interview with thom mayne of morphosis at his studio in los angeles

my advice has always been to look and understand who we are as human beings and how we perceive each other.

friends that I admire are: wolf prix and frank gehry for all different reasons; steven holl; richard rogers, for all the reasons why he is totally fascinated in urbanism; and eric owen moss. they are characters who are fighting for their culture of architecture. all of them have somewhat different notions of its connection, whether this is focusing on sustainability or urbanism etc.

design symbolizes self-expression, and that the use of freedom frightens people. right now, there seems to be a lot of people moving with the herd and are comfortable doing that.

Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry

I decided to splurge on an in-room massage. Unlike the sessions with the weeping swordsman and the rental mother, a massage wouldn’t count as a work expense. On the other hand, I reasoned, I had missed a shrink appointment back in New York, which cost more than the massage, so I was really saving money. Two hours later, a smiling young woman knocked on the door, waited to be asked inside, took off her shoes, and gave me a form to sign. The form said that I agreed not to demand a sexual massage, and that if I was a man I would keep the hotel-room door ajar. Everything contributed to the dreamlike atmosphere: her soft voice and sure touch, the fact that I was lying on the bed, and the compactness of Tokyo hotel rooms, which meant that she periodically had to move things around to make enough room to stand. At some point, I realized that she was kneeling next to me on the bed. How strange that it was somehow O.K. for us to be in bed like this together. “Your shoulders are so hard!” she said, somehow releasing the muscles with her fingers. I felt full of love and gratitude, and thought about how the fact that I was paying her, which could have felt uncomfortable, was instead a source of joy and relief, because it meant that I didn’t have to think about anything at all. I could just relax. It felt like unconditional love—the kind you don’t get, or ask for, from people in your life, because they have needs, too, and you always have to take turns. I didn’t have to give her a massage or listen to her problems, because I had given her money, with which she could do anything she wanted: pay bills, buy an aquamarine coat, or even hire someone to give her a massage or listen to her problems. This hour, during which she paid attention to me and I didn’t pay attention to her, wasn’t going to be entered in a ledger where she could accumulate resentment toward me over the years. I didn’t have to feel guilty: that was what I was paying for.

If he ever becomes a father, how will his feelings toward his own children be different from what he felt on the job? “I’m worried now that I might just end up acting a good father,” he said.

After the Second World War, a new constitution, drawn up during the Allied occupation, sought to supplant the ie with a Western-style, “democratic” nuclear family. Forced marriages were outlawed, spouses became legal equals, and property was distributed evenly among a couple’s children, regardless of gender and birth order. With postwar economic growth and the rise of corporate culture, ie households became less common, while apartment-dwelling nuclear households—consisting of a salaryman, a housewife, and their children—proliferated. During the economic boom of the eighties, women increasingly worked outside the home. The birth rate went down, while the divorce rate and the number of single-person households went up. So did life expectancy, and the proportion of older people. That’s when the first wave of rental families appeared. In 1989, Satsuki Ōiwa, the president of a Tokyo company that specialized in corporate employee training, began to rent out children and grandchildren to neglected elders—an idea she got from hearing corporate workers fret about being too busy to visit their parents. Ōiwa’s service was widely covered in the press; within a few years, she had dispatched relatives to more than a hundred clients. One couple hired a son to listen to the father’s hard-luck stories. Their real son lived with them, but refused to listen to the stories. The couple’s real grandson, moreover, was now past infancy, and the grandparents missed touching a baby’s skin. The price of a three-hour visit from a rental son and daughter-in-law, in possession of both an infant child and a high tolerance for unhappy stories, was eleven hundred dollars. Other clients included a young couple who rented substitute grandparents for their child, and a bachelor who rented a wife and daughter in order to experience having the kind of nuclear family he’d seen on TV. The idea of rental relatives took root in the public imagination. Postmodernism was in the air, and, in an age of cultural relativism, rental relativism fit right in.

Hired mourners existed in ancient Greece, Rome, and China, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in the early Islamic world; they were denounced by Solon, by St. Paul, and by St. John Chrysostom. They still exist in China, India, and, lately, England, where an Essex-based service, Rent A Mourner, has been operating since 2013. And what are babysitters, nurses, and cooks if not rental relatives, filling some of the roles traditionally performed by mothers, daughters, and wives?

I asked about the relationship between a real family and a rental one. Ishii replied that, although a rental family wasn’t real, it could in some sense be “more than a family.” This notion struck me as somewhat abstruse, but Reiko said she understood perfectly. “If I hadn’t gotten a divorce and was still married, I don’t think that I would be laughing like this, or that I would be feeling this happy,” she said. “It’s not necessarily the case that the real family is the best thing that happens.”

families are defined by “a love that money can’t buy” is relatively recent. In preindustrial times, the basic economic unit was the family, and each new child meant another pair of hands. After industrialization, people started working outside the home for a fixed wage, and each new child meant another mouth to feed. The family became an unconditionally loving sanctuary in a market-governed world.

Like many aspects of Japanese society, rental relatives are often explained with reference to the binary of honne and tatemae, or genuine individual feelings and societal expectations. Authenticity and consistency aren’t necessarily valued for their own sake, and the concealment of authentic honne behind conventional tatemae is often construed as an act of unselfishness and sociability, rather than of deception or hypocrisy. A case in point: the man who hired fake parents for his wedding because his real ones were dead eventually told his wife. It went fine. She said that she understood that his goal was not to deceive her but to avoid trouble at their wedding. She even thanked him for being so considerate

Behind the veil of families: emotions and carthasis for rent

Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry

He began researching phrases related to the idea of an imaginary family, and came across “The Family Romance of Neurotics,” an essay by Freud, published in 1909, about children who believe that their parents are impostors, and that their real parents are nobles or royals. According to Freud, this fantasy is a child’s way of coping with the inevitable, painful experience of disillusionment in his or her parents. If parents never stopped appearing as all-powerful, generous, and infallible, as they do to their small children, nobody would ever become independent; yet how can anyone bear the sudden, irretrievable loss of such beloved beings? The “family romance” allows the child to hold on to the ideal a bit longer, by reassigning it to “new and aristocratic parents”—whose wonderful characteristics, Freud wrote, are always “derived entirely from real recollections of the actual and humble ones.” In this sense, the child is not “getting rid of” the parents but “exalting” them, and the whole project of replacing the parents with superior versions “is only an expression of the child’s longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and loveliest of women.”

I decided to splurge on an in-room massage. Unlike the sessions with the weeping swordsman and the rental mother, a massage wouldn’t count as a work expense. On the other hand, I reasoned, I had missed a shrink appointment back in New York, which cost more than the massage, so I was really saving money. Two hours later, a smiling young woman knocked on the door, waited to be asked inside, took off her shoes, and gave me a form to sign. The form said that I agreed not to demand a sexual massage, and that if I was a man I would keep the hotel-room door ajar. Everything contributed to the dreamlike atmosphere: her soft voice and sure touch, the fact that I was lying on the bed, and the compactness of Tokyo hotel rooms, which meant that she periodically had to move things around to make enough room to stand. At some point, I realized that she was kneeling next to me on the bed. How strange that it was somehow O.K. for us to be in bed like this together. “Your shoulders are so hard!” she said, somehow releasing the muscles with her fingers. I felt full of love and gratitude, and thought about how the fact that I was paying her, which could have felt uncomfortable, was instead a source of joy and relief, because it meant that I didn’t have to think about anything at all. I could just relax. It felt like unconditional love—the kind you don’t get, or ask for, from people in your life, because they have needs, too, and you always have to take turns. I didn’t have to give her a massage or listen to her problems, because I had given her money, with which she could do anything she wanted: pay bills, buy an aquamarine coat, or even hire someone to give her a massage or listen to her problems. This hour, during which she paid attention to me and I didn’t pay attention to her, wasn’t going to be entered in a ledger where she could accumulate resentment toward me over the years. I didn’t have to feel guilty: that was what I was paying for.

One woman had been impersonating a man’s wife for seven years: the real wife had put on weight, so the husband hired the stand-in to go out with him and his friends. The same actress had also replaced overweight mothers at school events; the children of overweight parents may be subject to bullying. Ichinokawa and Ishii told me many more stories. A hostess in a cabaret club hired a client to request her. A blind woman rented a seeing friend to identify the good-looking men at a singles dance. A pregnant woman rented a mother to persuade her boyfriend to acknowledge their child, and a young man rented a father to conciliate the parents of his pregnant lover.

If he ever becomes a father, how will his feelings toward his own children be different from what he felt on the job? “I’m worried now that I might just end up acting a good father,” he said.

After the Second World War, a new constitution, drawn up during the Allied occupation, sought to supplant the ie with a Western-style, “democratic” nuclear family. Forced marriages were outlawed, spouses became legal equals, and property was distributed evenly among a couple’s children, regardless of gender and birth order. With postwar economic growth and the rise of corporate culture, ie households became less common, while apartment-dwelling nuclear households—consisting of a salaryman, a housewife, and their children—proliferated. During the economic boom of the eighties, women increasingly worked outside the home. The birth rate went down, while the divorce rate and the number of single-person households went up. So did life expectancy, and the proportion of older people. That’s when the first wave of rental families appeared. In 1989, Satsuki Ōiwa, the president of a Tokyo company that specialized in corporate employee training, began to rent out children and grandchildren to neglected elders—an idea she got from hearing corporate workers fret about being too busy to visit their parents. Ōiwa’s service was widely covered in the press; within a few years, she had dispatched relatives to more than a hundred clients. One couple hired a son to listen to the father’s hard-luck stories. Their real son lived with them, but refused to listen to the stories. The couple’s real grandson, moreover, was now past infancy, and the grandparents missed touching a baby’s skin. The price of a three-hour visit from a rental son and daughter-in-law, in possession of both an infant child and a high tolerance for unhappy stories, was eleven hundred dollars. Other clients included a young couple who rented substitute grandparents for their child, and a bachelor who rented a wife and daughter in order to experience having the kind of nuclear family he’d seen on TV. The idea of rental relatives took root in the public imagination. Postmodernism was in the air, and, in an age of cultural relativism, rental relativism fit right in.

Hired mourners existed in ancient Greece, Rome, and China, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in the early Islamic world; they were denounced by Solon, by St. Paul, and by St. John Chrysostom. They still exist in China, India, and, lately, England, where an Essex-based service, Rent A Mourner, has been operating since 2013. And what are babysitters, nurses, and cooks if not rental relatives, filling some of the roles traditionally performed by mothers, daughters, and wives?

One Hagemashi-tai client simply didn’t want to tell his fiancée that his parents were dead, so he rented replacements.

Ishii says that, two or three times a year, he stages entire fake weddings. The cost is around five million yen (around forty-seven thousand dollars). In some cases, the bride invites real co-workers, friends, and family members. In others, everyone is an actor except the bride and her parents. The rental best man gives a speech, often bringing the rental guests to tears. When Ishii plays the groom, he experiences complicated emotions. A fake wedding, he says, is just as much work to organize as a real one, and he and the client plan together for months. Invariably, Ishii says, “I start to fall for her.” When it comes to the kiss, some brides prefer to fake it—they touch cheeks so it looks like they’re kissing—but others opt for the real thing. Ishii tries to pretend he’s acting in a movie, but often, he says, “I feel like I’m really getting married to this woman.”

I asked about the relationship between a real family and a rental one. Ishii replied that, although a rental family wasn’t real, it could in some sense be “more than a family.” This notion struck me as somewhat abstruse, but Reiko said she understood perfectly. “If I hadn’t gotten a divorce and was still married, I don’t think that I would be laughing like this, or that I would be feeling this happy,” she said. “It’s not necessarily the case that the real family is the best thing that happens.”

A lot of problems, it seemed, were caused by some missing person, and often the simplest solution was to find a substitute

Ishii told me that, since 2009, he has played the husband to a hundred women. About sixty of those jobs were ongoing. At one point, early in his career, he was in ten families at the same time. It was not a sustainable workload. “You feel like you have someone’s life on your shoulders,” he said. He has since implemented a policy that no actor may play more than five roles at a time.

families are defined by “a love that money can’t buy” is relatively recent. In preindustrial times, the basic economic unit was the family, and each new child meant another pair of hands. After industrialization, people started working outside the home for a fixed wage, and each new child meant another mouth to feed. The family became an unconditionally loving sanctuary in a market-governed world.

Yūichi Ishii, the founder of Family Romance, told me that he and his “cast” actively strategize in order to engineer outcomes like Nishida’s, in which the rental family makes itself redundant in the client’s life. His goal, he said, is “to bring about a society where no one needs our service.”

Like many aspects of Japanese society, rental relatives are often explained with reference to the binary of honne and tatemae, or genuine individual feelings and societal expectations. Authenticity and consistency aren’t necessarily valued for their own sake, and the concealment of authentic honne behind conventional tatemae is often construed as an act of unselfishness and sociability, rather than of deception or hypocrisy. A case in point: the man who hired fake parents for his wedding because his real ones were dead eventually told his wife. It went fine. She said that she understood that his goal was not to deceive her but to avoid trouble at their wedding. She even thanked him for being so considerate

Technicolour Consumerism!

Lala land

Lala land fills me with the magic of dreams. I loved seeing two dreamers in defiance of their normal lives.

The force of their dreaming coloured the early scenes, transforming something as boring as a shoebox bedroom into a vehicle for the magical.

Dreams need believers to live. That's what Sebastian and Mia do for each other - their mutual love and encouragement breathed life and colour into each others dreams.

It's sad when they parted to continue living their dreams. At a certain point, as their dreams took life, they stopped the magic of dreaming and each settled into the comfort of life.

It leaves me thinking that the magic of dreams is in the pursuit of it. And when the dreams of today, are filled with life tomorrow, to give rise to more dreams. And on and on I'd float, bouyed by the magic of dreams, always light and free from the boredom of comfort.

The Transformer of Autonomous Farmbots Can Do 100 Jobs on Its Own

The first fully autonomous ground vehicles hitting the market aren’t cars or delivery trucks—they’re ­robo­-farmhands.

Dot isn’t just a tractor that can drive without a human for backup. It’s the Transformer of ag-bots, capable of performing 100-plus jobs, from hay baler and seeder to rock picker and manure spreader, via an ­arsenal of tool modules. And though the hulking machine can carry 40,000 pounds, it navigates fields with balletic precision.

Uber Makes Peace With Cities by Spilling Its Secrets

Today, the curb represents the most contested space in the urban world. Cyclists pedal through bike lanes, cars battle for parking spots. Taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts pick up and drop off riders. Delivery trucks unload Amazon Prime boxes and buses pull in and out of stops. People on foot scuttle through it all, trying not to get hit.

All of these debates that people are having, you have to have some kind of shared truth

Uber's New Direction: Move Slow and Test Things

In February his deputies appeared at an all-hands meeting to sell the company’s 18,000 employees on the importance of one metric: the ratio of driver or rider complaints to rides booked. That ratio needs to be reduced—a lot—in 2018, he told them. (He won’t specify the company’s 2018 target, but he said, completely deadpan, “Zero is zero.” Note: Even the Pershing didn’t have zero defects.) He believes the ratio is a good metric to use because it can be improved only if operations, technology, and customer service work together. “It’s a unifier,” he said. At Expedia, he worked on reducing a similar complaint metric, and the experience cemented his belief: As the measure improved, so did sales.

Khosrowshahi’s vision for Uber, as he relayed it, was to ask people to do their jobs correctly every single day. “It’s a game of inches,” he said.

Growth, not quality, had been its guiding principle for too long,

Zero Defects. The idea was, basically, to instill in workers the will to prevent problems during design and manufacture rather than go back and fix them later.

Instapaper - leading with porous design

What Design Chiefs At Uber, IBM, And Microsoft Care About In 2018–And Why

Inclusive design for Allen doesn’t mean creating one thing for all people; rather it is creating many different ways for many different kinds of people to participate in an experience. In an ideal world, the result is technology that fits each person and creates a sense of belonging regardless of physical ability, cognitive ability, and social context.

designing systems that don't alienate. open porous systems Vs gated ones

Joanna Peña-Bickley, head of design for Amazon AWS Internet of Things, puts it: “If you have design in the C-suite you are more likely to be the disruptor, not the disrupted.”

design is not just what it looks like and feels like. It is not even how it works. Design today is how it leads.

Microsoft: Inclusion and Diversity as a Business Goal

deeply design has integrated into the landscape of corporate America

Microsoft's human-centered AI philosophy [instapaper]

The Real Story Behind Microsoft’s Quietly Brilliant AI Design

that this idea of trust was thorny, and important: Unless the human felt some kind of connection to the machine, they’d never give it a chance to work well after it made even one mistake

how we build trust with machines

company’s governing principles for AI design: that humans be the hero of any story.

Microsoft goals for AI design

there are screens that evolve over time, as the relationship with the user grows.

Microsoft is now trying to build a different model of how AI adapts. The idea isn’t so much to wow anyone up front with what a machine knows–but to quietly gain a user’s faith by offering options that they can choose among, and then, when the time is right, to offering something smarter than you might have expected.

, giving people all these amazing capabilities at once that would still have a 30% probably of being wrong,” says Friedman. “Those models don’t have pacing that builds to high-confidence recommendations, then making a trust leap. We’re trying to pace things and work into a relationship, because you have to mirror how human relationships are built.”

lesson for working with clients - to defer to them with options and mild suggestions to build trust and insight. to offer leaps of authority only occasionally and later

Time and again, it turned out that assistants succeeded not by being smarter than their clients, but rather by deferring to them. This applied directly to how a machine assistant might beha

You garner trust by being open about your limitations, letting the client’s expertise lead the way. But the real secret to gaining trust? Quietly learning more and more about someone until you can surprise them with a level of thoughtfulness that they’d never expected

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Filter bubbles that divide. False news that misleads. Opinion polls that misapprehend. Information cocoons that isolate. Local voices and issues that are ignored.

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How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/03/how-babies-learn-and-why-robots-cant-compete "I asked her about language learning. We knew words mattered, but I’d not heard much talk at playtime. “If we’re not addressing personal, social, emotional development first, you’re not ready to learn,” said Prodger. She explained that before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of “being and belonging”. Too frequently, she thought, our approaches to early learning skipped these steps. It sounded to me like a nice-to-have, not an essential, but research showed otherwise." "They take the kids out to the forest a few days a week, light fires, let them experiment with scissors and ride BMX bikes. If they want to be outside, they go outside. If they fancy returning to the snug, where the youngest infants roll around, that’s where they would go. The environment dictates the learning. The adults aim only to connect and share attention with the children. Reading and writing could wait. Nurseries ought to be as social as possible, and follow kids’ lead in their play. Before kids can get on with learning, we have to ensure they belong" " “What the machine can’t do is be a partner,” Hirsh-Pasek told me. “It isn’t social. It’s interactive without being adaptive.”" "He had discovered that human learning was communal and interactive. For a robot, the acquisition of language was abstract and formulaic. For us, it was embodied, emotive, subjective, quivering with life. The future of intelligence wouldn’t be found in our machines, but in the development of our own minds." " In 2003, the psychologist Patricia Kuhl experimented with teaching American infants Mandarin. Split into three groups (video, audio and flesh-and-blood teacher) only those with a human tutor learned anything at all. In 2010 a study of the wildly popular Baby Einstein vocabulary-building DVDs (Time called them “Crack for Babies”) revealed that infants who watched them “showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it”. Nor did babies learn words by eavesdropping on parental conversations or listening to In Our Time on Radio 4, however soothing the mellifluous tones of Melvyn Bragg. More than words, it took a human being for a baby to learn language. They could not learn from screens." "Erika Christakis, early-childhood expert and author of The Importance of Being Little, charts the slow descent in preschool learning from a multidimensional, ideas-based approach to a two-dimensional naming-and-labelling curriculum. Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia asks if kindergarten is really the new first grade. The expectation that kindergarteners – aged five or six – can read is now commonplace. Yet this is counter to all the evidence. A Cambridge study comparing groups of children who started formal literacy lessons at five and seven found that starting two years earlier made no difference at all to a child’s reading ability aged 11, “but the children who started at five developed less-positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those who started later”." "These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life." "In her book, she suggested six Cs for modern learning: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence. Truisms, I had thought, but unlike much education policy, drawn from scientific evidence. If I was to take away one thing, she said, it should be that “from the earliest ages, we learn from people”." "He had given up building robots that would compete with humans and instead turned his attention to the augmentation of human learning. What had changed his mind was the process of actually raising a child"

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# [How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete](http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/03/how-babies-learn-and-why-robots-cant-compete) > I asked her about language learning. We knew words mattered, but I’d not heard much talk at playtime. “If we’re not addressing personal, social, emotional development first, you’re not ready to learn,” said Prodger. She explained that before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of “being and belonging”. Too frequently, she thought, our approaches to early learning skipped these steps. It sounded to me like a nice-to-have, not an essential, but research showed otherwise. > They take the kids out to the forest a few days a week, light fires, let them experiment with scissors and ride BMX bikes. If they want to be outside, they go outside. If they fancy returning to the snug, where the youngest infants roll around, that’s where they would go. The environment dictates the learning. The adults aim only to connect and share attention with the children. Reading and writing could wait. Nurseries ought to be as social as possible, and follow kids’ lead in their play. Before kids can get on with learning, we have to ensure they belong > “What the machine can’t do is be a partner,” Hirsh-Pasek told me. “It isn’t social. It’s interactive without being adaptive.” > He had discovered that human learning was communal and interactive. For a robot, the acquisition of language was abstract and formulaic. For us, it was embodied, emotive, subjective, quivering with life. The future of intelligence wouldn’t be found in our machines, but in the development of our own minds. > In 2003, the psychologist Patricia Kuhl experimented with teaching American infants Mandarin. Split into three groups (video, audio and flesh-and-blood teacher) only those with a human tutor learned anything at all. In 2010 a study of the wildly popular Baby Einstein vocabulary-building DVDs (Time called them “Crack for Babies”) revealed that infants who watched them “showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it”. Nor did babies learn words by eavesdropping on parental conversations or listening to In Our Time on Radio 4, however soothing the mellifluous tones of Melvyn Bragg. More than words, it took a human being for a baby to learn language. They could not learn from screens. > Erika Christakis, early-childhood expert and author of The Importance of Being Little, charts the slow descent in preschool learning from a multidimensional, ideas-based approach to a two-dimensional naming-and-labelling curriculum. Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia asks if kindergarten is really the new first grade. The expectation that kindergarteners – aged five or six – can read is now commonplace. Yet this is counter to all the evidence. A Cambridge study comparing groups of children who started formal literacy lessons at five and seven found that starting two years earlier made no difference at all to a child’s reading ability aged 11, “but the children who started at five developed less-positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those who started later”. > These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life. > In her book, she suggested six Cs for modern learning: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence. Truisms, I had thought, but unlike much education policy, drawn from scientific evidence. If I was to take away one thing, she said, it should be that “from the earliest ages, we learn from people”. > He had given up building robots that would compete with humans and instead turned his attention to the augmentation of human learning. What had changed his mind was the process of actually raising a child

Test

How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete

I asked her about language learning. We knew words mattered, but I’d not heard much talk at playtime. “If we’re not addressing personal, social, emotional development first, you’re not ready to learn,” said Prodger. She explained that before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of “being and belonging”. Too frequently, she thought, our approaches to early learning skipped these steps. It sounded to me like a nice-to-have, not an essential, but research showed otherwise.

They take the kids out to the forest a few days a week, light fires, let them experiment with scissors and ride BMX bikes. If they want to be outside, they go outside. If they fancy returning to the snug, where the youngest infants roll around, that’s where they would go. The environment dictates the learning. The adults aim only to connect and share attention with the children. Reading and writing could wait. Nurseries ought to be as social as possible, and follow kids’ lead in their play. Before kids can get on with learning, we have to ensure they belong

“What the machine can’t do is be a partner,” Hirsh-Pasek told me. “It isn’t social. It’s interactive without being adaptive.”

He had discovered that human learning was communal and interactive. For a robot, the acquisition of language was abstract and formulaic. For us, it was embodied, emotive, subjective, quivering with life. The future of intelligence wouldn’t be found in our machines, but in the development of our own minds.

In 2003, the psychologist Patricia Kuhl experimented with teaching American infants Mandarin. Split into three groups (video, audio and flesh-and-blood teacher) only those with a human tutor learned anything at all. In 2010 a study of the wildly popular Baby Einstein vocabulary-building DVDs (Time called them “Crack for Babies”) revealed that infants who watched them “showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it”. Nor did babies learn words by eavesdropping on parental conversations or listening to In Our Time on Radio 4, however soothing the mellifluous tones of Melvyn Bragg. More than words, it took a human being for a baby to learn language. They could not learn from screens.

Erika Christakis, early-childhood expert and author of The Importance of Being Little, charts the slow descent in preschool learning from a multidimensional, ideas-based approach to a two-dimensional naming-and-labelling curriculum. Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia asks if kindergarten is really the new first grade. The expectation that kindergarteners – aged five or six – can read is now commonplace. Yet this is counter to all the evidence. A Cambridge study comparing groups of children who started formal literacy lessons at five and seven found that starting two years earlier made no difference at all to a child’s reading ability aged 11, “but the children who started at five developed less-positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those who started later”.

These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life.

In her book, she suggested six Cs for modern learning: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence. Truisms, I had thought, but unlike much education policy, drawn from scientific evidence. If I was to take away one thing, she said, it should be that “from the earliest ages, we learn from people”.

He had given up building robots that would compete with humans and instead turned his attention to the augmentation of human learning. What had changed his mind was the process of actually raising a child

Test title

Test body 

Hope is a beggar...

Faith takes control

Desert island playlist

1 The XX - xx
2 The Libertines - the likely lads
3 Paul Kalkbrenner - train
4 Nosaj thing - kexp live mix
5 smashing pumpkins - adore
6 ash - nuclear sounds
7 chemical brothers - another world
8 jay z - grey album
9 Debussy - Clair de lune
10 opening theme to Planet Earth
11 Ratatat
12 gattaca soundtrack
13 yeah yeah yeah s

Desert island playlist

1 The XX - xx
2 The Libertines - the likely lads
3 Paul Kalkbrenner - train
4 Nosaj thing - kexp live mix
5 smashing pumpkins - adore
6 ash - nuclear sounds
7 chemical brothers - another world
8 jay z - grey album
9 Debussy - Clair de lune
10 opening theme to Planet Earth
11 Ratatat
12 gattaca soundtrack
13 yeah yeah yeah s

Systems or content

What is the foundation of a good business?

Singapore makes me believe it's lifestyle. Jakarta convinces me it's the logistical system.

A beautiful system wrapped in great content.

Harmonica

Harmonica