Another milestone at age 4–5 is forming episodic memories for the first time. This means the child remembers past sequences of events that happened to them, e.g. actions leading to adult attention and love or words leading to an argument or fight with some peer.… Along with remembering the past, the child acquires the skill to anticipate the future, to imagine events they look forward to.
—David Mumford
This issue of Alta Journal is devoted to the theme of family. We wanted to examine that human institution into which most of us are born, asking how our definitions of family shape our views and our culture.
At some point in our lives, we escape the confines of our birth family and seek to form relationships with people other than our immediate kin. To be more exact to human experience, some of us grow up in families without a biological parent. Maybe we rise to adulthood thanks to grandparents, adoptive parents, foster parents, or hybrid families, owing to the consequences of death, divorce, incarceration, or other circumstances.
Regardless of our environments, we are social animals. As very young people, we try to become independent—to walk, to talk, to think on our own—inevitably shaped and guided, or perhaps misshaped and misguided, by the social setting of some kind of family. As our interactions with the rest of the world become more mature, we seek to become more competent and appreciated individuals.
This Publisher’s Note appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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After all, we do not live on a desert island. Our intelligence, our accomplishments, our values, and our ways of understanding are connected to and derived from the rest of the world.
The epigraph above is a quote from the essay “AIs and Humans with Agency,” by the mathematician and researcher David Mumford. He describes a looming gap between the way children learn about their worlds and imagine the needs of other people within them and the way AIs acquire knowledge about their worlds.
Mumford’s essay calls to mind such questions as these: How much data does a large language model need to seem human? How many times does a child need to speak, walk, and interact with their environment to become a valued, even loved, member of their family, their tribe, their faith?
Even as our AI helpers continue to become smarter, Mumford asks whether they can somehow develop a wider understanding of other intelligent beings, and of the nuances of concepts like values, ethics, reputation, and trust. Can they be trusted to act without human supervision?
Mumford does not conclude his essay with an answer, but he raises the bar for what we should expect, and demand, from our technology creations. At the moment, AIs betray a cold indifference to the ways we learn from our families, however they may be defined.
Meanwhile, articles in our Family Portraits section reveal the warm, heartfelt connections between “family” members. I’m delighted to highlight three Alta staffers who made themselves vulnerable while writing for the special section. Editorial director Blaise Zerega and his half brother, Gregory Bynum, share an intensely personal story of how they learned about each other and how they met for the first time. Senior editor Lydia Horne traveled to Texas to spend time with the Engelharts, a tightly knit clan that once owned a successful chain of vegan restaurants in California but fled to Texas and embraced MAHA. Copy chief Lynn Rapoport makes an amusing and loving argument that dogs are like children. Elsewhere, Emmy Award–winning journalist Rubén Martínez visits with an undocumented matriarch needing cancer treatment during the ICE siege of Los Angeles. Additionally, we examine the ties that exist among members of a communal home, within a witches’ coven, between a woman and her best friend turned chosen sister, and between the children of two famous parents, writer William Saroyan and actor Carol Grace.
This issue also introduces Alta True Tales, a heart-thumping piece of journalism that you wouldn’t believe unless it were…true! Longtime contributor Julian Smith inaugurates this recurring feature with “Tunnel 13,” his account of a botched train holdup in Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains. The attempted heist by three brothers left four men dead, sparked an international manhunt, and helped make science part of crime fighting. While we didn’t quite plan this part, the bonds between the three brothers and the ways they depended on, and learned from, one another fit nicely with our cover theme.
Still, we are a long way from understanding the origins of human learning. Science tells us that we—people like Zerega and Bynum, the Engelharts, the three train robbers—arose from social animals. The ability to understand what other people want, think, and expect is absolutely essential to successful living and, maybe, surviving.•
Will Hearst is the editor and publisher of Alta Journal, which he founded in 2017. He is the board chair of Hearst, one of the nation’s largest diversified media and information companies. Hearst is a grandson of company founder William Randolph Hearst.
