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The Current Transcript for May 14, 2025

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SPEAKER: Don't you hate it when ChatGPT's writing sounds super robotic and uses words like delve, poised, and efficiency? Well, here's the three-word prompt to make AI actually sound like a human.

MATT GALLOWAY: For years, tech evangelists have promised that the arrival of artificial intelligence would change everything. Well, now it's here. Open your email app and you might be prompted to use AI to help polish what you're writing. Ask any high school, college or university student, and chances are they know someone, maybe themselves, who's used it to write an essay. In 30 minutes, the debate over whether artificial intelligence is actually making us better writers or just dulling our creativity for the sake of efficiency. And yes, for better or worse, I wrote that. Also this morning.

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ALEX HUTCHINSON: Exploration is in our nature, not exploring is also in our nature. And so finding that balance between the two is really the tension.

MG: From ordering something new on a menu to discovering your next favourite place to visit, there is a thrill we get from going off the beaten path and exploring new ground. The writer Alex Hutchinson says it's a muscle worth exercising, especially now in an era where algorithms would gladly tell you what to do next. In an hour, the appeal of uncertainty, how screen time is eroding our desire to play, and why the older we get, the less prone we are to exploring new things in favour of simply enjoying what we already like. But we begin with our national affairs panel on a new prime minister, his new cabinet, and some big challenges ahead. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

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NATIONAL AFFAIRS PANEL

Guests: Rosemary Barton, Stephanie Levitz, Kathleen Petty

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MARK CARNEY: Our government will deliver its mandate for change with urgency and determination. We're going to deliver that mandate with a new team, purpose-built for this hinge moment in Canada's history. This cabinet is smaller and more focused than those of previous governments. It will operate with a commitment to true cabinet government, with everyone expected and empowered to show leadership.

MG: Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled his new cabinet yesterday and shared a bit of his government's plans for what that government will do once they're back in Parliament. To help us understand who is in, who is out, and what happens now, we have convened our national affairs panel. Stephanie Levitz, senior reporter for the Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau. Rosemary Barton is the CBC's chief political correspondent and host of Rosemary Barton Live. And Kathleen Petty is the host of CBC’s Alberta at Noon and the West of Centre podcast. Good morning, everyone.

ALL GUESTS: Good morning. Good morning.

MG: Rosie, we'll talk about who is in and who is out in a moment, but just briefly for us as we start, what did the prime minister need to do with this announcement?

ROSEMARY BARTON: He needed to show that the party looks different, that the change that Canadians thought they were buying into with Mark Carney as a different kind of leader with different set of priorities is reflected around that table. And he needed to try and find a way to keep some of the experience that was there to deal with, most notably, Donald Trump. Did he strike that balance? Ish, you know? I think if you were looking for change, you saw it. There's a lot of new faces around the table, a lot of older faces who didn't make it back. And if you were wanting to be reassured, you saw some of that too in people like Anita Anand and Mélanie Joly and Dominic LeBlanc.

MG: Steph, pick up on that. What message is Carney trying to send here, do you think?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: I mean, what he's working on is trying to send a message of a focused cabinet, right, that in his view is aligned with what he sees as the key priorities for his government, absolutely economics, absolutely dealing with Trump, absolutely trade. I mean, if you unpack some of the new titles given to ministers, there seemed to be some overlap between Minister Dominic LeBlanc is in charge of one Canadian economy, Chrystia Freeland is in charge of internal trade. Like these seem like similar things, but it's his economic message that's the thing. And I thought a lot about, you know, the day that Justin Trudeau was sworn in with his majority government in 2015, and he made a big show of gender parity. And he was asked why, and he said, well, because it's 2015. And all day yesterday, I was looking for that phrase, right? What was Mark Carney going to say that was going to become a defining feature or that could become a defining feature? And it was the build now. I think that's the theme of this cabinet, trying to build something forward. Whether he achieves it or whether that's a slogan that comes back to bite him, I guess we'll see.

MG: Kathleen, did you hear that key phrase, to Steph's point, that will define this cabinet from a distance?

KATHLEEN PETTY: Well, I think the message he's sending is we're going to roll up our sleeves and get things done, which is ambitious. And I think most people can see that's what it is. But once you've done that, then the expectations are set. So he has raised expectations, I would argue, substantially. And if we're talking about the cabinet in particular is, is this the cabinet that can deliver that? And, you know, I take Rosie's point that there's lots of new people, but a lot of the key ministers in the key portfolios are still part of the Trudeau team. And part of the book on the Trudeau team, at least in recent years, was they weren't getting stuff done. They announced a lot, but they didn't do a lot. So I think people are going to see whether this is a do-a-lot government.

MG: Rosie, the prime minister said this is a purpose-built cabinet. Who's on the front bench?

ROSEMARY BARTON: So Kathleen's right. I mean, if you're looking for the front bench to see change, you're not necessarily going to see a lot of it there. Dominic LeBlanc, as Steph pointed out, is the minister in charge of a new category of Canada-US trade, that one economy, and intergovernmental affairs. François-Philippe Champagne is in charge of finance and the National Revenue Agency. They put those two together, which I'm told makes a lot more sense than what it did. Anita Anand is the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly is the Minister of Industry, which will deal with a lot of these areas that have had tariffs. So, you know, some of those people are definitely familiar faces. I guess I think we need to see whether the prime minister's very ambitious agenda propels them to work differently than it did under Justin Trudeau. This is a different kind of leer, and he made it pretty clear what his expectations in that clip were for these ministers too. Like they've got to perform, And I don't get the impression that this is a person, a leader who's incredibly patient with people who underperform. So I suspect if they don't do that, they won't be in those jobs very long. He added a couple new faces to key portfolios. Gregor Robertson, the former mayor of Vancouver, is in charge of housing. This fellow named Tim Hodgson is in charge of Enercan, which is very important, developing new energy projects. So there's a little bit of new blood in that front bench, but I think given the moment we're in dealing with Donald Trump, you know, some of those old faces had to stay given the relationships that they have south of the border.

MG: Steph, the phone does not ring for everyone, and some people are inevitably left out. Nathaniel Erskine-Smith was briefly the housing minister. He's now out of cabinet entirely and he wrote on social media, it is impossible not to feel disrespected. What do you make of that?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: Yeah, I mean, that's why cabinet making is called an art, not a science, right? Like art is very subjective and everybody thinks, there's a lot of MPs through every single government who think, if only I were in cabinet, I could make a difference, right? And I think the funny thing, though, I mean, it has to be said, Mark Carney became prime minister scant weeks ago and he did swear in a new cabinet. And you have to wonder, with those people that are no longer there, Nate Erskine-Smith among them, well, then what was that a few weeks ago? What was that supposed to do? What message was that supposed to send to them? And then when you look at the cabinet that was sworn in yesterday, if you're Nate Erskine-Smith or you're someone who didn't make the cut and you're saying, well, what does this tell me about how I get into cabinet, right? I mean, we talk a lot about Mr. Carney's focus on the economy, but in this cabinet, it was also highly political, Matt. There are a lot of political choices there, you know, some made in pushback to criticism he received with his original cabinet not having official languages, for example, specifically in the portfolio of the newly styled heritage minister, dropping a minister for women and gender equality, he brought that back. There's a nod to some of the issues that were successful for the Conservatives like crime and cost of living, with a secretary of state responsible for combating crime. So my point is if you're Nate and you think, well, what was I brought in to do six weeks ago and why wasn't that good enough now? There's no clear answer.

MG: Some of the politics, Kathleen, is in regional distribution and making sure that the entire country feels heard and seen. From Edmonton, you have Eleanor Olszewski, who was made Minister of Emergency Management and Community Resilience and the minister responsible for Prairie's Economic Development Canada. Given everything, and we'll talk more about Danielle Smith and separation in a moment, but given everything that's going on in Alberta and Saskatchewan and Manitoba and parts of British Columbia as well, what message do you think that's intended to send to the west, showing regional distribution?

KATHLEEN PETTY: Well, someone's always going to have a complaint about it. Let me just say that upfront. It's pretty much guaranteed. I mean, I'll point out Scott Moe congratulated Buckley Belanger, right, who got Secretary of State for Rural Development. There's been nothing about Eleanor Olszewski and her appointment for energy management and prairie economic development, which, you know, I found notable. And then there were complaints about the fact that, you know, there were two Liberals elected in Alberta, and the other one was a Calgary Liberal MP in a riding that, you know, does not vote Liberal, trust me. So it was a bit of a surprise when, and the complaint was, you know, Calgary is the fourth largest city in the country. And the last time Calgary had an MP in cabinet in a Liberal government was Kent Hehr in 2015. And before that, it was in 1972. So, you know, there was, so as much as there is sort of friction between Alberta and the rest of the country, there's friction within Alberta as well in terms of what the representation should look like.

MG: Do you think, I mean, Mark Carney, the prime minister, is from Edmonton. I mean, he spent a lot of time in Edmonton, grew up in Edmonton. Do you think that beyond those, those divisions within the province itself, is there a sign that he is listening? Is there a sense, Kathleen, that he's paying attention to the angst that's unfolding there?

KATHLEEN PETTY: Well, I think certainly with the appointment of Tim Hodgson, it got sort of universal reaction. I will point out, though, that the provincial government didn't respond to his appointment. They only responded to the who was appointed as environment minister. That was very much the focus of Danielle Smith and her chief of staff, because they essentially argue that Julie Dabrusin is Steven Guilbeault 2.0. and another keep it in the ground, as they put it, environment minister. And her chief of staff wrote, fire meet gas. But they said nothing about Hodgson, whereas the industry had a lot of great things to say about Hodgson. I think it's been reported that he served on the board of MEG Energy, and MEG is one of the companies within the Pathways Alliance. And she talked to board members who worked with him, and they remember him as being a very strong director, you know, impressive capital market experience, the new head of MEG Energy, that he was collaborative and hardworking. And generally speaking, across the board from the industry, they think very highly of him. But it is interesting that the industry focused on him, the government focused on the new environment minister.

MG: And Pierre Poilievre focused on what he says is very little change. Have a listen to what the Conservative leader said.

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PIERRE POILIEVRE: In all, 14 Trudeau ministers are now in Carney's cabinet. It's more of the same when Canada needs real change. Even the new additions are problematic. Gregor Robertson was the mayor of Vancouver who pushed for total legalization of hard drugs. Now, he's the housing minister. Well, what's his record on housing? Well, he increased housing taxes in Vancouver by 141%. If this is the new blood that Mr. Carney is bringing into the cabinet, then sadly for Canadians, nothing is going to change, and the role of the Conservative Party will be more important than ever.

MG: Rosie, it would be unlikely to expect Pierre Poilievre to cheer the new cabinet, but what do you make of his comments that this is just another, that it's Trudeau 2.0?

ROSEMARY BARTON: I mean, it did harken back a little bit, I thought, to the election campaign. Sometimes it's hard to turn that off in your brain when you're a politician, to go to, okay, I lost, so here's what I've got to do now. You know, the beginning of that press conference was more magnanimous, talking about how the Conservative Party would support the government if it was good for the country, like talking about the Donald Trump stuff. And then he sort of went on personal attacks about all the people that were the same or similar value set as to Justin Trudeau. Justin Trudo is not here anymore. Mark Carney won. Pierre Poilievre lost. So I think there needs to be a bit of a shift there. What I think Pierre Poilievre did Well yesterday, could have done a little better, but what he tried to do was sort of set expectations of his own, right? Mark Carney was elected by a lot of people with a lot of big promises. And if he can't start delivering on those things pretty quickly, Pierre Poilievre is going to hold his feet to the fire once he gets inside the house. And I think that that's fair, and that is something that Pierre Poilievre needs to keep pushing, that the expectations that the government itself has set need to deliver. And if Canadians don't start feeling that, he's right. They will be disappointed very quickly.

MG: Steph, what did you make of the Conservative leader's tone yesterday?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: I mean, his tone was certainly much more moderated in its timber. You know, like there wasn't that histrionic sort of anger that has sometimes characterized the way Mr. Poilievre responds to things. And I think Rosie's point is well taken, that there were two parts to that speech. And the part where, you know, he laid out what the role of the opposition is in a new government where, you know, it is remains to be seen, it's fair point to make that, You know, I don't know and to what end, but it is a fair point to make that Canadians, as the Conservatives argued during the election, yes, Mr. Carney is a different Liberal leader, but it is effectively giving a Liberal government another term. And so it is fair to look at the past Liberal record on things and wonder, okay, what is going to be different this time? The question for Mr. Poilievre is if you're going to run through this list of attacks on cabinet ministers, well, we're not heading into an election imminently like we had been for the last year, let's say leading up to March. And so the focus for him will have to be on the work his party can do in the house, making decisions, Where can they hold the government to account? Where will they vote on side? But the tone change was notable, and it'll be interesting to see if that is the tone That the opposition intends to take in the house, which is much more house-like, shall we say, I guess in an old kind of way, as opposed to clips for viral social media videos.

MG: Can I just ask you quickly, Steph, I mean, one of the things he was also asked about was whether he knows of any Conservative MPs who are thinking of crossing the floor to the Liberals. They just need a few of those folks to make that trip, and perhaps the election would be a lot further off down the horizon. He said no to that. Is he right in that nobody will cross the floor?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: It's a tricky thing, I mean, to contemplate. If you're a Conservative right now, you're trying to game out your own political future, right? You were not necessarily expecting to get elected to become an opposition backbencher again. And so are you willing to ride this out with Mr. Poilievre as your leader? Are you confident in him? Do you see a horizon where you could be a cabinet minister? If the answer to all of those questions in the current form is no, then would you look at crossing to the Liberals? Is the promise of a cabinet position now, because that's what it would take, right? It would have to be. You're not crossing to be a government backbencher. Is that enough for you to be, and then you would effectively be shunned by your colleagues forever more. That's dangerous stuff. So it's a tough decision to weigh for sure.

MG: Kathleen, Pierre Poilievre is eyeing a seat in Alberta, and he was asked yesterday about Alberta sovereignty. He said he is against separation, but that, in his words, Albertans have a right to be frustrated. What sort of needle is he trying to thread?

KATHLEEN PETTY: Well, that's the needle Danielle Smith is also trying to thread, although she's threading it a little bit differently. It might not be a thread that she's using. It seems more like a yarn of wool, to tell you the truth, trying to get that through the needle. You know, I think that's a pretty straightforward message. It's what you would expect him to say, especially as the leader of the Conservative Party and presumably at some point soon, because of that byelection that will be coming, once again, leader of The Opposition, which he's not, technically, at this point. But that's exactly what you would expect him to say. And really, it's not like he carries a lot of risk. There may well in that riding be people who might lean towards separatism, but let's remember that the MP that won in that riding won with 81.8% of the vote. There was a riding in Saskatchewan where they won by 84%.

MG: It's about as safe as it gets, though.

KATHLEEN PETTY: Yeah, technically not the safest, but pretty darn close. So I'm not sure how delicately he needs to thread that needle. It's a pretty simple message to say, yes, Alberta has been disrespected. Yes, they have legitimate grievances. I mean, that will play well here. And then oppose the idea of separation and sovereignty, because again, if your job is to continue to campaign to be prime minister, which is essentially what he's continuing to do, that absolutely has to be the message that you transmit consistently.

MG: You've all said that the clock is ticking in some ways on Mark Carney. He just became the prime minister, but action is demanded. And he spoke about his governing plans yesterday. Have a listen.

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MARK CARNEY: My last government's first act was to cancel the consumer carbon tax. In this new Parliament, our new government will put more money in Canadians' pockets with a middle-class tax cut that will take effect by Canada Day. We will also cut the GST on homes under $1 million for first-time home buyers and lower the GST on homes between one and one and a half million, helping to promote the goal of affordable home ownership.

MG: Our clock is also ticking. We just have about two minutes left. And so Steph, the King will come to this country at the end of the month to give the speech from the throne and start that new session of Parliament. What will show you that the government is in action?

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: Tactical plans, names of bills, like a process to get it through the House. He's saying by Canada Day. The House is only scheduled to sit for a handful of weeks. That requires a lot of goodwill from the opposition parties to speed things through the legislative process. So actual tangible signs of how he intends to do that will signal that he's really going to do what he says he's going to do, which is move fast.

MG: Stephanie, that's an interesting way to start the end of this. Kathleen, from your perspective, what is going to show you, to Steph's point, that this government is moving fast?

KATHLEEN PETTY: Well, I think to have Danielle Smith at least claim some victories, because I think she needs some victories in dealing with this prime minister and this government. And obviously, she has a very long list. It's a daunting list. There is no way he can meet everything on that list. But if some key areas he can show, you know, substantive, tangible progress, I think that's what a lot of people here will be looking for.

MG: Rosie, last word to you.

ROSEMARY BARTON: Frankly, whether he can delegate. Like he's been the head of a lot of big investment firms and banks.

MG: And said yesterday that he would be responsible for the relationship with the United States.

ROSEMARY BARTON: Yes. Yeah. And as he should be, given he has to maintain that relationship with the president. But now, he has a team around him, and he's going to have to let those ministers do their jobs and get things done. And I think it might be challenging for the prime minister to let that loose a little bit and to step back and focus on certain issues. So how quickly can those ministers get staffed up, can they get briefed up and can they start actually doing their job? There's a cabinet meeting this morning. So maybe that's an indication of how quick the action will be. I really think that Mark Carney's biggest challenge will be managing expectations. But I have never heard a prime minister talk as confidently about his own ambitions as this prime minister. And we'll see whether that is warranted or not.

MG: It's good to get the band back together. We will talk again. Thank you all for being here this morning.

ROSEMARY BARTON: Thanks, Matt.

STEPHANIE LEVITZ: Thank you.

KATHLEEN PETTY: Thanks.

MG: Stephanie Levitz, senior reporter with the Globe and Mail's Ottawa Bureau. Rosemary Barton, CBC's chief political correspondent, host of Rosemary Barten Live. And Kathleen Petty is the host of Alberta at Noon and the West of Centre podcast. Your CBC news is next, and then artificial intelligence is everywhere. Just open your email application and it might ask you whether you want AI to write that email instead. It is a very different skill set than writing on your own. We're going to talk about using AI and how that use is affecting our critical thinking skills for better or for worse. That's coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

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AI WRITING

Guests: Jeanne Beatrix Law, Emily M. Bender

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. Hey Ai, write me an opening line for a national radio program segment about AI’s impact on writing.

SPEAKER: Welcome, listeners, to a thought-provoking discussion on how the burgeoning world of AI writing is poised to reshape one of our most fundamental human abilities, critical thinking.

MG: That's a mouthful. Maybe, maybe our jobs are safe, at least for now. We'll see. Writing used to be just you and the blank page. But now, you are probably seeing AI writing prompts everywhere. Open up a blank email or a blank document, there's often an AI prompt that says, help me write. You might've been tempted by these generate text buttons that whispered, do you really need to write that eBay listing yourself or that job application or that essay? Does every word really need to be yours? It is prompting a fierce debate between people who are worried that outsourcing our writing to AI will erode critical thinking and creativity, and those who think generative AI is opening a new frontier in writing. In a moment, we will hear from someone with serious concerns about the implications of writing with artificial intelligence, but first, I am joined by Jeanne Beatrix Law. She is a professor of English and coordinator of the graduate certificate in AI Writing Technologies at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Jeanne, good morning.

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: Good morning, Matt. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for being here. This is such an interesting subject because, as I say, it seems like it's everywhere when you open these documents or applications. In your world, how are students already using AI to write?

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: Well, and it's not just in my world, I think. I think we see this nationwide in the US and even internationally. There's a lot of data out there that shows students are using AI for some deeply nuanced tasks, right, like starting to write, brainstorming, editing. So they're not just using it to get an answer, let's say for a math quiz or a biology test. They're really using it in deeper nuanced ways.

MG: They may be doing that too, I mean, using it just to get the answers.

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: Yeah, sure.

MG: Do they, is your sense that, I mean, in your experience, do they admit to using artificial intelligence?

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: So I would say at my university, we surveyed 1700 first year writers, and about 40% of them said they use AI in their academic writing. More of them said they use it in social media writing and their workplace writing. But yeah, I think that number is way higher.

MG: So you have written that this could be more of an opportunity for students than a threat. Why do you think it is important for students to learn how to write with generative AI?

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: Well, first of all, what we know is that organizations that predict workforce development, like the World Economic Forum, they really have gone all in with thinking about human collaborations with AI, how we can use AI for critical thinking, for analytical thinking and creative thinking. So I think for me, preparing students to thrive in AI infused workplaces is important for me as a professor. But what I think is also important is teaching students how to ethically and responsibly use AI, and I think that starts in a first year writing course or a general education course at university.

MG: So tell me how you would do this. And explain this in a way that somebody who isn't familiar with ChatGPT or other AI writing would understand this. How do you go about teaching your students to use AI?

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: So I talk to them first day, first week, right? Prompt first model is what we call it, always making sure, number one, that the human is driving. We're never going to offload our creativity to generative AI. We're never going to single prompt. I'm never going to, like what you did when you first introduced the show. Never just put an input in and then just take that output and use it. So what you might want to do is you might want to precisely, rhetorically, effectively use your words to input, and then you want to evaluate and read that output that you get. Then you want to revise it, reflect on it. Maybe you want to throw it away and start all over. And then you input again with different words. No, you didn't quite get this right. Let's change this. How about this? Give me recommendations for this. Get another output. And you continue to converse, I guess would be the way I would put it, or iterate with that machine until that output combined with all of your inputs that you put in aligns to the vision that you wanted originally to have in the writing.

MG: And this is the rhetorical prompting method that you've talked about?

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: It is, yes. And we teach that at Kennesaw State. We have piloted that, and we developed it in 2023. Our research teams continue to test it and iterate on it, both with our students and with students on the Coursera learning platform. And so we really have found that when we develop something that looks a lot like the writing process already, which the prompting method does, students remember. They bring that prior knowledge of how they learned to write or how they were introduced to writing in grade school or primary school, and they can engage with that process again. The only difference is you're explicitly putting those things into the chatbot.

MG: You said earlier that this is a way to teach students how to use AI ethically, but also responsibly, and that if you use AI responsibly, this can augment human creativity. What does that mean? What does that mean, responsibly? Why do you use that word and how do you define it in this context?

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: I would define responsibly as a use by a human, right? The human decides how to use that output, right? The AI is kind of agnostic to that output. The human decides how to use it. So what we teach our students is a four-part method where they have to ask themselves questions, four questions. Is this output useful to me? Is it relevant to others? Is it accurate? So we've got to factcheck that output. And then is it harmless? What is the degree of harmlessness in regards to prompt engineering, right? The prompt itself. An example of this would be if I am a staff member at a university and I have an agenda for a meeting, let's say, right, and the meeting, someone asked not to be named at the meeting, and I put the agenda in and asked for minutes from a large language model, and then the large language model gives me those minutes, and it names that person. That's the type of harmlessness we teach our students to think about, not harmlessness in terms of environmental impact or the larger ecosystem. We're talking specifically about how they use it for writing. So if any of those questions that they ask themselves, if they can't say with certainty, yes, I'm sure, then they go back and continue to converse and continue to refine and polish until they get to a point where they can. And I think that's important. But I also think, Matt, it's important to acknowledge the limitations of that method and the idea that, you know, some students might overrely on generative AI.

MG: And just use generative AI to create the essay for them. They're not having a conversation. They create a prompt that leads the service or the technology to write the essay for them and they're done.

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: Right. And I think what we see, I think my response to that is what we've seen at my university, I'm at a large public university with a fair number of first generation students. And so we surveyed 1700 first year students and asked them about their thoughts on AI and cheating, and it was really interesting the answers that we got. What we saw over from 2023 to 2024 was a dramatic increase in the number of students who didn't think using AI was cheating. But we also saw that more than 60% of students surveyed said, oh yeah, sometimes it's cheating. And it's cheating if I don't have my voice in it. It's cheating if I use it for this purpose, right?

MG: Well, and making sure that their voice is in it is really important because one of the real concerns around this is that A, there are people who believe it's not writing, but also that you are dulling critical thinking and you are dulling, if you allow AI to write your first draught rather than staring at the blank page and trying to figure out something creatively that will fill that page, that you reduce critical thinking, and that you circumvent what writing is, which is it's hard. I mean, it's hard work.

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: It is, for sure.

MG: So what do you say to people who raise those criticisms?

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: I would have a couple of responses. My first response, I think, would be one of accessibility. So for many writers who are neurodiverse, I'm one of those writers. For neurodiverse writers, the tyranny of the blank page can be part of what stops us, what paralyses us from being able to write. And so using a large language model to give you ideas, like if I already have my topic and I'm just looking for ideas to scaffold it or to organize it or to structure it or give me recommendations on how best to talk about this idea, that can be a game changer for folks who are neurodivergent in terms of writing. The other thing I might say for students learning to use this is learning to use it as part of the writing process recursively. So it may be the beginning or it may be the middle of your writing process, but it can never be the end. You always have to end it.

MG: How do your colleagues react? I mean, as somebody who is an English professor who teaches people to write, how do your colleagues respond to you embracing AI in that writing process?

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: I would say there are some who agree and some who disagree vehemently, and I understand those disagreements. I think some people come at the disagreement from an environmental impact stance, from other stances. I think we're getting better with some of, I think, you know, the models are getting better in terms of environmental impact. But some of the colleagues who agree agree really because they are thinking about the responsible use, right, not one and done, but actually making it part of the writing process. Because when students get to workplaces, they're going to be using AI as part of the writing process. I mean, in the US, you know, there's some great statistics that show that 94% of companies expect their employees to use AI, but only a third of those companies are training their employees to use AI. So if they're not getting training, but they're expected to know how to use generative AI, maybe we ought to be helping them on that journey in university.

MG: I have to let you go, but very briefly, what is one piece of advice you would give to somebody who wants to be a better writer while using AI?

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: Always make sure that you are the human at the helm. Don't offload your creativity. Use generative AI to amplify it.

MG: All right. Jeanne, we'll leave it there. That's a concise lesson. I appreciate that. Thank you very much.

JEANNE BEATRIX LAW: Thank you, Matt. I enjoyed it.

MG: Jeanne Beatrix Law is a professor of English and coordinator of the graduate certificate in AI Writing Technologies at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Emily M. Bender is a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, author of the book, “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want.” Emily M. Bender, good morning to you.

EMILY M. BENDER: Good morning.

MG: We just heard about the tyranny of the page, how AI can help people confront that tyranny, but also, I mean, partially ensuring that they are still the human at the centre of this. This technology is everywhere. What do you make of the use of AI to make us better writers? Is that possible?

EMILY M. BENDER: It makes me sad to hear about students being told that they need to learn this technology. Your previous guest said that some statistics about all companies expect people to use this, but they're not training their workers in using it. All of that is just part of this current hype bubble. And I really wish that we could refocus in higher education on nurturing critical thinking and self-expression. And all of that is deeply wrapped up in the process of learning to write.

MG: What's wrong with using that technology to be a better writer?

EMILY M. BENDER: Well, there's a couple of problems. First of all, the technology itself is unethically produced. So it's simply not possible to use it in an ethical fashion.

MG: What do you mean?

EMILY M. BENDER: Well, there’s the environmental issues that your previous guest alluded to, there's the fact that it's all built on appropriated, if not stolen data, that was not collected with consent. And there's an enormous amount of exploitative labour practices in the way that the data workers are treated, people in Kenya and Venezuela and other places who have to do really grinding work looking at terrible outputs so that the users at large don't see those outputs. So that's the systems that we're talking about. And to be presenting this to students as something that could be used ethically, I find a problem. That's sort of the first level.

MG: If you go deeper, do you have a moral issue with schools teaching kids how to use this technology in settings that are ostensibly about, you know, tapping into or cultivating a sense of critical thinking, a sense of, you know, just base-level creativity? You have a blank page, you need to fill it, and you need to kind of put the gut work in to make that happen.

EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah, I wouldn't say so much that's a moral issue as a professional issue. Our job as educators is to help students learn to think, and writing and thinking are inextricably twined. And, you know, if you say, you know, put your theme in and then, you know, outcomes, some notes, a first draught, and then keep working with that, that is part of the process, right? We are, there are some skills that are being trained there, but it sort of gets removed from the person's own thoughts and the work of taking your own thoughts and turning them into the page. I think you can't skip that part and expect to learn how to do it.

MG: Can you explain just very briefly, for people who don't understand this, just how something like ChatGPT works and how that feeds into your concerns around this technology?

EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah, so ChatGPT is built on something called a large language model. Sometimes people misspeak and call it a language learning model. It's not. All of these words like learning and artificial intelligence are anthropomorphizing terms that sort of muddy the waters here. But a large-language model is a statistical model of literally what letters go where in a very large collection of text. So it's modelling words, but not what the words mean, just sort of how they're spelled and what spellings go next to each other. And then when you use ChatGPT, what the system is doing is repeatedly answering the question, what's a likely word to come next? And it seems like it's doing so much more because what comes out is plausible looking text in languages we speak, and then we make sense of it.

MG: What do you make of the fact that if I were to open the email application on the phone that's sitting next to me right now and go to send you an email, it would prompt me to use the technology to write you an email, to write you a polished email, to write you perhaps a better email than I could write at this hour?

EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah, I mean, what's a better email, really?

MG: But it is everywhere, right? Like it is everywhere, not just in education settings, but in our personal lives and professional lives as well.

EMILY M. BENDER: Oh yeah, absolutely. And that's because there's enormous amounts of money behind this. Huge swaths of the tech sector are bought into this, and in order to get their return on investment need to convince everybody that it's useful.

MG: If we were able to train AI on data that was not, as you said, perhaps stolen, or at the very least, taken without people's permission to help build the models, and if we were somehow able to address the environmental concerns, would it be possible to collaborate with AI to make something that is creative, do you think, to produce something that is creative and perhaps park some of those ethical concerns?

EMILY M. BENDER: So collaborate is one of these anthropomorphizing terms. I would never say that I collaborate with my calculator to solve a math problem, for example. I think you could imagine a collective of artists, let's say, of writers, who decided to contribute their writing to a system that would then make paper mâché of it, and they would sort of collectively be collaborating with each other through that system. So, and then, you know, assuming that it was done without environmental impact and so on, then yes, that would be okay as a kind of an artists’ collective.

MG: The paper mâché thing is, you've talked about this before, right, that what people are creating isn't writing, that it's some sort of linguistic paper mâché.

EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah, I mean, what people create could be writing, but what comes out of these systems is linguistic paper mâché. And that's, I think, particularly important if you're looking at the output of these things as a source of information, which it absolutely is not. It’s, the only information inside of ChatGPT is information about which words go where in its training data.

MG: Can I go back to that idea of the tyranny of the blank page, that there are people who would say when they're trying to write, it is just too much, and that if this prompt helps them get started when they have been stuck, that there is something beneficial to that. It doesn't mean that you use it. It doesn't mean that you use all of it. Maybe you go back as a human being and revise it and improve upon it, but that that's the jump off point. Is that not better than nothing?

EMILY M. BENDER: So, you know, it's interesting. Oftentimes people will say, well, we're using ChatGPT because it's better than nothing. And you’ll hear that in all kinds of contexts. So this context, but also someone who's seeking psychotherapy for mental health issues. And it's like, actually in that case, it really is worse than nothing and frightening. But the question I always ask is, okay, so why is the alternative nothing? What else could we create that's actually designed for this particular purpose, rather than picking up the so-called everything machine that OpenAI desperately wants us all to use? And what would a special purpose system look like for getting over the blank page? So if your blank page is an email that you've opened up, maybe you've got a couple of effectively dice you could roll to get possible greetings and possible like opening sentences, for example, and then the page isn't blank, and you can go from there.

MG: That that would be a useful tool.

EMILY M. BENDER: You know, I would, I'm not sure that it would be a useful tool, but it would be a tool that you could test in that context and decide, is it useful for this particular issue?

MG: As a professor, do you know whether any of your students are using AI?

EMILY M. BENDER: So I am the faculty director of a professional master's program in computational linguistics, and computational linguistics is the field that language models come out of. So at the start of each year, we have a conversation about what these things are and how they relate to our work and why they are not information access systems and why it doesn't make sense to use them to do your homework. And I'm sure that some students do anyway. But my goal is not to, you know, be policing the classroom and getting to absolute zero usage, but my goal is to help students understand what's going on and make sure that as many of them as possible take advantage of as many learning opportunities as possible.

MG: We've long worried about the implications of creativity and productivity when it comes to new technologies, that this is going to corrupt us, this will corrupt us, this will do something. How is AI different than any previous new technologies when it comes to its impact on our creativity, do you think?

EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah, so first of all, I never call this stuff artificial intelligence because that is a misleading term that muddies the waters. But if we're talking about chatbots and…

MG: What do you use instead? What is the phrase that you use instead?

EMILY M. BENDER: Well, it depends on what I'm talking about. So if I'm talking about things like ChatGPT, I'll call them chatbots, large language models, synthetic text extruding machines.

MG: It sounds like something that's making noodles rather than words and sentences.

EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah, and that's kind of the point, to sort of make fun of them a little bit, but also to name specifically, you know, this is a machine for extruding text as opposed to a machine for being creative or getting information or something. And also, it's a different piece of software from something that might be doing image processing in the context of a radiology lab. So calling it all artificial intelligence really muddies the waters. I think here, you're interested in the synthetic text extruding machines and how is that different from other technology? Like, you know, how is it different from spell check? How is it different from being able to type instead of writing by hand? And I think the difference is that all of the previous technological changes in writing or composing, because written language itself is the first of these technologies, is All of those were about different ways of expressing and sharing our own words. And with the synthetic text extruding machines or these paper mâché bots, it becomes a way of appropriating other people's words. We don't know whose, and it's being sold as, this is an okay tool for you to use to make your words. And that's just not true.

MG: Do you worry that, I mean, the phrase is the horse is out of the barn. Do you worry that you're pushing, you know, a heavy stone up a hill here because this technology is everywhere? And because people, for better or worse, people use it as a means to an end.

EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah. And also, there's a lot of money behind the marketing of it. I know that I am swimming upstream here, but I think the inevitability argument is also a move on the part of Big Tech to convince us to give up our agency. And I refuse.

MG: What do we do about that? If you refuse and, as I said, the title of your book is creating the future that we want, how do you create the future that we want?

EMILY M. BENDER: Well, first of all, I can't speak for the whole we, and neither can my co-author, Alex Hanna. So when we say create the future we want, what we mean is empowering everybody to have agency in their own lives, in their own communities. And the vision of the future that we have is one where technology is something that’s made much more locally and controlled by the people who are using it and having it hopefully not used on them.

MG: In the meantime, it is everywhere, though.

EMILY M. BENDER: It is, but we can all, you know, opt out. You don't have to click the sparkles button. And you can also, one of the things that we talk about in our book is ridicule as praxis. That is when some brand, for example, uses a janky synthetic image in their advertising, you can laugh at them, and you can do it publicly and sort of help normalize valuing authenticity and seeing the synthetic stuff as a sort of janky labour stealing, you know, poor knockoff work that it is.

MG: Can I just, before we go, can I just end with where you started, which is that it's sad to hear, you said it was sad to hear in some ways how prevalent this is in schools. What does it do to our sense of education if, because there are professors who are using this as well, not just to see whether kids are using AI, but they're using it to improve on their own, on their own methods of teaching as well. Where does that leave how we think about education if this tool is there?

EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah, I mean, every time I hear about this in education, I know that people are coming from a well-meaning place, right? We all care about our students. We care about them being prepared. We care about being more effective teachers. And I'm sad that the marketing from the OpenAIs of the world has led us to believe that this has to be part of it. And I really wish that higher ed as a whole could refocus on nurturing critical thinking and nurturing the relationships that happen in the context of education where it's person to person and not person to machine.

MG: I'm glad to have a person-to-person conversation with you. Emily, thank you very much.

EMILY M. BENDER: Likewise. Thank you.

MG: Emily M. Bender is a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, co-author of the book, “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.” Do you use AI? I mean, it's everywhere in some ways, and so you are using it even if you don't think you are. But do you use it to write things? Do you use it perhaps to script emails, to start documents, maybe in fiction or in non-fiction? And are you comfortable with the place of that, not just in schools and higher education, but beyond? You can email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. Coming up after your regional update.

SOUNDCLIP

ALEX HUTCHINSON: You're venturing into the unknown, you're taking a path where you don't know how it's going to turn out. There has to be uncertainty. If you know what's going to happen, for better or worse, you’re not exploring.

MG: We're going to talk about the power of uncertainty and why we are hardwired to explore. Alex Hutchinson has spent a lot of time thinking about this. We'll talk about seeking out new things coming up in 90 seconds here on The Current. Stay with us.

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EXPLORER’S GENE

Guest: Alex Hutchinson

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

CARL SAGAN: Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.

MG: For the astronomer Carl Sagan, it is natural to want to explore what's going on beyond our planet. For the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, it was a desire to reach the west coast of North America that motivated him. And for a young child, exploring can be as simple as heading into the forest to see what lies beyond the edge of a neighbourhood park. For Alex Hutchinson, the urge to explore has sent him to the impenetrable landscapes of Tasmania and to the unmarked backcountry of Newfoundland on a gruelling five-day hike, all of which got him thinking about what drives us to do these sorts of things. Alex Hutchinson is a Canadian journalist, long-distance runner, and the author of the bestselling book, “Endure.” His new book is “The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavours, and the Blank Spots on the Map.” Alex is with me in studio. Good morning.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Morning, Matt.

MG: Good to have you here.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: It's great to be here.

MG: Do you believe Carl Sagan that exploration is in our nature?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: I think exploration is in our nature. I think not exploring is also in our nature. And so that, that finding that balance between the two is really the tension.

MG: Why did you want to write this book? You, I mentioned you wrote a bestselling book about endurance and what pushes us to do extraordinary things and how we can get to that place. Why did you want to look at this?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, I mean, I've been fascinated by exploration since I was a kid, you know, wandering in the woods. But I think the real push was after this last book. My previous book was 2018 about the science of endurance, and I'd spent about a decade reporting on exactly that topic. And I was sort of set up to follow this path for the rest of my career. And I realized that I wanted to do something different, that I didn't want to write “Endure” 2. Instead, I wanted to do, I wasn't sure. I didn't know what I wanted to do and I didn't know why I wanted to do something different. And that became a sort of obsession for me, and I ended up in a sense writing a book about why I wanted to do something different for my next book.

MG: What is, I mean, how do you define what exploration is?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, you can think about it on a spectrum from, you know, sailing west across the Atlantic to see if there's anything there. That's an extreme form of exploration, being the first to do something that very few of us will ever experience or maybe even want to experience. At the other end, you could say, oh, you know, every time I'm lying on the sofa and get bored of whatever I'm watching on TV and change the channel, I'm exploring the airwaves. And that's a kind of meaningless definition. So for me, there's a middle definition where it's not just about physical exploration, it's not just about extremes or anything like that, but there has to be some stakes. There has to be. You're venturing into the unknown. You're trying, taking a path where you don't know how it's going to turn out, where there's probably going to be some struggle along the way, and trying to find out what lies along that path.

MG: And there is uncertainty that's kind of at the heart of that.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: There has to be uncertainty. If you know what's going to happen, for better or worse, then you're not exploring.

MG: Are we hardwired, do you think, to do that?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: I think we are on a very deep level, that there's something crucial that goes beyond even just being human, but being alive, that we're trying to be able to predict what's going on in the world around us. We want to know what's going to happen so that we don't get eaten by, you know, the lion that's hiding behind the next tree. And so in order to be able to predict what’s going to happen, we need to be willing to seek out the unknown so that we can learn about the world.

MG: Tell me more about that. I mean, that gets to the title of the book. I mean, is there some sort of gene? Do we know scientifically what's going on there?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: So there is a gene. And, you know, the title The Explorer's Gene is, I don't know, provocative or metaphorical. There is a gene in that that did get me interested initially. One of the threads is that there's evidence, there's a gene related to the way we process dopamine in the brain that makes some of us a little bit more responsive to the thrill of the unknown or of surprises. And you can, there's this sort of body of anthropological evidence where you can say, oh, look, The farther a population migrated away from the cradle of civilization in Africa, you can look at their ancestor or their descendants today and say, oh, populations at the southern tip of South America have a really high prevalence, you know, 80% of them might have this explorer's version of the gene, whereas you go back closer to the origins in Sardinia, you might have 10 or 20%. The important caveat is that it's not that some people are wired to explore and some aren’t. This is evidence that we're all wired to explore, but some of us just have the volume turned up a little bit higher.

MG: What happens, I mean, you mentioned dopamine. What happens in our brain when we embrace that uncertainty?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, so I mean, this idea of dopamine, of course, is a big thing in the current discourse about what's driving us to be addicted to social media and stuff. The point about dopamine is it’s not that we get a hit of dopamine when something is good. It’s we get a hit when something's better than expected. So it's a marker of prediction error where you can't get it just from doing the same thing over and over again, because then you learn what to expect. So this drives us to try new things, to go new places, because only in doing that will we find something that's better than our existing expectations.

MG: But that speaks to that whole kind of balance between whether you explore or whether you exploit, right? That comes out in the book a lot in terms of, people call it a comfort zone for a reason, because it's comfortable, and you might get to a place where you don't want to go any further. How do you see that?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, I mean, I think when I started out working on this book or thinking about this topic, I imagined that we'd end up with a subtitle like “The Case for Exploring More: Why We All Need to Get Out of Our, you know, Comfort Zones.” And I realized actually, you know, comfort zones are pretty nice sometimes. And, you know, there is this whole literature on what's called the explore exploit dilemma that transcends disciplines. Like that terminology comes from the business world, that, you know, should you spend on R&D or should you just market the heck out of your current product? But it's also in, you know, animal foraging, how does a bee know when to move on from, you know, the nectar, where it knows there's nectar, but it's used a lot of it. But maybe there's a better patch on the next flowers over. So every living thing confronts this, and we confront it on a, you know, when you go to a restaurant, I mean, everywhere in your life, but you go to a restaurant, you're going to order the food or the dish that you got last time, which was pretty good, or do you try something else on the menu?

MG: Might even be the restaurant that you choose to go to.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, yeah. And the key point here, though, to your question, is that ordering the new thing doesn't always pay off. You know, it's not always great when you just sort of pick something new. Sometimes the old, the comfortable favourite is great. And so it's more a question of understanding when is the time to explore and when to exploit than just to say, hey, we all need to explore more.

MG: How does that play out in your life? Are you somebody who is, I mean, again, hardwired to kind of push out of that comfort zone, or is occasionally the couch where you want to be?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, it's far less, I'm definitely not like Indiana Jones, you know, writing a book about exploring because I am Mr. Super Explorer. I actually am…

MG: The stories in the book would suggest otherwise. And I mentioned, I mean, traipsing around on this part of Newfoundland with no trail, with your family in tow, trying to, you know, find somewhere to camp because there's no actual place to camp.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: So there's definitely, there are different elements and different parts that mix together. In some ways, I'm very risk averse. My friends would describe me as anxious and cautious and an overplanner, but there's also a part of me that craves being surprised. And I think those two things are linked, right? Because I'm such a planner, I eliminate uncertainty in so many areas of my life that I'm left thinking, oh man, I need to do something. I need to do a hike where there is no trail, because if there is a trail, I’m going to go and read so many travel blogs that there will be no surprises left to me on that trail. I will know every step of the trail.

MG: I'm just, I'm so interested in that idea of the uncertainty bonus, right, like what we get out of that. We live in a society where you can cut so much of that out of your life, but you don't get that extra piece, right? You don't get that bonus that you were just talking about.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah. And this is, this idea of an uncertainty bonus is really cool because it shows up in the mathematics of if you're trying to, let's say you turn this into just a mathematical game, a gambling game of how you're going to maximize your odds. And it turns out that when we're evaluating two things, we unconsciously add an extra little piece of value to anything that we don't know. And we don't do it consciously. So it's easy to forget about that and not realize it and to sort of, like you said, organize it out of our own lives. But it's a very satisfying thing to feel it. It's what makes it exciting to discover something new. So Pursuing that uncertainty bonus is worthwhile, but it doesn't mean, like risk is another question. So it's like You want uncertainty, but you don't want to fall off a waterfall or whatever.

MG: How does the story of this speed skater from Sweden speak to what we're talking about?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, so there's a guy, Nils van der Poel, who I think a lot of people might recognize the name because he won a couple of gold medals at the 2022 Olympics in speed skating, the 5000 and 10,000 metres. What people may not realize is how unbelievably unconventional his training was leading up. So he was a guy who he won a couple of gold medals at the World Junior Championship. So very good skater. Went to the 2018 Olympics and came 14th, which is, you know, better than a poke in the eye. I would take it. But yeah, he was disappointed, basically quit skating, joined the army, went and did a year of special forces training in northern Sweden. And then he decided he wanted to come back and make a speed skating come back. So to do that, he spent a year doing nothing, not skating at all, doing running and cycling and ski mountaineering, doing these ridiculous, like biking the length of Sweden, 20-hour races. And then I got to get serious, got to sort of build my fitness. So he went just on the bike and did nothing but threshold training on the bike. And then when he, he only started skating something like three weeks before he returned to racing, and he did nothing but race pace training. So without getting into the details of the training idea, the point is There have been, I don't know, dozens and dozens of speed skating champions over the last decades. All of them train within a very narrow Envelope of how one trains to be an Olympic champion.

MG: Do this and it will get you there.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah. And he took all that, and he had followed that path and been pretty good. He was a World Junior champion, but he said, you know, forget all this. I'm going to… And I didn't even mention he didn't want to train seven days a week. He wanted his weekends off so he could go skydiving, which he had discovered that he really enjoyed from his military time. So he's training five days a week, insanely hard, in a completely unconventional way. He goes and sets two world records and wins gold medals at the Olympics. So I think this is, to me, this is it's just a cool story, for one thing, but it's also a reminder that just because We do something over and over and everyone does something in some way the same way, it doesn't mean we've explored all the possibilities. There's a lot of still unknown even in the things that seem familiar to us.

MG: One of the things, and part of it is the fact that he didn't want to, you know, do his training on the weekend, that he wanted to do something else. You write in the book a lot about play and how, I mean, that skydiving to some people might be a form of play, not for me, thank you very much, but to some it might be, that young people, and kids in particular, it's obvious, but they are more attuned to the idea of exploration than they may be as they get older. What's going on there? I mean, this is around the time horizon, but also just what kids are hardwired to do when they're young if we let them do it.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah. So I talked to a guy in Denmark named Marc Malmdorf Andersen, who's a theorist of play, which sounds like an awesome job. And his thesis is essentially that play is the counterpart of exploring, that in exploring, we're drawn to uncertainty. In play, we're basically creating situations where we can have the feeling that we're resolving uncertainty. So, you know, you take your kids to the playground, they like, what is it like to go down that slide? I don't know. They go down the slide a couple of times, then they know. The uncertainty is gone. So that's why they're like, okay, now we're going to go up the slide, even though you're yelling at them like, no, this kid's coming down, like stop that. But they are very intuitively aware of where there are possibilities to get that feeling of learning about the world. And you can see this in like eight-month-old infants. You're showing them sequences of shapes. If they're very predictable, they look away. They're bored. If they’re very unpredictable, if they’re random, they'll look away because they get bored. If there's an intermediate level of predictability, that's what gets them interested. So I think the instinct to play, which is very, which we support in kids, it allows us to tune into opportunities to learn about the world where it's not too predictable, but not too crazy. And I think we become deaf to that at our peril as we get older.

MG: Do we know what that does to their development? I think of when our kids were young, how they played, and it would just, you would see organized things, but sometimes it would be just disorganized kind of chaos. What does that do to their development, do you think, when they are able to do that in that context that you just described?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, so there's a woman named Alison Gopnik, who's a very prominent developmental psychologist, and her theory is that the whole point of childhood is that it's the solution to the explore-exploit dilemma, not for an individual, but for the species. We give our children a very long period of protected development compared to other species, and what they can do is then learn how to learn. So they are wired to explore widely in a way that, in laboratory tests in Alison Gopnik’s laboratory, kids sometimes do better at picking up patterns than adults do because they're more open to the unexpected. So if you create a sneaky pattern That's not the sort of what you're going to guess the pattern is going to be, then kids can pick that up. And so kids are in a sense exploring ways of exploring. So as random and Counterproductive as their actions often seem, and I say that as a parent of young children who seem often very random and counterproductive, they're learning things that we can't, we don't know how to teach them. We can't tell them. It's like no, no, you should be studying your math or whatever. It's like no, do that crazy thing That's going to make a huge mess because you're learning things that I can't even intuit.

MG: Should we be surprised that we play, or some of us, play less as we get older and that we might be less attuned to exploring widely as we grow older?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: We should not be surprised, although I wrestle with this, the message here a lot. Like in any context where there's a time Horizon, it makes sense to explore more early in the game. And if the game is life, then when you're young, the more it makes us to explore because you have a long time To take advantage of the things you discover. The less time you have left, the more You might say, well, let's just stick with the things I know I like because there's no point in discovering something new now. I think we still sometimes err on the side of leaning into that curve too much because we live a long time now. You know, I'm 49. If I keep exploring, I may have four decades to enjoy that. So there is some logic to it, but I still worry about it.

MG: But this is the thing. So I was saying when you came in, one of the things, I like the book a lot, and then I got to that point in which you're talking about getting older and how you think about whether you continue exploring or not, and this light bulb went on. It's like that's what, it feels like that's what this is about in many ways. How do you think about that in your own life as you get older, how much you explore versus what you exploit that you've already explored?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, okay, you've put your finger on the real reason I wrote this book, which is the feeling in my 40s that I think I'd always been animated by the feeling that I was preparing for some future great moment, that everything I did, whether it was learning a new language or exploring a new place or learning a new skill, somehow this was going to come in handy in the future as in some sort of James Bond scenario.

MG: It's going to unlock something that you need to have.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yes. Like unbelievable, this guy can speak Norwegian and that therefore, you know… So there was a sense of a real future orientedness. And at a certain point, you know, in midlife, you think, well, maybe I should be living for the present now. Like maybe I don't need to explore anymore in the future. And that really tormented me, this idea of like, I don't know, but I like exploring. And so I think about this a lot. I don't think they're easy answers, but I think one thing to say is that you can argue for exploring in two different ways. One is very utilitarian. We explore because it leads to better things. We learn about new food sources or discover new dishes or new experiences. The other is that exploring is fun and fulfilling and rewarding and full of meaning. And so those two things are linked in the same way that the taste of sugar tastes good to us because it's giving us, leading us to calories, which are useful. But at this point in my life, I'm, I want to explore, and I think there's reasons to explore in a utilitarian way, but I'm shifting the emphasis a little bit to the idea that exploring is fulfilling and is a way of giving my life meaning and purpose.

MG: One of the things that people talk about a lot now is that kids may not be playing the way that they used to. And it's not nostalgia. It's looking at technology around them, how we shape our lives, what informs our lives. You quote a senator from the United States, Chris Murphy, talking about the algorithm, the algorithm being in some ways the death of exploration. How has the technology around us made us less active, more passive, and perhaps less prone to exploring?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, I think this is a really emerging topic in society, right? We're much more conscious of the role of screens and social media taking away the sort of random exploration or even the directed exploration and just telling us this is what you're going to watch next, this is what you’re going to listen to next, this is what you're going to scroll to next.

MG: And that that's replacing your sense of exploration because something else is doing it for you. Something else is prompting or presenting those things instead of you discovering them.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: So if we go back to this idea of play as a really sensitive tool to guide you towards the areas where you personally have something to gain or learn from it, well, the algorithm is not going to allow you to follow that instinct. It's going to make some average, a pretty good guess of what you're going to find titillating, but it's not allowing you to tune into your best barometer of what, where you can learn about the world. But the other point here is that before we get too fixated on this, how the screens and the technology and the algorithms are affecting us, we also have to think, why is it that my kids always want to be on the iPad? What is the alternative? When they go outside, what are they allowed to do compared to what kids were allowed to do when I was a kid, much less two generations ago? And there's been this tremendous loss in freedom and mobility and independence and autonomy. So we have to think about the screens, but we also have to think about, hey, let's give kids an opportunity to explore in a real way.

MG: Are you encouraged by the success of people like Jonathan Haidt, who, I mean, he writes about screens, but a lot of what he writes about in “The Anxious Generation” is about play, is about letting kids play.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah. And I think that's probably the biggest marker that encourages me that this isn't just, you know, a few crazy people, that the way that book has resonated…

MG: It feels like something is happening, right?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah. And I think there are different strands coming through this. I mean, Chris Hayes's book, who you spoke to recently, like we're coming to similar conclusions from all these different directions. And I feel like the more you triangulate to this idea that, yeah, you need to accept some risk, you need to have some uncertainty, you need to escape from the algorithm and make some decisions yourself, even though the algorithm is useful. And when I go and buy something online, I will check the online reviews. I want to do what everyone else says is good.

MG: But how do you embrace risk? I mean, as a parent especially, that's a scary thing, right? We want our kids to have a big, fulfilling life, but we also don't want them to get hurt. We want to protect them.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: It's, and I will say one thing that does not solve this dilemma is writing a book about exploration. You don't suddenly Relax and think, oh, I'll let my kids, you know… Like my kids recently started biking to school for the first time in the last, you know, couple of weeks.

MG: Which is freeing and scary.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: It's amazing, but, you know, you look out the window and it's like what the heck, they just blew through the very first stop sign Eight seconds after I said remember you stop at a, stop at all the stop signs and stay on the right hand side of the road. So, you know, I struggle with, but I'm trying to find little wins. You know, like I, you know, my kids are nine and 11, and I, you know, in thinking about these exact topics, I was realizing it. I don't think my kids have ever gone to a store by themselves and bought something Because I pay with card now. And so I was like, kids, get over here. Here's a 10 dollar bill. Go to the gas station and buy milk. And it was the biggest adventure of their life. They were thrilled.

MG: How do you tell people, or how do you convince people that they can make time for exploration? In the middle of everything that's going on, people are, the reason that they, you know, might put the iPad in their kid's hand is because they're super busy. The algorithm helps take some of the pressure off. How do you make time? How do we make time for this?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, I mean, it's a real struggle. And I will say one of the things I noticed in my own life is after having kids, the way some of my other forms of exploration had to contract that all of a sudden, I was like, I'm just going to listen to my playlist of tunes that I've been listening to for the last, you know, 30 years. You know, I'm exhausted, not in a physical sense, but just in an emotional, mental sense. So I would say one thing is to recognize that not all exploration has to be epic. And it doesn’t involve, it doesn't even have to involve going outside. So there are ways of exploring by reading new books, by thinking, talking to new people, by trying out new hobbies or even foods or cooking. There are ways of doing things that are new to you that don't involve disrupting your entire life. But ultimately, I think that, you know, one of the questions I asked everyone about, every scientist I spoke to who's an expert in play is like, how do we get adults to play more? And, you know, to a person, they were all saying, you can't just tell people to play like that. People have jobs and responsibilities and excessive demands on their time. So it's just a question of They will play naturally if they can make a little space for themselves. Play is what we want to do. It's a self-motivated behaviour, but it's a way of finding little spaces in your day, in your life, in your week, where you can say, what do I actually want to do? What would be interesting to me right now?

MG: It's not a self-help book, but you come with rules, rules to explore better. And you can explore, then exploit, seek the uncertainty, sweet spot, play more, embrace the struggle, but one of them is also minimize regret. What is that?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Yeah, this is… so, of course, I was trying to write a self-help book because they sell a lot of copies, right? But there isn't easy, there are not a lot of easy answers here, or let's say science backed answers here. One of the ones that is science backed, which I found fascinating, which comes from the math of explore exploit decisions, is this idea of minimizing regret by being optimistic in the face of uncertainty. So you can't always make the right choice in an explore exploit Dilemma. The nature of exploring is it's uncertain. So you're never, you can't guarantee you’ll make the right choice. What you want to do is make choices such that when you're looking back, You will even if it went wrong, you will not regret it. And I think, you know, an easy example maybe that reflects my own Insecurities as a kid is like asking someone to dance. It's terrifying to take that leap when you don't know if it's going to be a yes or it's going to be a no. And sometimes if you make the leap, it sometimes will be a no. But looking back, how often does anyone regret saying, oh man, I wish I hadn't asked that person to dance compared to the, for me at least, the orders of magnitude more times that I look back and say, I wish I had asked that, tried asking that person to dance or, you know, whatever equivalent, metaphorical equivalent of that. So you take a chance, you look at what has the best, the biggest possible upside, what has the best realistic outcome, and you say, let's try that. And even if it doesn't work, at least I won't regret trying.

MG: When was the last time you hit that uncertainty sweet spot?

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Oh, that's a good question. I would have to say, last summer, we went on a hiking trip in the Pyrenees, and I write in the book about this trip I took in Newfoundland, which was probably too hard, too scary, and I ended up defaulting back to like walking with my phone in my hand and the GPS so we wouldn't get lost. And so I was really trying to focus on feeling exploration, but not in pursuit of a goal. And I think on this hike in Spain with my family, I really felt in the moment and was able to keep the GPS in the pocket. It was challenging, but not that sort of terrifying that I felt a little bit in Newfoundland.

MG: Those are the moments that we're all looking for. Alex, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to talk to you.

ALEX HUTCHINSON: Thanks so much, Matt.

MG: Alex Hutchinson is a journalist in Toronto. His new book is called “The Explorer's Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavours, and Blank Spots on the Map.” That is The Current for this Wednesday, the 14th of May. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. This is Coldplay, “Adventure of a Lifetime.” I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you tomorrow.

[Song: “Adventure of a Lifetime” by Coldplay]

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Wednesday, May 14, 2025 Episode Transcript

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