Watch UC Berkeley professor Alison Gopnik explain the surprising overlap in just 101 seconds.
By Public Affairs
13 August 2024
UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik studies how children learn. She also studies artificial intelligence systems. That may sound counterintuitive, but as she explains in this video about her work for UC Berkeley News, there’s a lot of overlap between what we’re learning about how babies explore the world and how we might design better AI systems.
“Even very young children learn best, and they do so in record time and with very little instruction,” says Gopnik. “So the question is, how do they manage to learn so much?”
“Answering this question not only helps us understand children, but can also help us answer some deep philosophical questions about how it is possible for each of us – children, adults, scientists and even artificial machines – to know so much about the world,” she continues.
Gopnik, who was recently awarded the prestigious Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science, has studied how children understand their world, with very little evidence available.
“I study children because aliens don’t exist,” says Gopnik, who joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1988. “If you want to study small creatures with big heads and small bodies that are incredibly intelligent and spend a lot of time trying to hypnotize us, you have to look at three- and four-year-olds.”
Gopnik’s video is the first in a new Berkeley News series called “101 in 101,” which challenges professors and researchers from across campus to summarize the fundamentals of their work in just 101 seconds, like an introductory course.
Consider it the shortest lecture you will ever enjoy.
