The video discusses the impact early childhood environments without distractions like television have on fostering curiosity and independence. The speaker reflects on their upbringing by physicist parents and how a lack of television encouraged more self-led exploration, emphasizing curiosity as an essential part of learning. This nurturing of exploration and learning is viewed as especially important in childhood as it influences future interests and career paths.
It highlights the importance of adaptability in career choices and the notion that children should not feel bound by rigid disciplinary lines. As fields evolve and intermingle, such as with AI in medicine, being open to change and prepared to switch paths is vital. Consequently, it becomes essential for individuals to prepare to learn continuously and adapt to changes, which broadens personal and professional possibilities.
Main takeaways from the video:
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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:
1. monotony [məˈnɒtəni] - (noun) - A lack of variety and interest; tedious repetition and routine. - Synonyms: (tedium, sameness, routine)
But you have to decide whether you can take that or whether you're looking for a monotony of some job.
2. tunneling [ˈtʌnəlɪŋ] - (noun) - The act of making or using a tunnel; metaphorically, it means being channeled into a specific path. - Synonyms: (channeling, directing, guiding)
The children get tunneled that way. The kind of tunneling I got.
3. physicists [ˈfɪzɪsɪsts] - (noun) - Scientists who study or practice in the field of physics. - Synonyms: (scientists, researchers, scholars)
They were both physicists. And so the only occupation I knew was a small child was a physicist.
4. self-dependent [self-dɪˈpɛndənt] - (adjective) - Being reliant on one's own abilities and resources rather than those of others. - Synonyms: (self-reliant, independent, autonomous)
And it meant that you were much more self consistent, self dependent for your own play.
5. augmentation [ɔːɡmɛnˈteɪʃən] - (noun) - The action or process of making something greater in size or amount. - Synonyms: (enhancement, increase, expansion)
AI was certainly, even as we presently understand it, could be made into a marvelous augmentation of any doctor's life.
6. sentient [ˈsɛnʃənt] - (adjective) - Able to perceive or feel things; having consciousness. - Synonyms: (conscious, aware, responsive)
When I say sensible use, does that mean sentient use?
7. unrest [ʌnˈrɛst] - (noun) - A state of dissatisfaction, disturbance, and agitation, often involving public demonstrations or disorder. - Synonyms: (disturbance, agitation, chaos)
And I think there's a good deal of social unrest which would also attend trying to move anywhere on that boundary.
8. hazards [ˈhæzərdz] - (noun) - A danger or risk. - Synonyms: (risks, dangers, perils)
And so AI is always, I think, going to be limited by the hazards it has.
9. peculiarity [pɪˌkjuːliˈærɪti] - (noun) - A strange or unusual feature or habit. - Synonyms: (oddity, abnormality, quirk)
And some particular peculiarity of this job structure of the world says no, that's for people who have background A.
10. allocation [ˌæləˈkeɪʃən] - (noun) - The action or process of distributing something. - Synonyms: (distribution, allotment, apportionment)
Where the allocation of scarce resources depends on sensible use of who can actually benefit.
John J. Hopfield, Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 - Official interview
I've never tired of learning new things. That's a great adventure, a big role when you get back on. I don't know if you have children, but young children learn what their parents do. And parents do something highly visible. Always a fireman or something or other.
The children get tunneled that way. The kind of tunneling I got. I didn't have a father or butcher or mother who would bake bread or. They were both physicists. And so the only occupation I knew was a small child was a physicist. What else could you be? That's what parents did. And so I had a certain bias to begin with and that was just left to explore the world with.
And my parents very much were content watching me explore the world with my hands and making things and making a mess and breaking things. But always, never. We didn't have television screens after all. No TV came to the United States when I was about 13, 14. And so I grew up without television, which is probably a great help. And it meant that you were much more self consistent, self dependent for your own play. You didn't have. You couldn't just sit there passively and look at the screen.
And so you can see my. Because I'm older, I have a very different childhood experience than most of the children you've ever seen. And that had a great deal of influence on me. What I see is it's so easy to lose doing and becoming merely a spectator and studying a child in the corner. Watch the picture, find it funny, don't rely on yourself, Mama, Daddy, change the film if you can even just change the channel and nobody objects to you doing it.
It's already exploration which is more useful than sitting and watching. How can you do anything but let it run at any time you interact with the world? It's your curiosity. And I've never tired of learning new things, even at the cost of abandoning some of the things I'm doing at present in order to have mental space to learn the new ones.
And that's a great adventure. But you have to decide whether you can take that or whether you're looking for a monotony of some job. Why no? I think when 12 year olds are exposed to what a certain line of job actually entails, I think they'll spend a little more time trying to understand what the world has to offer for them.
Don't presume that you will be in the same field ten years from now. It may be something which happens because you want it to. It may be something you don't want. You wanted to go into this area, this is discipline. And you find suddenly there are no jobs in it, really, because most disciplinary lines are pretty arbitrary.
And you don't want to get a place where you. You're trying to pursue some interesting line. And some particular peculiarity of this job structure of the world says no, that's for people who have background A, people who have background B, have to do something different. And if you look at the number of people who actually change from something to something else in a major way, it's not tiny.
And so there's no point in trying to say the world is divided into these little chunks and they have different names and you have to be in one of them. It just doesn't help. In fact, it really hinders, except it makes it easy to at a low level say, this is job A, this is job B, this is mathematics, this is geography. But after a while, you find out the geodetic system is based on global satellites. You want to understand what those are. Well, maybe you'd better know some mathematics.
AI was certainly, even as we presently understand it, could be made into a marvelous augmentation of any doctor's life. That kind of thing will occur in all kinds of fields where you would have thought, oh, can't do that, can't sympathize as well as I can. And then it turns out people are happier interacting with a doctor who's had some background in AI and everything becomes somewhat mixed.
And the difficulty is, of course, along with good information, there's lacking information. And that goes into the whole mixer if you really don't understand how AI works. And I do wonder whether you can actually have available the most aggressive possible AI which you also can't control because you actually don't understand quite how it works.
And so AI is always, I think, going to be limited by the hazards it has, just as nuclear energy is limited by the hazards it has. But we've lived through quite a few hazards. The hazard of, over my lifetime, the nuclear energy hazards, the molecular biology revolution which suddenly allowed all kinds of gene things to be done again.
When that was first invented, there were many biologists who said, wait a minute, we have to stop research in that direction until we understand it, because it had such potential hazards of doing horrible things at very low cost. And you can ask whether the AI revolution, the president, is going to run into something which poor people say it really has to be chopped off, stopped, thought about for a while, I would say, having life or death power to an agent whose actions you cannot predict.
Will is one of them. And that question is going to come up very rapidly in medicine, for example, where the allocation of scarce resources depends on sensible use of who can actually benefit. When I say sensible use, does that mean sentient use? Or does it mean you can actually hand the job over to a computer which says this person gets the treatment that one does not? And I think there's a good deal of social unrest which would also attend trying to move anywhere on that boundary.
Of course, the astonishing thing for me is the idea of being here in Stockholm as a representative, in some sense, of physics. So unlikely, so absolutely unlikely. Stay healthy, don't ask too much, and independently do interesting things, doesn't matter what they are. Interesting is the important one.
Interesting question. None of them became scientists. They almost did and then didn't. And the trouble with coming from physics is being a lover of mathematics helps. And mathematics education for women just somehow is not as well pursued in the US as it could be or ought to be or what have you. And.
And it's easy to fall into the thing where instead of going into astronomy, you go into economics. Little less math, little less science. And that's what one of them did. Another of them went into biology, got as far as a PhD in biology and in neuroscience, in fact, then looked around at the job market and said the interesting jobs in biology are actually management jobs. And I find it very interesting, but I'll learn management.
And so the middle daughter, in fact, got a degree in management after getting a biology PhD and is now very successfully pursuing whatever mixture that it's called. But what she actually got out of her upbringing was the idea that you were responsible for it. If you're getting toys, I would say simple toys that have things that you can manipulate and not just look at. And the other thing is don't use the word, don't too often give leeway to do things which might even look a little hazardous to you as the parent. Learning, learning always has.
EDUCATION, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, CURIOSITY, CHILDHOODEXPERIENCES, AICHALLENGES, NOBEL PRIZE
