How do we define intelligence? What is the point of creativity and intelligence if we are not creating good in the world? In this age of AI, what is the importance of a synthesizing mind?

Howard Gardner, Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an author of over 30 books, translated into 32 languages, and several hundred articles, is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In the last few years, Gardner has been studying the nature of human synthesizing, a topic introduced in his 2020 memoir, A Synthesizing Mind.

For 28 years, with David Perkins, he was Co-Director of Harvard Project Zero, and in more recent years has served in a variety of leadership positions. Since the middle 1990s, Gardner has directed The Good Project, a group of initiatives, founded in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon. The project promotes excellence, engagement, and ethics in education, preparing students to become good workers and good citizens who contribute to the overall well-being of society. Through research-based concepts, frameworks, and resources, The Good Project seeks to help students reflect upon the ethical dilemmas that arise in everyday life and give them the tools to make thoughtful decisions.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

What made you interested in pursuing The Good Work project?

HOWARD GARDNER

I had two close colleagues, both psychologists: William Damon, a student of moral development, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, recently deceased, probably known to many of your audience because he developed the notion of flow, which is that psychological state where anxiety and boredom are mediated by something that really involves and engrosses you. And the three of us were able to spend a year together at a research center, and the question we came up with was: Can you be creative and humane at the same time? Creative means having your mind go free, think about all sorts of things, try them out. Nothing is taboo, nothing is off limits. But at the same time, can you do it in a way that's humane and ethical and avoids, for example, creating the Einstein equation, which was a brilliant physics explanation, but also led to nuclear weapons.

And similarly with cracking genetic code in any way. And we thought this was a good question, but we weren't wise enough to come up with an answer. So that's why we spent 10 years, roughly from 1995 to 2005, interviewing about 1, 500 people from nine different professions. And it was from that very intensive and extensive study that we came up with the three E's of good work. Excellence, engagement, and ethics. Since then, my research group at Harvard has called this The Good Project. And The Good Project is looking at the development of a moral and ethical stance as young as the age of three or four, preschool, all the way to professions and middle life. And we have a website thegoodproject.org where you can read dozens of blogs and various papers on this topic. And, as Mia indicated, there were also our books in which there's one book called Good Work, and another book called Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Refrain, where we describe our current thinking. And, you know, I think the study would have been different if we had done it in the age of ChatGPT.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I think you have many years of writing ahead of you since there's longevity in your family. I believe your mother lived to 102, mind fully intact. I want to go back to what's unusual, about your upbringing or might lead you to your propensity to have a synthesizing mind. You were born into a German-speaking family. And the German language seems like a language of synthesis with compound words. You also have this monocular vision and are prosopagnosic, a kind of face blindness where you don't always recognize faces, but you have this internal music, which is a different kind of vision. So these things combined can also kind of shape your going inward. As you describe, when you were growing up you lived in your mind.

GARDNER

The garden that makes up one's mind is always to some extent the flowers and trees that we get from our families genetically, but also we get from our families culturally.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

So you were a believer in excellence, engagement, and ethics, which are strong components of the humanities. What do you feel about having academic input into the governance of AI? We've just seen the recent stance by the G7 nations and President Biden's Executive Order to put up guardrails around AI, nudging it towards an ethical way and making sure we have the right balance in place for human flourishing.

GARDNER

Well, thank you for bringing it up. I actually finished my work 40 years ago. And since then, I've been focused with colleagues on what we call good work and good citizenship. And our study of good work, we studied nine different professionals dealing from law and medicine to journalism to teaching. And we found out people who were admired and to find out why these professionals were admired. And we found out they were admired for three things. One, how excellently they carried out their work. And of course, that's important. Number two, how engaged they were. To what extent do they really like their work, want to do it, and feel good about being at work rather than dreading it? And three, and what you're touching on, did they carry out the work in an ethical way? Now, when it's absolutely clear what to do in a situation, then you don't call it ethical. Ethical is what do you do when a situation is complicated? Let's say you're a lawyer and you find that the client lies to you. Do you let the client lie on the stand? Or do you say, "No, I'm not going to be your lawyer if you're going to lie." If you're a doctor, and there are two people who have the same injury and one is a relative and the other is a stranger, what do you do? If you're a journalist, and you're covering a story and you see a crime occurring, should you remain a journalist and cover it? Or should you call the police and become an accessory? So we're very, very interested in how people deal with ethical issues. Now, as you are anticipating. The issues of excellence, engagement, and ethics, they have to be reexamined in an era when there are computational systems which are clearly as excellent as any human being can do, maybe more excellent.

The word engagement doesn't mean anything when you're talking about computational systems. they aren't asked whether they like what they're doing or not, they just do it. But the issue of ethics is very difficult and very complicated. I touched on it earlier. If you're trying to decide what to do in a complicated economics matter, in a complicated military matter, do you leave the decision to the computational system? Or do you have human beings make it alone or in groups? And this is not something where I have any special insights. My guess would be you should find out what would various computational systems recommend that the final decisions shouldn't be a majority vote among ChatGPTs. It should be human beings evaluating with these different systems. Recommend and then living with the consequences of human-made decisions. I don't want a decision about whether to have a nuclear weapon shot off to be made by ChatGPT. I don't want it to be made by Donald Trump either, but I would like to think that rational leaders consulting with one another and being very cautious about life-and-death decisions. And as you know from your question, you know, there are things which large language instruments could recommend which would destroy the planet, but they don't care. It's not their planet.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

We're living in this crucial decade of transformation, with climate change and the many different challenges we face. And sometimes our intelligence and expertise can act like many veils that get in the way of seeing clearly what needs to be done. Say acting on climate change. We have the knowledge, we're just not implementing that knowledge.

GARDNER

And I became interested in synthesis and I wrote the memoir quite a while ago, but now with the advent of large language instruments or ChatGPT, the pressure to figure out what synthesis is, what these computing systems can or can't do that human beings are still the privileged cohort in carrying out those tasks, that's made the interest in synthesis more important than ever. If we're trying to decide what policy to cover, whether it's an economic policy about interest rates, or whether - we're talking now during the beginning of the war in the Middle East - what policies to follow militarily, economically, and ethically. For that matter, do we entrust that to some kind of a computational system, or is this something that human judgment needs to be brought to bear? And if so, how and at what point? And these are quintessential synthesizing questions. You can't just look up and say, "Well, what should we do with the Gaza Strip? Or what should we do in Japan, which has had low interest rates, but the rest of the world has got very high inflation." These are not things where we just want to press a button and get the answer. These are things we want to discuss and debate and review and maybe even pit one large language instrument against another and see do they come up with the same answers. They might well not.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

I think that it's so important, the language we're born into prepares the mind and sometimes it makes us have thoughts. Culturally, it imprints on us. I've reading lately the words of a Tiokasin Ghosthorse. He talks about the Lakota language, and how other languages are about dogma and domination. We've lost through our languages our relationship with the Earth. But the Lakota language, for example, it's a language of verbs and motion and action, and not nouns and ownership. So their language is a measurement of the energy and relationship with the sun and us. Or us and the trees. And that we're all part of this family. It's always important to interrogate how language may be shaping our thoughts or shading them. And on that note, I know you have to go soon, but I would love to hear your reflections on climate change and the kind of future are we leaving for future generations? And, for you, what is the importance of the environmental humanities and telling stories?

GARDNER

The barriers to climate change are largely political: individual countries and countries working together. We need to keep carbon down and have people lead lives in ways which are less destructive to our environment. And I don't have a great deal of faith that our political system can do that. I'm not religious myself, but I think that we need to have a new religious leader in the world. I always say Gandhi is the most important person of the last thousand years because he understood that if we tried to fight with weapons, we would just destroy one another. We have to disagree peacefully. And I think we need that kind of figure who can mobilize people across different nations and different attitudes on the question. Where I think I do have something to say, is I think in the schools of the future, we're going to focus much more on what it means to be human beings on our planet. I think that's the best chance for the planet to survive, which is the question of climate change, but also to thrive, which is a question of good work and good citizenship.

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And what scholars my age do is we write about these things. We talk about these things, but we hope our students will carry it through. So I've been trying to organize a network on synthesizing, which now has people from several different countries involved. And my team on The Good Project is working with schools and dozens of countries. And the curriculum has been translated into Portuguese, Chinese, and it's about to be translated into Japanese. And that's how we hope these ideas will make a difference. Now, if you are a pessimist by nature, as I am. You're going to say, "Well, what can a bunch of scholars in Cambridge, Massachusetts, possibly do that's going to change the way the world is?" And the answer is we can't do it ourselves. We have to find partners and like-minded people all over the world and do blogs and podcasts and write. And I don't do social media, but my colleagues do and try to come out with more positive ways of thinking about things. Because there's plenty of depressing news and examples in the world. And I like to say, I'm a pessimist by nature, but I try to live my life as an optimist.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Zachary Liu-Walter with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Katie Foster and Zachary Liu-Walter. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).