal understanding. In this Review, Goddu and Gopnik describe the development of causal learning and reasoning...

New preprint about causal learning and intrinsic empowerment rewards, bridging Bayesian causal learning and reinforcement learning. TLDR hypothesis is that increasing empowerment necessarily increases causal learning and vice-versa. Helps explain infants learning too! philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23268/

Excellent piece in the Guardian on why Sora can't compete with babies.(nice shout out to Henry Farrell too) www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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How do you make a person? @alisongopnik.bsky.social and Ted Chiang consider how child-rearing and care work can yield insights into Artificial Intelligence. www.publicbooks.org/developing-a...

Developing AI Like Raising Kidswww.publicbooks.org “In terms of the machine learning programs or robots that we have now, I basically think of them as being comparable to thermostats.”

Thisis a really great discussion and also applies to current crises of academic publishing and journalism. The truth incentives of scientists and journalists conflict with the publisher incentive of maximum transmission but both sides depend on each other.

"All this is leading to the emergence of new economic divides between those who control the means of summarization, and those whose properties or livelihood risks being summarized into effective non-existence." www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-politi...

The political economy of AIwww.programmablemutter.com It's all about who gets what

The data babies use is much smaller than LLM data but it reflects their own active attempts to understand the world and their interactions with the people around them. The still very limited models can take advantage of this, but that doesn’t mean that they themselves have those abilities.

My thoughts on the fascinating new study in Science science.org/doi/10.1126/... by Vong et al in the Financial Times. 1/2 Babies vs AI — it’s no contest From ft.com

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Excited to present this paper at SPSP JDM pre-conference today, 4pm PST room 11b. Feel free to swing by (even if not registered for pre conf)!

🚨New WP🚨 Field experiments with 33 million FB users & 75k Twitter users: Ads prompting users to think about accuracy reduce misinformation sharing! Accuracy prompts offer platforms a content-neutral approach that is scalable and preservers user autonomy osf.io/preprints/ps...

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The Human Centred podcast has a lot of great episodes, this one with Alison Gopnik talking to sci-fi legend Ted Chiang is a good place to start, notionally about AI but the discussion ranges far and wide into parenting/caring, capitalism and many other subjects

‎Human Centered: Developing AI Like Raising Kids - Alison Gopnik & Ted Chiang on Apple Podcastspodcasts.apple.com ‎Show Human Centered, Ep Developing AI Like Raising Kids - Alison Gopnik & Ted Chiang - 1 Jun 2023

This is absolutely right, best piece on being a parent I've ever read too (and I've read a lot) and here's a link to my conversation with Ted Chiang about it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCD...

I'm guessing you've almost certainly read Ted's Life-Cycle of Software Objects? If not, it is among the most moving pieces of writing on parenting that I've ever read.

yes, really great piece. Phil K dick is very relevant!

Great essay on LLMs by @himself.bsky.social "LLMs are perfect Derridaeians - “il n'y pas de hors texte” is the most profound rule conditioning their existence." "LLMs are incapable of innovating, but they are good at imitating...That is why we can think of LLMs as a cultural technology."

ChatGPT is an engine of cultural transmissionwww.programmablemutter.com LLMs and Gopnikism

Really great piece on LLMs as cultural and social technologies from Henry Farrell --really look forward to the next installment - and here's our most recent piece on this -- not paywalled. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-politi... The political economy of blurry JPEGs

The political economy of Blurry JPEGswww.programmablemutter.com What LLMs can do. And what they can't.

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@WSJ: The cognitive science of caregiving explains why it’s so important to exchange presents for the holidays, even if it can be a chore, writes Alison Gopnik https://t.co/WnwjmykQZh https://t.co/WnwjmykQZh

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Wonderful piece from @alisongopnik.bsky.social, showing how a spiritual practice (if you think of it that way) can leverage a biological system for good.

My latest in the WSJ, as a long time Jewish Atheist lover of Christmas ( from a family of them) I really enjoyed writing this - Christmas shopping as a spiritual practice. A chance as well to talk about my new ideas on caregiving. Scrooge features! www.wsj.com/science/gift...

wsj.comwww.wsj.com

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📣 #CogSci2024 submissions now OPEN! 🔍 Review the submission guidelines ⬇️ Download the required templates 🗓️ Make note of key deadline dates cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/

New paper led by Azzurra Ruggeri shows that toddlers spontaneously explore more as there is more relevant information to be gained. Getting into everything is experimentation! This is just what we'd like AIs to be able to do! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Wiley Online Libraryonlinelibrary.wiley.com One of the largest and most authoritative collections of online journals, books, and research resources, covering life, health, social, and physical sciences.

Was so glad to be part if this fascinating workshop on causality with really interesting talks. Alison

The talk recordings from the "Causality in Minds and Machines" workshop are live now. sites.google.com/view/causali... Thanks again to all the speakers and to the Society for Mathematical Psychology for sponsoring the workshop!

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This seems like a good first post: what happens to psychology in the LLM future? I ponder… open.substack.com/pub/noahgood...

LLMs and future Psychologyopen.substack.com A thought experiment prepared for the Stanford psychology faculty salon on LLMs.

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My latest "Expert Voices" column for Science: "AI's Challenge of Understanding the World". www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Science | AAASwww.science.org

Our latest paper, in Perspectives on Psychological Science, with Eunice Yiu and Eliza Kosoy, articulating the idea of Large AI Models as cultural technologies at more length and comparing and contrasting with human children journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

An interesting and convincing essay arguing for a link between the decline in independent play and exploration and in child mental health. drive.google.com/file/d/1lkJQ...

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Congratulations to Claudia Goldin for (finally!) winning the Nobel "for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes"! A giant in her field! Reposting a conversation we had about her work on the gender wage gap: equitablegrowth.org/equitable-gr...

Equitable Growth in Conversation: An interview with Claudia Goldin - Equitable Growthequitablegrowth.org Equitable Growth’s Executive Director and Chief Economist Heather Boushey talks with economist Claudia Goldin of Harvard University about her research on the gender wage gap, how it stems from the h...

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🚀 We've officially landed on Bluesky! Excited to join this vibrant new platform and (re)connect with all of you! 🗣️💬 Help us spread the word by retweeting and following.

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@WSJ: Essay: Children explore their worlds much more chaotically than adults, yet learn quickly. It turns out that AI does best by mimicking their curiosity, at least at first. https://t.co/Yd2aocxHMT

My latest in the WSJ on the cool Giron et al. Nature Human Behaviour result. The shift from exploratory child minds to exploiting adult ones looks a lot like AI "stochastic optimization" learning strategies. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-...

How the Best AI Imitates Childrenwww.wsj.com Random exploration is the key to early learning in both cases, before more mature needs take over

My Berkeley CITRIS talk on AI as cultural technology, imitation versus innovation, transmission versus truth , online blicket detectors and what children can tell us about AI and vice-versa www.youtube.com/watch?v=53sQ...

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Cool paper by Joshua Rule, Mariel K. Goddu, Junyi Chu, Verity Pinter, Emily R. Reagan, @ebonawitz.bsky.social, Alison Gopnik, and the @tomerullman.bsky.social!

Such an interesting article demonstrating that when children play to play they choose more difficult options than when they play to win (stickers). Work done at Harvard and Berkeley with @AlisonGopnik. www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable...

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