Alison Gopnik is an international leader in the field of children’s learning and

Alison Gopnik is an international leader in the field of children’s learning and development and was one of the founders of the field of “theory of mind.” She has spoken of the child brain as a “powerful learning computer,” perhaps from personal experience. Her own Philadelphia childhood was an exercise in intellectual development. “Other families took their kids to see The Sound of Music or Carousel; we saw Racine ’s Phaedra and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,” she has recalled. “Our family read Henry Fielding’s 18th-century novel Joseph Andrews out loud to each other around the fire on camping trips.” Lately she has invoked Bayesian models of machine learning to explain the remarkable ability of preschoolers to draw conclusions about the world around them without benefit of enormous data sets. “I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults,” she has said. “They’re very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once.” She has referred to babies and young children as “the research and development division of the human species.” Not that she treats them coldly, as if they were mere laboratory animals. They appear to revel in her company, and in the blinking, thrumming toys in her Berkeley lab. For years after her own children had outgrown it, she kept a playpen in her office. Her investigations into just how we learn, and the parallels to the deep-learning methods of AI, continues. “Tt turns out to be much easier to simulate the reasoning of a highly trained adult expert than to mimic the ordinary learning of every baby,” she says. “Computation is still the best—indeed, the only—scientific explanation we have of how a Physical object like a brain can act intelligently. But, at least for now, we have almost no idea at all how the sort of creativity we see in children is possible.” 151 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016954