The Cultural Technologies of the Past Can Be Quite Illuminating From That Perspective

High-level abstract schemas typically constrain low-level hypotheses and shape learners' interpretation of the data. Of course, now I'm thinking of Jessica Flack and her work on coarse-greening as downward causation and Caleb Scharff talking about the data ohm and how we're all serving this information architecture that we are embedded in as William Gibson put it like polyps and a coral reef across the planet. This is a speculative kind of final shot. But do you think that we are becoming in general more childlike by necessity? I mean, do you think that we are retreating into the embryonic in order to better network with one another and surf all of this change? I'm torn about that. I want to say when you said, well, everything's fine. Of course you have to worry. I mean, you worry about anything that's coming up in your culture and in your time is I keep thinking about this quote in the words of all places about these may not be the times we want but our job is to deal with the times that we have. So in any time we have to have the responsibility for trying to work through what would be good and what would be bad in that time. I think that again, the cultural technologies of the past can be quite illuminating from that perspective. Think about those 18th century pan-sotiers. There aren't really any newspapers yet or magazines or any of the apparatus that we think of as being part of our modern journalism media apparatus. And what had to happen was that you had to have to start inventing things like editors or journalists or newspapers which took this great expansion of, again, this would be a cool one of the internet where anybody who wanted to could produce a pamphlet and spread it around and turn that into, oh no, you don't want to get just anybody's pamphlet. You want to get the newspaper which you have some reason to believe is going to be more accurate and more supported. And I think that's just been the history of human technology all the time as we have. Another example that I like is think about electricity. So again, this is one of those ones where thinking about it from the perspective of, you know, so putting yourself in the past. There's someone thinking, said, we have this idea of this thing that we want to put in everybody's house except that we know that it gets hot enough to burn down houses. But we still think it would be really useful to put it in everybody's house.

Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I.

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