Alison Gopnik: Transmission Versus Truth

There is no such thing as general intelligence — artificial or natural — argues Alison Gopnik. Instead, there are multiple intelligences, each with its own trade-offs. Three different types of cognitive capacities mark human development, and our life histories accommodate intrinsic trade-offs between the three. The extended human childhood allows a period of protected broad-ranging exploration and truth-seeking, adulthood allows exploitation and resource gathering, and post-menopausal elderhood allows caregiving and cultural transmission. Each period involves motivations and computational capacities that are in tension with those of other periods, but the full suite of development allows for maximal adaptation to changing and variable environments. The human life history offers lessons for AI, suggests Gopnik. Different types of AI enable different capacities: intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning can help enable exploration and truth-finding, while Large Language Models are means of cultural transmission.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, and a member of the Berkeley AI Research Group. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. She is a leader in the study of cognitive science and of children’s learning and development.

The 2025 Santa Fe Institute Community Lecture Series is free to attend thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation.