Thank you for the post! You raise some great questions. I’m not an expert, but I’d like to check something. Is it possible that Pinker and Marcus are trying to distinguish blabbering from well-reasoned text? If we take that perspective for a moment, Bert or GPT-2 would appear more reasoned, when their training text is more focused. The broader their training text, the less reasoned their output. It’s just a hypothesis.
When some societies turned into agrarian societies, right after they leaned into sports and performing arts as a primary leisure and competitive activity. Training, education and research never went away.
I recently came across this white paper on the Future of Work and the role of our children by The Archbridge Institute. https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/building-soft-skills-for-the-future-of-work/
According to this white paper, what's needed in the AI era is a combination of creativity, empathy, imagination, and team-building. How do kids develop these? Through a combination of early education, family and an emphasis on "Free Play", typically mixed-age. One quote:
"Once I was watching some kids play an informal game of basketball. They were spending more time deciding on the rules and arguing about whether particular plays were fair than they were playing the game. I overheard a nearby adult say, “Too bad they don’t have a referee to decide these things, so they wouldn’t have to spend so much time debating.” Well, is it too bad? In the course of their lives, which will be the more important skill—shooting or debating effectively and learning how to compromise? Kids playing sports informally are practicing many things at once, the least important of which may be the sport itself."
The white paper has other quotes and examples...
About: "The Archbridge Institute is a Washington DC-based non-partisan, independent, 501(c)(3) public policy think tank. Our mission is to lift barriers to human flourishing." More like a socio-economic mobility thinktank...