{"id":293916,"date":"2026-04-30T22:47:06","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T22:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/293916\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T22:47:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T22:47:06","slug":"berkeley-talks-alison-gopnik-on-why-ai-is-no-match-for-a-4-year-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/293916\/","title":{"rendered":"Berkeley Talks: Alison Gopnik on why AI is no match for a 4-year-old"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over her decadeslong career as a developmental psychologist,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/psychology.berkeley.edu\/people\/alison-gopnik\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Alison Gopnik<\/a>\u00a0has observed a striking phenomenon: When children are given a new toy without an obvious use, they often outperform high\u2011achieving college students in figuring out how it works. While adults tend to test the most likely possibilities and quickly get stuck, children respond with playful experimentation.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat children are doing is exactly the kind of open-ended, non-utilitarian, exploratory learning that allows you to find out things about the world that you would never find out any other way,\u201d says Gopnik, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In this\u00a0Berkeley Talks\u00a0episode, Gopnik argues that human intelligence is not a single, general capacity, but a collection of distinct cognitive modes \u2014 exploration, exploitation and care \u2014 that are distributed across different stages of a person\u2019s life. Childhood, she says, is evolution\u2019s way of creating a dedicated \u201cexplorer\u201d phase, made possible by a specialized care system provided by adults.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over her decadeslong career as a developmental psychologist,\u00a0Alison Gopnik\u00a0has observed a striking phenomenon: When children are given a&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-293916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}