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| Photo: Javier Zarracina/Vox; Getty Images |
The mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan
Turing hit on a promising direction for artificial intelligence research
way back in 1950. “Instead of trying to produce a program to simulate
the adult mind,” he wrote, “why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?”
Now AI researchers are finally putting Turing’s ideas
into action. They’re realizing that by paying attention to how children
process information, they can pick up valuable lessons about how to
create machines that learn.
DARPA, the Defense Department’s advanced research agency, is embracing this approach. It recently invited proposals
from interdisciplinary teams of computer scientists and developmental
psychologists, which will work to create AI systems capable of learning
the things babies learn in the first few years of life.
To the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, this approach is the
obvious way to go. She explains why in an essay titled “AIs Versus
Four-Year-Olds,” which appears in the new anthology Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI.
Noting that preschoolers can learn things even the most sophisticated
AIs can’t, Gopnik argues that studying kids can give programmers useful
hints about directions for computer learning.
I was drawn to Gopnik’s essay not only because of the
catchy title, but also because she and I both majored in philosophy at
McGill University (three decades apart), and because her piece is one of
only three in the book written by women. The fact that women represent
12 percent of contributions to the anthology mirrors the gender imbalance in the machine-learning community at large, where only 12 percent of the leading researchers are female, according to Wired.
Gender may go some way toward explaining why it’s taken
computer scientists nearly 70 years to act on Turing’s ideas about the
importance of children in AI research. Kids have traditionally been
considered the domain of women.
I spoke to Gopnik about how her research on children has
been perceived by male scientists and how that may finally be changing
to the benefit of AI research. A transcript of our conversation, lightly
edited for length and clarity, follows.
What do babies think? - Alison Gopnik
Source: Vox.com and TED-Ed Channel (YouTube)
