Danny Fortson

Alison Gopnik tells Danny Fortson that children solve problems differently from current AI. Her acronym is MESS: model building, exploration, and social learning. Model building is the claim of her book The Scientist in the Crib. Children hold theories, test them, and make counterfactuals, more than spotting correlations. Exploration is what adults call getting into everything, an explore-versus-exploit tradeoff. She cites the Goldilocks effect, work by Berkeley colleague Celeste Kidd: even a nine-month-old looks longest at a just-right amount of new information. Social learning is watching people nearby and trying to join in. She sets AlphaZero, which can beat chess grandmasters, against he

Danny Fortson asks Mike Selden, founder of Finless Foods, when people could try the fish the company was growing. Selden says the plan was restaurants by the end of 2019, starting with a limited release. The fish he wanted to grow was bluefin tuna. He calls that a conservation choice. Bluefin moves on and off the threatened list and sells at a high price, but price is not the reason. A bluefin cell costs the same to culture as a tilapia cell, so he would rather grow the fish people value most. The first sales target he names is price parity: the grown tuna at the same price as caught bluefin.