The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

"I love this book so much. Alison’s work has been so important to me. She brilliantly argues in this book and in her research that if you want to understand our species, in a psychologically and scientifically literate way, you have to be deeply interested in children and childhood. Childhood is key to our uniqueness as a species. Human childhood is a total outlier in biological terms in the mammal kingdom. We have this incredibly long period of enormous dependency, neuroplasticity and flexibility. Fairly obviously, to be a language-using and technology-crafting species, you need an incredible capacity for learning: to be able primarily to acquire skills through nurture rather than nature, through teaching and communication rather than through instinct. But how did this come about? Gopnik makes the case that over millions of years, our lineage doubled and then tripled down on this incredibly long, vulnerable, flexible childhood, because it conferred evolutionary advantages in terms of our ability to create tools, to build protections through technology. But she also points out that all this was necessarily bound up with an incredible capacity for mutual care, compassion, and for nurture. These traits are the absolute fundamentals for human survival and thriving. She calls children the R&D department of the human species. It’s a wonderful image; and it captures the entwined capacities for care and change that underpin technology and culture alike. The human child is born incredibly vulnerable. It’s very dangerous for the human mother to give birth. And then, once the child is born, it’s utterly dependent for months and months and months—like no other ape. It takes months to even learn to sit up. Reproductive maturity is a decade, a decade and a half away. The prefrontal cortex continues to grow and develop into our twenties. But it brings great gifts: this capacity for change and learning and teaching. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So much of the time, discussions of technology are obsessed with notionally independent adults—perhaps men with disposable income. But that’s an impoverished description of our species, both how we got here and how we build a future together. Pretty obviously, the future—in the most literal of ways—is children. They are born with this incredible plasticity, a wonderful lack of instinctual lock-in. So, for me, any ethics of technology has to be deeply, deeply interested in childhood and children: in how we learn, how we teach, how we change, and how the knowledge of one generation is passed on and adapted. Gopnik has also written about AI as a social technology, as a kind of reification of the knowledge and understanding latent in language and culture—something more like the library to end all libraries than a mind. I think this is a very useful framing. AI isn’t, or shouldn’t be, our rival. It’s a resource: a cultural and technological compendium of our achievements. But it cannot do any of the most important stuff, in terms of nurture, care, teaching, hoping. If you are thinking about how to create systems that have values compatible with human and planetary thriving, children and child-raising are good models. If you want to look at the conditions a human needs to thrive, look at children. It’s crushingly obvious that children need love. Of course, they need to be safe and warm and fed more than anything; but it’s love that is the driving and connecting force. The love and support of family and friends and kin is more important than piles of stuff and gadgets. The idea that children might be taught and raised by super-intelligent AI is just delusional. It’s stupid. There’s a lovely line in the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s lecture series Dependent Rational Animals , where he says that his attempts in his earlier work to come up with an ethics independent of biology was just wrong and impossible. To paraphrase, you need an ethical self-conception rooted in the fact that you’re part of humanity, part of a species, not just a notionally independent adult. We have all been, and we all will be again, utterly reliant upon the care of others. Every single one of us was born into total dependency. We will all sicken, age and die. There’s nothing in our lives that is truly autonomous, when you think about it. Even the most libertarian forms of individualism are wholly predicated upon massive shared supplies of goods and services, money and trade, manufacture and technology. These people in their bunkers with their generators, what are they doing? It’s a weird denial of our profound inter-dependency. And technology is the most inter-dependent thing of all, even more so than us. Technology is incredibly needy. I think the desire to be wholly independent of others embodies a confusion between the enormously important freedom to pursue your goals, to live your life, and the fact that every opportunity and tool you have at your disposal is ultimately the product of countless others’ lives and labour. Gopnik makes this point very powerfully. She says: I am the child of countless minds. Everything around me—the light, the chair, the clothes I wear—is the product of century after century of human ingenuity and inheritance."