Alison Gopnik: Computers Have Had Unpredictable Causal Powers Since Turing, Beyond LLMs
AlisonGopnik · x · 2026-09-04
Cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik argues that abstract text-based characters, especially collective ones, already influence people significantly — the first novel, Don Quixote, is literally about novels causing people to behave like novels. She adds an orthogonal point: since Turing, computers have always had genuine and unpredictable causal powers, unrelated to language or large models.
Related event: Millière vs. Gopnik: AI Agents, Causal Power, and the Intentional Stance(5 posts)→
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