The World as You'll Know It S2 01: Technology and Our Brains

[Music] welcome to the world as you'll know it i'm your host kurt anderson we are discussing the future and this season the shape of things to come specifically as a result of technology i don't have to tell you the ways we live now thanks to ubiquitous devices and connecting with friends and strangers digitally more than in person and getting information 24 7 and misinformation and having our personal digital lives constantly mined and sold to companies who want to sell us things or make us behave differently but how is all of this reshaping our minds and how we think in the minds of younger people who've only lived in this networked digital era to explore all of that i am talking with alison gopnik she is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the university of california at berkeley and one of the best known cognitive scientists around she's famous for her research on children's minds especially and books like the scientist in the crib and the philosophical baby she has also been collaborating with computer scientists working on artificial intelligence to try to help them figure out how to program ai to learn more like children do alison welcome to the world as you'll know it glad to be here so i want to start with but then extend far beyond your specialty which is to say babies and children and how they think and learn and all of that and the effects of digital technology on them is there any evidence studies experiments or otherwise that you trust that total internet natives i'm not just saying people younger than you and i but like 25 and younger who grew up with broadband grew up with smartphones are mentally different than their elders yeah i mean i think that's a really good question and one thing that's interesting about thinking about childhood in this context in particular is that one of the things that i argue is that in some sense the function of childhood is to allow technological and cultural change so what's happened not just recently for as long as we've been human because we have culture and technology those are two of our biggest human characteristics is that each new generation gets to revise and change and shape and figure out the environment that it's in in a way that's different from the previous generation and the interesting thing in terms of our more modern technology and life is that there's this kind of trope where every time a new technology gets introduced everyone's convinced that it's going to be terrible for kids and it's funny that the sort of it's going to be terrible for kids comes in before the it's going to be terrible for all of us i just saw a wonderful study a longitudinal study that was actually done at berkeley starting in the 1920s where they started interviewing a bunch of families and their children and sure enough in the 1920s what they said was movies movies are just destroying the next generation that's you can see they spend all their time going to the movies and it's destroying their minds and in the case of television it occurs to me that the debate and the inquiry about whether television was good for you or not has lasted longer than television so now we don't have kids watching broadcast television and there's we're still saying well you know there's not actually very good evidence one way or another but it sure doesn't look like television has these negative effects and by the way the same thing's true with the internet so there's already been a bunch of studies about adolescence in particular looking at relationships between screen time use and mental health and just what comes out over and over again it sort of doesn't matter what technology it is it doesn't matter when the study's being done there might be some little effects around the edges for kids who are already vulnerable but you just don't see big consistent uh effects and that's oddly discordant with the fact that everybody's first hypothesis is always that they're going to be these terrible effects so that's like where people start and then you do the studies and it's i don't know maybe a teeny bit about the edges but you just don't see it and i think part of that is exactly because the way that human childhood brains and adult brains deal with the world is really different so an adult brain one of the ways that i describe this is the difference between exploration and exploitation so adult brains are really designed to act effectively so they have lots and lots of assumptions and knowledge about how the world works and then they use that knowledge that they've accumulated to do things and do things effectively and childhood brains are really different childhood brains are really designed for learning for what neuroscientists call plasticity changing figuring out the environment around them not terribly good at doing things like you know putting on your jacket and getting to preschool or even if you're a teenager um actually going out in the world and acting effectively but the result of that is that when you take that kind of brain and put it in a new environment with the adult brain is kind of disrupted it's confusing it's distracting it requires a lot of top-down attention a lot of top-down work whereas that's what child brains are for is to take that new information and take it in and make sense out of it and make some kind of coherent picture well and it seems to me that children using these technologies for better or worse but have they changed the way minds work of little kids who are staring at screens in a way that my 32 year old children didn't right but did tv is i guess a question change the way people actually think or consume or do these more intimate ubiquitous devices actually change the way brains work or or is it natural there's just it's another thing no different than books when you were a kid or television when i was a kid or whatever well let me start with a parable that i use in uh the gardener in the carpenter so here's a story one of these creepy dystopian stories about a device there's a woman and from the time she's two or three she's on this device all the time that's what she spends her time doing she goes to school but instead of paying attention to the lessons she's got the device she's looking at the device most of her experience of the world actually comes through this device so she's actually spending more time in the world of you know someone walking into a ballroom in napoleonic russia than she is in her real life and by the time she becomes an adult literally every room in her house including that this is a bit embarrassing the bathroom has the device in it and she won't do anything including going to the bathroom unless she has a device her her children one of her children has a concussion and has to go to the hospital the first thing she thinks is oh i need to have the device with me and then of course she works really hard to get her own children hooked on the device as well and then if you do neuroscience you discover that the device has completely reshaped her brain so that parts of her brain that were once used for other things like vision or making their way through the world now are completely dedicated to the device and if you put the device in front of her brain it automatically engages in this effort of taking the device's input and using that to shape what it thinks rather than its own input there's nothing you can do about it just does that completely automatically okay well the story that i've told you is absolutely true and it's a story about the book that's exactly what the book does there's studies that show that by the time you're an adult who's read all your life you literally can't ignore print if you see you know the word red printed in green you have a hard time actually figuring out that it's red rather than green if you look in your brain big parts of your visual system are now devoted to print et cetera et cetera et cetera and from a historical period there's at least arguments that many things that are very distinctive about us like protestantism like the idea of individual privacy that those things came from having print came from actually experiencing the world through this medium of print but but i'm interested in how as you say reading itself for now thousands of years changes the way people perceive and think and consciousness do we know yet how these new devices and the always always-onness and all the rest of it is changing the way people think i think we don't and we couldn't and if anyone tells you that we do then they're lying because we'd have to wait for 20 years to see how people were functioning or if children are functioning any differently than adults i think it's perfectly reasonable for us as adults to say look here's what we see with this technology it's good in some ways and bad in other ways and it's kind of addictive in this dopey way and i don't like that and i don't want my children to experience it but of course that was true about tv that was true about books right so plenty of adults could properly say you know you shouldn't be there with your nose in the book for hours and hours you should be out playing sports and playing with the other kids outside that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say i don't think there's any reason to believe that it's drastically going to be different with this technology than the other technologies maybe you know this time is going to be different from all the other times but i don't think there's any particular reason to believe that's true one thing and i don't know if it was it's going to doom anybody but it's the thing i've noticed in the smartphone era for 14 years now parents and caregivers giving a lot less attention to the babies and toddlers in their care because of phones it's just i i don't i haven't seen the studies but my daily anecdotal experience of that is that it's true a problem probably not in the sense that again you know as an adult you're noticing someone looking at the phone you wouldn't notice a mom going to talk to the person next to her right so what you notice is that here's the mom talking to the baby but then she's looking at her phone for most of human history mothers have been working at the time that they had babies if you have a baby on your chest while you're digging for roots or you're planting right i think there's lots of evidence that for most of history parents have been busy they've been paying attention to lots of different things they don't have this kind of narrow focused attention just on the baby so it's not clear that what's happening with the phones is qualitatively different from what's happened for most of history when grown-ups were busy and babies were learning by looking at the busy things that the grown-ups were doing it's more that it's something that's different for us so it becomes very noticeable you're reassuring to all parents grandparents and everybody on these scores but let's talk about adults maybe i can get you to admit or agree that these technologies are not good for adults because i think it is misframed and oh it's going to hurt the children oh it's going to hurt the children no but when we see for instance and most obviously the the exciting falsehoods and alternative realities that are propagated in these various information silos that we now have that seems like a big problem that we need to figure out how to begin fixing right no well i think you know again i i mean i don't want to sound too uh uh dr pangolo yeah no not dr panglas but it's just it's on the one hand and on the other hand so when print first became not just first appeared but first became cheap and something that everybody could use publicly and and sort of ubiquitous in the 18th century one of the things that happened was that there was this great explosion of scurrilous libelous misinformation uh there's a wonderful book by robert dartin called the literary underground in the anthean regime it's one of my favorite books way before anything about the internet describing how you know there was marie antoinette pornography and you know the marie antoinette let them eat cake that was an internet meme that nowadays we'd have a fact check about no marie antoinette did not say let them eat cake so there was this explosion of disinformation and misinformation and the punchline is and you know like the only bad thing that happened was the french revolution right so um other than that there weren't any negative effects now obviously the french revolution was a big historical event with lots of negative consequences that came out of that but again it's not as if this is the first time that this has happened in human history and there's a kind of back and forth between on the other hand when you start having curated less wild west kinds of forms of media right so then you end up having regulation you end up having just a few sources of information which was kind of like our media ecosystem say when you and i were growing up that has a lot of advantages in terms of not having a lot of scurrilous nonsense around but it has disadvantages because that meant that the three networks could control the information that people heard and there were things that people didn't hear because they weren't on the three networks that's not to say everything's fine we shouldn't do anything about it what we need and i think a lot of people in the tech world themselves are realizing this we need the equivalent of code we need the equivalent of regulation we need to figure out what we could do to make the system work better and that's a really important urgent problem but again it's not different from the important urgent problem of regulating technologies that we've had as long as we've been human my grandson comes to our house and the two things that he does are he does vr for a half an hour and then we read lord of the rings for two or three hours and he pointed out you know the thing that's great about tolkien is he has all this stuff about exactly you know where you turn left and you went south and then you came out to another place after three months he said it's just like he does vr but he just does it with books right he puts you in the alternative reality no it totally absolutely and the maps i mean he he was almost a game designer ahead of his time yeah you could see how much he would have enjoyed the idea of having this alternate universe that then you could uh i mean he did have the alternate universe so again this is not to be pangosic about it but just to say i think you know as with nourishment or anything else what we want both as adults and for our children is to be able to have a kind of balanced diet of these different kinds of uh forms and to have enough both social institutional norms and you know legal political uh norms and regulations to bring out the better parts and get rid of the more dangerous parts and you talk very interestingly about the sorcerer's apprentice problem which is to say that you say ai thinks it's doing what the creator wants but it gets it disastrously wrong and the way mickey mouse flooded everything with the broom uh that's what ai is doing and and as you say it's because people click on things that outrage them and make them scared and and that's what looks interesting and so that's what they're given and that is a real problem you know yes we have to figure out how to regulate that but how does that happen when these businesses being businesses make their money by selling ads which depend on maximizing clicks so yep let's make people upset because that's what makes them keep clicking right right right yeah i mean so the apocalypse is there's a famous uh thought experiment by nick bostrom talking about ai so one of the other things that i've been doing is working with a lot of people in uh nai thinking about how ai is gonna work bostrom's analogy is imagine the paper clip apocalypse the paper clip apocalypse is that um you tell the ai to make paper clips and it goes out and turns everything in the world into a paper clip now current ai aren't in that ballpark but my colleague tom griffis has pointed out you could sort of say something like that has happened not with ai but with social media and attention that we sort of have the attention apocalypse where we told our media it seemed like a good idea to say give me something that i want to see give me something that i'm interested in and then it turns out that what it did was sort of the equivalent of of producing too many paper clips where it gave us things that we wanted to see even if at a metal level we didn't really want to because they are exactly that's right and i think that's a genuine unintended consequence of what looked like you know if you said to someone well what kind of algorithm would you want you'd say well you know show me things that i'm interested in that seems like a sensible strategy but it turns out to have this really negative effect which is that you're end up being interested in things like um the outrageous or the or the frightening um and i think that's real and there's interesting questions for instance the economist paul romer has argued that we should set up financial incentives so that instead of having this advertising model which is sort of just by accident ended up being the model that we had for media that we have something more like a subscription model where you could say this is someone who i know is a reliable source of information and so i'm going to pay to have that reliable source of information i'm not just going to be clicking on the things that are going to get the best advertising revenue the founders of google early on said oh we can't do this if it's going to be advertising that's going to be a disaster we can't do it if we're going to be making the decisions about this based on advertising but of course that turns out to be the business model it's so true exactly what you said if everybody just had to pay a subscription to facebook and twitter and all the rest this would it wouldn't go away there'd still be misinformation conspiracy theories and nonsense but it would mitigate it and it's these kinds of choices that we see along the way like ah no we didn't want to do advertising but that's the way it worked out that we have to recognize that these are choices that are made along the way to go more toward utopia or more toward dystopia yeah and i mean romer for example has this proposal that's being considered right now to have taxes on digital advertising which is something that we hadn't done before so that would be a an obvious thing that could let us get more income to be able to do some of the things that we that we need to do and that would act as a disincentive for um the straight advertising model so again i mean i think these things have to be done and they have you have to put some political and some sociological and some psychological work into doing them but i don't see any reason to think that they can't be done or that you know this is and you know again if you think about the very strange fact about the 20th century which was that ads for your couch turned out to subsidize investigative journalism that was a pretty contingent outcome and i think we need to figure out other ways of doing that well one of the the ways in which this seems different than all the rest is the fact that software and algorithms are designed to addict you and you can say yes and so did pulp fiction writers they were trying to be addicted but isn't this different or or is it not different are they no different just more technological and and all-consuming than other forms of commercial media in the past i don't know the same kind of conversations remember the hidden persuaders the the same kind of conversations about the way that advertising was corrupting your uh your needs that the whole consumer society was about persuading people that they needed the latest you know soap powder when the soap powder was not actually going to change your life and there were all sorts of subtle things that advertisers figured out about how to have the right colors and have the right people that would make you want the things that they were advertising i mean hijacking the human reward system is something that we've been doing as long as we've had a human reward system um and again that doesn't mean that we aren't responsible for trying to figure out how we deal with the fact that someone's trying to hijack our reward system now but i don't think it's a qualitative difference from the kinds of structures that we've had in the past an interesting point you made that i hadn't really thought about is is that social media and the internet in general allow us as humans have never had before by orders of magnitude all of these people with whom they are connected in in some kind of social interactions you know whether it was hunters and gatherers or even people in cities we have never had such ability to be connected with so many people friends acquaintances strangers that is a really new condition and and right and we don't know how that's gonna go what the effect of that's gonna be it's interesting that when you talked about the kinds of things that people worry about with the internet they're very much like the things people worry about with cities you're in a crowd but you're alienated and you're lonely at the same time you can interact with many many more people and we have lots of reason to believe that cities for example allowed innovation just by sheer virtue of being cities that you you get more innovation in when people are in this literally and physically in the same place but you get more alienation you don't have those uh you have this kind of trade-off between what people sometimes call strong ties and and weak ties um you don't have the kind of strong ties that you have in a family it's actually a very interesting comparison but the difference is and it's something i think about a lot in terms of the anger and contempt that people so often feel free to express on the internet that i don't think in real life most of them would because it's real life and the person's there and they're your neighbor or what whatever the people online seem less real they seem like characters in a game and therefore i can call them horrible things or mob them because there is no physical proximity well i think this is a continuance of what happens in cities right so one of the things that happens in cities uh it's funny my my husband comes from a very small town in new mexico and i grew up in big cities in philadelphia london and uh and he gets very upset because i'll walk down the street and i won't make eye contact with the people who i'm walking past on the street i don't know if you were in new york or kurt but anyone who grows up in a big city one of the first things that you learn is you make eye contact with that small group of people who you actually know and you have to glaze out over the other people because you couldn't be in those kinds of close personal relationships there's that problem about you know when you get lots of people interacting there's a natural lack of the kind of empathy that comes when you're in close personal relationships with people i think that's that's a real important true thing about how humans work and how to deal with that again in every culture with every technology is a real genuine deep problem for people right and i've often thought that digital media social media makes people treat other people online as digital characters less like human beings which seems kind of like a flip side to the fact that we're getting so dependent on and virtually in love with our devices and we'll do so more and more as ai develops i wonder if we're not going to start treating certain software and devices less like i don't know this microphone or a car or a toaster and and more at least like pets right if not humans i think that's a really interesting question and i think what we would tend to say from a developmental psychology point of view is that it's this interactivity that's going to be the thing that makes the difference so if you can really feel that you're interacting with uh and not just in the sort of pseudo way that chatbot or something like that sort of pretends to be interacting but if you were genuinely interacting where what you were doing was interacting with the other agent i think people will start thinking of them as being agents that are out in the world in the same way that they are in much the same way that we welcome you know animals so humans do tend to do that and i think as computers become more sophisticated that's one of the things that we'll do but you know we can decide whether we're going to do this or not but if we're thinking about the future this gets back to the point about uh the paper clip apocalypse my colleague stuart russell has pointed out one of the real questions is going to be how will we get computational system to know what our values are what we want um how can we set up incentives again this is like in the social media case how could we set up the algorithm so that it doesn't do the bad things you know there's a whole field of ai ethics which is just about how could we change the algorithms so that they won't be biased for example that they'll be more productive for for social good right but one of the problems with this alignment problem that i think is interesting is if you think again about and i think a lot of this cur you know if you just think about the phenomenon with human beings that we have children and we have a new generation that every generation is a bit different grows up in a different environment has different tools has different technologies has different social structure these problems about how is it that we're going to have a next generation that will have the values that are going to be beneficent instead of malignant right that's just so baked into the human condition so baked into our relationship with our children with our teenagers who are often the people who are kind of at the cutting edge of the next change and i think one of the things about caregiving that's very neglected is that to be a parent is to be able to look at another person another sentient agent and say you know i want you to have a different set of goals than i do and i want you to even have a different set of goals than i want for you right that's my job as a parent is to create a new intelligence that will be adapted for its environment not necessarily adapted for my environment and if we're ever going to have ai that's actually going to be able to do that be able to actually generate new values in a new situation rather than just go with their pre-determined values and at the moment we're not even in the ballpark of being able to do that we're going to face this problem about how do we get a system whether it's a machine or it's a new generation of humans to to be able to adjust their values adjust what they think adjust what ai people call their objective function the things that they're trying to go out in the world and get in a way that overall is more beneficent rather than or difficult right i have i have a question before we finish about about ai and i get that we're nowhere near general artificial intelligence but when i see how ai is as good at facial recognition as humans better than a lot of than doctors at diagnosing many things and so on and so forth do you have any reason to doubt that machines will get there in some fashion my hunch is there's really only one creature that we know is conscious namely me right but i think there's some interesting work in evolutionary biology peter godfrey smith who's a philosopher of biology has this wonderful new book metazoa where he is arguing and other people have argued that the thing that really is associated with consciousness is a certain kind of function of the way that you are in the world and in particular he suggests that during the cambrian explosion you see these creatures that start to appear you know to start out with they're just like little shrimp and and underwater creatures but they can run after things they have arms they can go out and catch their own food and they have claws and they have they chase each other they can be in conflict and he suggests that gives you a kind of attitude towards the world when that's true and the interesting question is if you had again we don't have ai's that are anything like that now but if you had an ai that could actually go out and function in in the world something more like a a genuine robot would that start to be in the category of things that would have consciousness and i think it's just sort of an empirical question does it depend on having um being made out of carbon rather than being made out of silicon you know all the examples we have are made out of carbon or is it something about these functional characteristics like having an attitude in the world having to have goals having to accomplish those goals rather than consciousness so there's a tendency among philosophers to think that sitting in an armchair and doing philosophy is the quintessential example of consciousness and i think that's probably not true so the way we have come to think of different kinds of intelligences in humans and in other animals in addition to us that's perhaps a way to think about consciousness as plural i think that's exactly right and one of the things that i'm writing about now and thinking about a lot is the diversity of intelligences the incredible range of different kinds of intelligence that we see across different ages of human beings the difference in the intelligence of adults versus children across different species the intelligence of an octopus versus the intelligence of uh a primate or a crow those are all creatures that are amazingly intelligent but they're all intelligent in in really different ways that reflect their ecology and i think even you know adult humans find ourselves being intelligent in states of consciousness that are really different at different times the the kind of narrow focus on what an outcome is going to be is really different from when we're meditating and we're open to all the things that are going on around us or when we're playing or when we're we're thinking in a fictional way so i think what will happen if we actually get more sophisticated machines is it's unlikely that there'll be a sort of sense of does this one have consciousness or not as if it's a binary or is it intelligent or not it's that different kinds of creatures with different kinds of functions different kinds of computational complexity are going to have different kinds of intelligence and probably have different kinds of consciousness i'm glad to hear you say that because one of my new hobby horses is that this lovely idea of non-binariness should be extended to all kinds of things beyond gender gender identity to really thinking about almost everything in terms of continuum and i think that's one of the things that's come out of uh thinking in psychology is that the diversity this has been one of my points about parenting for example is that we tend to have this model that what we want is we have a particular outcome and we're trying to bring about this outcome and if only we do the right things we're going to get this particular outcome and i think what biology tells us is that often the way that we have innovation the way we adjust to the world around us is by diversity it's by trying out lots of different things it's by things being sort of noisy and random a lot of the time computer scientists talk about something that i think is very deep distinction between exploration and exploitation and those are different really different kinds of things being able to do something really effectively means narrowing your focus having a clear goal doing something for that clear goal and that's very different from exploring the possibilities trying things out generating a whole lot of intellectual diversity and you need to have both those things to be able to adapt to an environment there's an idea i like in biology called evolvability so even now we're just talking about evolution that one of the things that happens is that you evolve evolvability so you get creatures that are designed to have more genetic variability so that they can be more sensitive to the environment around them so i think diversity isn't just you know sort of a slogan it's something that our biology tells us is really foundational especially when what you're trying to do is adjust to new environments to innovate to to deal with uh novelty and i think babies and young children are just amazingly good at that kind of intellectual and psychological diversity so us adults with these radically new technological environments uh over the next decade or two how do we not just adjust to all of that novelty but but make the future better play our cards right with technology so we we we end up closer to utopia than dystopia uh you know stephen johnson has this book that just came out about the extension of life and steve pinker had a a similar kind of book and and i have things to argue with but you know what 200 years ago not even 300 years ago two out of five kids died before they were five years old and i sort of feel like if you want to know are we getting closer to utopia are we getting closer to dystopia i feel like that statistic you know like all by itself nothing else just if you say look here's what's happened your child is less likely to die like i think i'll take that right i'll i'll take i'm bored and irritated by twitter on the one hand but then you know my kids aren't dying on the other no and that's all science and technology exactly so that's the fact that the science and the combination and there's a nice point in in stephen's book the combination of the science and technology and then this very unsung bureaucracy public health regulation you know making sure that the water is clean in your in your sewers uh making sure that your milk is pasteurized i mean all these very dull everyday civil service kinds of things combined with the science that's made an enormous difference in these really foundational parts of our life like do our kids die young not to mention you know do we die young do we have accidents do we you know die of lightning strikes so in that sense i think it's you know maybe whenever utopia but certainly some of the things that we take for granted about our lives that are the result of vaccines right you know the fact that we could use the mrna technology just developed in the past 20 years that's a giant positive change and again that's not to say that we don't have costs and that we shouldn't be trying to do things to to counterbalance the cost but i think it's so easy to forget that really basic fact about about the very fact that our children are surviving one thing we need to figure out how to do is how to make uh raise people to be as glass-half-full as you are because my goodness uh it's it's it's like taking the antidepressant talking to you so thank you well this is my uh again i will end with words of wisdom from my grandson which is i'll always focus on we've been reading lord of the rings together which he loves and is very very excited about and he said to me at one point grandma you know like i think this is the way stories go they go hope hopeless hope hopeless hope hopeless but then you always have to end with the hope part um and i think that's a very good insight about what makes for a good story so maybe a good podcast too that's that's the hero's journey in a nutshell um well thank you so much this was this has been a pleasure well thank you so much for having me kurt [Music] the world as you'll know it is brought to you by aventine a non-profit research institute creating and sharing work that explores how today's decisions could affect the future the views expressed don't necessarily represent those of aventine its employees or affiliates danielle matune is the editorial director of aventine the world as you'll know it is produced in partnership with pineapple street studios on our next episode of the world as you'll know it my guest is roger mcnamee he is one of silicon valley's most significant defectors as a lifelong tech investor he was an early advisor to facebook and a mentor to 22 year old mark zuckerberg but five years ago he had an epiphany he says he suddenly realized that facebook and google and the rest were enabling the destruction of democracy and civilized society and shared reality he's the author of zucked waking up to the facebook catastrophe we've allowed the language of the monopolist to crowd out the language of democracy we need more risk-taking in the entrepreneurial world we need more in risk taking in technology we need the rewards to go disproportionately to those people who make the world a better place and be taken away from those who are demonstrably harming us

2022-06-04 01:12

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