Plenary: Large Language Models as Cultural Technologies: Imitation and Innovation in Children and Models
Alison Gopnik / University of California at Berkeley
Alison Gopnik University of California, Berkeley
Wednesday, July 12 - Time: 14:00–15:00 EDT
Abstract: Its natural to ask whether large language models like LaMDA or GPT-3 are intelligent agents. But I argue that this is the wrong question. Intelligence and agency are the wrong categories for understanding them. Instead, these Al systems are what we might call cultural technologies, like writing, print, libraries, internet search engines or even language itself. They are new techniques for passing on information from one group of people to another. Cultural technologies arent like intelligent humans, but they are essential for human intelligence. Many animals can transmit some information from one individual or one generation to another, but no animal does it as much as we do or accumulates as much information over time, . New technologies that make cultural transmission easier and more effective have been among the greatest engines of human progress, but they have also led to negative as well as positive social consequences. Moreover, while cultural technologies allow transmission of existing information cultural evolution, which is central to human success, also depends on innovation, exploration and causal learning. Comparing LLM’s responses in prompts based on developmental psychology experiments to the responses of children may provide insight into which capacities can be learned through language and cultural transmission, and which require innovation and exploration in the physical world. I will present results from several studies making such comparisons.
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, and a member of the Berkeley AI Research Group. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. She is a leader in the study of cognitive science and of children’s learning and development and was one of the founders of the field of “theory of mind”, an originator of the “theory of cognitive development”, and the first to apply Bayesian probabilistic models to children’s learning. She has received both the APS Lifetime Achievement Cattell and William James Awards, the Bradford Washburn Award for Science Communication, and the SRCD Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Science in Child Development. She is an elected member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Cognitive Science Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Guggenheim Fellow. She was 2022-23 President of the Association for Psychological Science.
She is the author or coauthor of over 140 journal articles and several books including “Words, thoughts and theories” MIT Press, 1997, and the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books “The Scientist in the Crib” William Morrow, 1999, “The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life” 2009, and “The Gardener and the Carpenter” 2016, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, the latter two won the Cognitive Development Society Best Book Prize in 2009 and 2016. Since 2013 she has written the Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal and she has also written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist and Slate, among others. Her TED talk on her work has been viewed more than 5.2 million times. She has frequently appeared on TV, radio and podcasts including “The Charlie Rose Show”, “The Colbert Report”, “Radio Lab” and “The Ezra Klein Show”. She lives in Berkeley with her husband Alvy Ray Smith and has three children and five grandchildren.