308 | Alison Gopnik on Children, AI, and Modes of Thinking
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. So here's a question. Given a problem, how do you find the solution? To that problem. This is one of those questions that sounds deep or profound or something like that, but in fact you might worry it is a little bit too abstract. How can we hope to understand how, in perfect generality, to find the answer to a problem if you haven't given me a bit more information about what kind of problem it is you're talking about? But it's not so abstract that we can't make some progress, you know? In general, how do we, in fact, go about solving problems?
Sometimes. Hopefully, indeed, you'll find a problem that resembles another problem, a problem that you've seen before. So you can either use or maybe adapt the kind of solution that you already knew about. Other times you know nothing about the context of a problem, so maybe you'll just try some things randomly, sort of flail about, just get some information. These kinds of questions, as abstract as they are, turn out to be frighteningly relevant to things like Building artificial intelligence, right? When you
Turn on the computer and there's no software on it yet. The computer doesn't have any pre existing strategies for solving problems. You have to choose how to build them in. So how should we go about figuring out the best way in different contexts to solve problems? Well, one thing to do is to look at what actual human beings actually do. The lesson of today's conversation with Alison Gopnick is Is that human beings use different ways to solve problems in different life stages. There's a way that we do it when we're adults, when we're flourishing, in the prime of life.
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