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AIs VERSUS FOUR-YEAR-OLDS
Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley; her books include The
Philosophical Baby and, most recently, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New
Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and
Children.

Everyone’s heard about the new advances in artificial intelligence, and especially
machine learning. You’ve also heard utopian or apocalyptic predictions about what those
advances mean. They have been taken to presage either immortality or the end of the
world, and a lot has been written about both those possibilities. But the most
sophisticated AIs are still far from being able to solve problems that human four-year-
olds accomplish with ease. In spite of the impressive name, artificial intelligence largely
consists of techniques to detect statistical patterns in large data sets. There is much more
to human learning.

How can we possibly know so much about the world around us? We learn an
enormous amount even when we are small children; four-year-olds already know about
plants and animals and machines; desires, beliefs, and emotions; even dinosaurs and
spaceships.

Science has extended our knowledge about the world to the unimaginably large
and the infinitesimally small, to the edge of the universe and the beginning of time. And
we use that knowledge to make new classifications and predictions, imagine new
possibilities, and make new things happen in the world. But all that reaches any of us
from the world is a stream of photons hitting our retinas and disturbances of air at our
eardrums. How do we learn so much about the world when the evidence we have is so
limited? And how do we do all this with the few pounds of grey goo that sits behind our
eyes?

The best answer so far is that our brains perform computations on the concrete,
particular, messy data arriving at our senses, and those computations yield accurate
representations of the world. The representations seem to be structured, abstract, and
hierarchical; they include the perception of three-dimensional objects, the grammars that
underlie language, and mental capacities like “theory of mind,” which lets us understand
what other people think. Those representations allow us to make a wide range of new
predictions and imagine many new possibilities in a distinctively creative human way.

This kind of learning isn’t the only kind of intelligence, but it’s a particularly
important one for human beings. And it’s the kind of intelligence that is a specialty of
young children. Although children are dramatically bad at planning and decision making,
they are the best learners in the universe. Much of the process of turning data into
theories happens before we are five.

Since Aristotle and Plato, there have been two basic ways of addressing the
problem of how we know what we know, and they are still the main approaches in
machine learning. Aristotle approached the problem from the bottom up: Start with
senses—the stream of photons and air vibrations (or the pixels or sound samples of a
digital image or recording)—and see if you can extract patterns from them. This
approach was carried further by such classic associationists as philosophers David Hume

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