HOWARD GARDNER - Author of A Synthesizing Mind & Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences - Co-director of The Good Project

How do we define intelligence? What is the point of creativity and intelligence if we are not creating good in the world? In this age of AI, what is the importance of a synthesizing mind?

Howard Gardner, Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an author of over 30 books, translated into 32 languages, and several hundred articles, is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In the last few years, Gardner has been studying the nature of human synthesizing, a topic introduced in his 2020 memoir, A Synthesizing Mind.

For 28 years, with David Perkins, he was Co-Director of Harvard Project Zero, and in more recent years has served in a variety of leadership positions. Since the middle 1990s, Gardner has directed The Good Project, a group of initiatives, founded in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon. The project promotes excellence, engagement, and ethics in education, preparing students to become good workers and good citizens who contribute to the overall well-being of society. Through research-based concepts, frameworks, and resources, The Good Project seeks to help students reflect upon the ethical dilemmas that arise in everyday life and give them the tools to make thoughtful decisions.

“The word engagement doesn't mean anything when you're talking about computational systems. they aren't asked whether they like what they're doing or not, they just do it. But the issue of ethics is very difficult and very complicated. I touched on it earlier. If you're trying to decide what to do in a complicated economics matter, in a complicated military matter, do you leave the decision to the computational system? Or do you have human beings make it alone or in groups? My guess would be you should find out what would various computational systems recommend that the final decisions shouldn't be a majority vote among ChatGPTs. It should be human beings evaluating with these different systems. Recommend and then living with the consequences of human-made decisions. I don't want a decision about whether to have a nuclear weapon shot off to be made by ChatGPT. I would like to think that rational leaders consulting with one another and being very cautious about life-and-death decisions. There are things which large language instruments could recommend which would destroy the planet, but they don't care. It's not their planet.”

www.howardgardner.com
http://thegoodproject.org
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542838/a-synthesizing-mind

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