Alison Gopnik: evaluation

Transcript context

…The demand curve will still slope downwards, but it gets the answer, and maybe the humans don’t. There’s something unique about that. It depends on the humans. The other thing to say is, we don’t know. We’ll actually see what happens. We’ll see what the outcomes are going to be. I’m pretty skeptical just because we have been trying to figure out how two-year-old babies go out and solve the kinds of problems that they solve in the world, and they’re solving problems. Here’s a really good example. If you go to robotics, for instance, there’s a giant gap between what the LLMs, the large models, are doing, and what robotics is doing. In robotics, which again is the thing that the two-year-olds are doing, is going out, experimenting with the real world, getting data from the real world, doing something new in the real world. That’s the thing that the LLMs are really not good at doing. Some people have argued — I like this idea — that they’re like Derrida’s revenge, that the postmodernist idea that all you had to do is have text, and as long as you had more and more text, you didn’t have to worry about whether the text actually was making contact with some external reality. ChatGPT is like Derrida in practice. What it’s doing is putting together lots and lots of text and generating more text, without ever quite making that contact with an external reality. There’re some papers in experimental economics. They indicate that autistic people — they’re more likely to be Bayesian, and they’re more likely to do better at game theoretic exercises than non-autistic humans. Should we infer from that that autistics have theory of mind?…

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