Tim Scarfe: preference

Transcript context

…Well, just because it's a massive experiment. I mean, it's obvious that from developmental psychology that young children are predisposed to be sort of paying attention to social interactions with the people around them, the gaze and faces and features and all of that. If they have less opportunity to make those connections, have those experiences at a very young age, it seems like that's bound to have an effect on how they relate to people later on. Don't see how it couldn't. I mean, there's a thought experiment that I had a debate with an AI doomer and because I'm a big externalist, I think we're embedded in these cognitive as you do. And I gave the example, imagine that a child was brought up in a hermetically sealed chamber and you gave them a computer and the internet and they could still learn to do lots of clever things and so on. But we're becoming a bit more like that. It's not quite a hermetically sealed chamber but we're mediating through the internet and so on. And that could go 1 of 2 ways, right? As you say, it could dramatically kind of truncate our mental life and cause lots of problems, or maybe it just won't be a big problem. I mean, there were already experiments done on monkeys in the 1950s of depriving them of maternal contacts, and it didn't work out well for those monkeys. Mean, should we be doing that experiment on children, sort of depriving them of what is instinctively the kind of social engagement that you know young humans seem to need to develop normally.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.