Love and Learning: The Transformative Power of Care in a Digital World with Isabelle Hau S9E1 (121)
What if we designed our education systems around relationships instead of outcomes—what would change in how we measure success?
As AI rapidly integrates into learning environments, how do we safeguard and elevate the irreplaceable value of human connection in a child’s development?
In this thought-provoking episode of The Learning Future Podcast, host Louka Parry is joined by Isabelle Hau, Executive Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and author of Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education. Together, they explore why relationships must be placed at the center of learning systems—from the neuroscience of early childhood development to the role of love, play, and human connection in lifelong learning.
Isabelle shares powerful insights from her research, including the impact of nurturing relationships on brain development, the hidden costs of technology-induced disconnection, and the decline of free play in childhood. They also discuss the promises and perils of AI in education—highlighting its potential to either enhance or erode our relational capacities depending on how it’s designed and used.
Whether you’re an educator, policymaker, or parent, this episode offers a compelling call to action: to reimagine learning as a relational, joyful, and deeply human experience.
About Isabelle Hau:
Isabelle Hau is the Executive Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and a leading voice in early childhood education and innovation. Formerly head of U.S. Education at the Omidyar Network and a founding partner at Imaginable Futures, she champions inclusive, human-centered approaches to learning. Isabelle is the author of Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education, a book that emphasizes the critical role of relationships in learning and development. Her work bridges neuroscience, technology, and systems change to advocate for education models that are relational, inclusive, and future-focused.
Resources mentioned:
- Love to Learn by Isabelle Hau
- Research on the Romanian orphanages and brain development
- The Stanford study on AI companionship
- Tool for Observing Play Outdoors (TOPO)
Stay Connected with Louka Parry:
For the latest learning innovation follow Louka on LinkedIn
Share your thoughts by visiting www.thelearningfuture.com
Tune in to be inspired, challenged, and reminded why love truly is at the heart of learning.
[Transcript]
Louka Parry (00:08)
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Learning Future podcast. I'm your host, Louka Parry, and it is my delight to actually be reuniting with someone I met a couple of years ago as we were just discussing, Isabelle Howe. Isabelle, as you'll find out, is a visionary leader who's dedicated to transforming the way we nurture and educate our children. She is now the executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and formerly was the head of US education at the Omidyar Network.
as an imaginable futures. She champions innovative, effective and inclusive solutions towards a bright future of learning for all. And she has recently released her first book, entitled love to learn the transformative power of care and connection in early education. Isabelle, it's lovely to see you again. Thank you for joining the podcast.
Isabelle Hau (00:57)
Louka, it's such a joy to be reunited. think we needed a podcast to be reunited.
Louka Parry (01:02)
It is so funny and we were just saying before we went to recording that the last time we saw each other was in person delightfully at the wise summit in Qatar almost an 18 months ago or so now. And it's just interesting to realize like what's shifted. been some significant geopolitical shifts, technological shifts. And so I'd love for you just to reflect on where you are right now.
What is the thing that you're learning, Isabelle, that's kind of that you're noticing or that's catching your eye or came out of your exploration with the book?
Isabelle Hau (01:32)
Yeah, so lots of things have come from the exploration of the book, but right now, one area where I feel like I'm learning a lot is in the area of learning differences. So this area that others call disability, either identified or unidentified, which is one of our pillars at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and an area where
I had spent some time on but not dedicated focused on and I feel like I'm learning so much there. I just finished a great book called which has a funny title normal sucks about reframing the concept of what is normal and what is not and why we have
such an obsession, societally, on this concept of an average normal in education when, in fact, are, everyone of us is so special.
Louka Parry (02:31)
I think there's something about the uniqueness aspect that I'm very curious about as well, Isabelle. And of course, the clash with our individual, like the individuation process into our unique self with a standardized system that ranks an audience. I've always thought, you know, looking at the kind of learning differences space is a really powerful way for us as educators to try to understand how we might redesign the entirety of the system.
it's something, and it's especially now that we see the AI wave, you know, with this hype, but also with its horizontal transformational layer, also starting to challenge the way that education has taken place. What are you, what are you seeing as someone that's nested, you know, in the middle of Stanford looking across all the ways that learning is taking place? Like, what would you say about this moment?
Isabelle Hau (03:20)
Yeah, I find that some of the biggest innovations in our humanity have actually come from the margins.
Louka Parry (03:29)
Yeah.
Isabelle Hau (03:30)
Some call it the curb effect for any type of road adjustments or pavement to have people on wheelchairs being able to go experience some different possibilities, but that benefits so many other people.
including parents with who may just have a little baby baby carriage or other other people anyway I love this concept of the curb effect of thinking about innovations at the margins that end up actually really transforming society as a whole and
Louka Parry (03:54)
Mmm. Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (04:08)
AI in so many ways, I predict that we will see some incredible innovations serving people who may be on the margins of our existing systems because they in, you know, historically have been considered as having even neural differences or other types of differences.
where AI can actually make a huge impact, but as a result of that can actually benefit a wide range of people. So we had seen this by the way with some voice technologies or some caption technologies that have now benefit everyone. Yeah.
Louka Parry (04:49)
It's a great example, it's like, you know, designing from the edges. It's a powerful way to think about inclusivity, which actually then benefits every single person. Because, know, as you said, the normal sucks or the myth of normal or this idea that the end of average, know, all these are kind of like different books that, you know, like, all saying that no one is
Isabelle Hau (04:56)
Mm-hmm.
Exactly.
Louka Parry (05:11)
No one is average. And so if you design for the average, you design for nobody. And we now are sophisticated enough in our design of systems, both built environments and psychological systems like education. But we can, we can ask more from our systems, I think. Tell me, tell me a little bit about what you see unfolding in that learning space. Cause you know, in lot of the conversations we have, see
Isabelle Hau (05:15)
Correct.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Louka Parry (05:36)
There is still the dominance of a paradigm which is content rich curriculum. I like curriculum that is content rich, but I'd actually like it to be capability rich as well. And maybe even character rich would be nice, real world oriented. So this kind of, we're seeing a bit of an opening of the awareness of what we might need to do to make learning truly transformational, truly agentic. What's the...
What's your kind of reflection again at this moment?
Isabelle Hau (06:03)
Yeah, so at this moment I'm obviously very focused on my, you know, my recent book and my recent writings. And I would add to your really amazing comment Luca, I would add that I would love to see learning to become also a lot more relationship-rich or relational-rich. You know, we have...
Louka Parry (06:25)
Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (06:29)
known for a long time that our brains are social. Learning is social fundamentally. And that we as human beings thrive in social environments. So it's not only learning, but also well-being and health and longevity. All...
Louka Parry (06:33)
Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (06:47)
driven by relationships and our circles of relationships, both the quantity and the quality of those relationships matter a lot. And we all know this, it's nothing that is, know, none. So like one of us, yeah, of course everyone knows this, relationships in our education systems are for the most part invisible.
Louka Parry (07:07)
Hmm.
Isabelle Hau (07:07)
So my call is for relationships to become more visible. And I think it matters a lot at this time of artificial intelligence where artificial intelligence could be, if we are intentional about it, a force to, a very positive force to connect us among humans and make those connections more visible. Or it could be...
Louka Parry (07:29)
Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (07:33)
a replacement of those human relationships. And so we have a major choice in front of us, you know, with this technology, which is really a tool that humans have designed on which path we choose.
Louka Parry (07:36)
Mm.
Hmm. Tell, let's, okay. Well, I want to go two directions here. Let's go the first direction first. I really want to talk about the science of love and connection and this relational basis. Um, and, and so let's talk about that. And then I also want to have this conversation around technology in learning because I, again, as someone who's so well positioned to have this conversation with, um, so let's talk about that first piece, you know, like this idea of the invisible relationship.
Isabelle Hau (07:51)
Ha ha ha.
Louka Parry (08:13)
And I remember speaking with Professor Stephanie Jones, who runs the easel lab at Harvard. And our conversation was, what if instead of putting a person at the center of the Bruffenbrenner ecological model, we put relationship at the center? It's the same kind of thesis. So tell us what you discovered through your research. why should people, we are so relational as teachers, but so often it doesn't feel like it's not respected for what it might.
should be. So make us make the case Isabel.
Isabelle Hau (08:42)
Yeah,
Luca, such a point. So I like to say that we are all born billionaires. So when we are born as babies, have billions, actually. have about 100 billion neurons in our brains. But neurons by themselves are not enough. So they need to be connected, which is what scientists call synaptic connections.
for those synaptic connections to occur, they need to happen moment by moment, interaction by interaction. So essentially those connections are fueled by human relationships. What Stephanie and my, know, Jack Shunkoff and many others are calling serve and return interactions. Fancy word to say, you know, an eyesight, a touch, a laughter.
with a little one, essentially builds those synaptic connections. And then in fact, 90 % of the brain develops before age five. So the earliest years of life are some of the most plastic when the brain is most ready to adapt and to be shaped by those human relationships.
Every moment in life, by the way, matters for relationships, not only the earliest years, but the earliest years of life as many things in learning matter tremendously. And we have evidence of the importance of those in a very heartbreaking situation historically that's
the Romanian orphanages which have been, Luca, totally obsessed about so much so that my children are asking me to not stop about the Romanian orphanages any longer. Anyway, so that's a setting where it became a mine for researchers which is why I'm so obsessed about this setting.
Louka Parry (10:17)
Yeah.
You've told us the story too many times, man. Yeah.
Isabelle Hau (10:39)
where anywhere between a hundred thousand young children to the latest estimates of 500,000 young children were abandoned very sadly in those institutions and those little ones were fed and clothed but what they lacked was love.
And as a result of that, literally, their brains were physically smaller than those Romanian children who had, who were lucky enough to be adopted outside of the US. So they were the control group. And also their brain activity was meaningfully lower. And also those children who stayed in those orphanages had, you know, severe developmental delays.
and long-term emotional challenges. Actually, as a matter of fact, about 15 % of those were never able to have any form of attachment with other human beings. So that's one setting where we can observe the importance of human relationships and love. Literally, it has a physical impact on the brain.
And by the way, Luca, just let add one more study that's maybe a little bit more positive, but that was looking at the size of a child's hippocampus, so the front portion of the brain that's responsible for memory and for many, aspects of learning. When a child is more or less nurtured in more normal environments, that was done by a colleague at the University of Washington.
and concluded the same thing that those children who had more parental support and more love of more nurturing relationships had a hippocampus size that was also about 10 % bigger. So in a sense, if we want children who are smarter, it's not about starting math earlier or...
giving them more flashcards. It's really about love.
Louka Parry (12:39)
Wow, that's so powerful as a reflection.
It's so, it's so powerful. What then is the main challenge for this present moment? Isabel, because when you think about the challenges for parents or for schools or systems, you know, this distraction versus attention, you know, I think of another devastating study, the steel face experiment and just seeing the impact on the toddler when their mother in that case doesn't respond to their serves.
It's just, it's really, you know, you think about the impact of technologies in the kind of a certain way, what's the most important things for us to start paying attention to therefore in the way that we develop our young people and the relationships around them.
Isabelle Hau (13:18)
yeah so it's by the way this in the still face experiment that you are referencing what matters a lot is not so much the disconnections between an adult and a child but rather the ability to reconnect after there has been an interruption
So that ability and capacity to reconnect is really what matters. Or said differently, are not, no parent is ever expected to have a perfect, you know, 100 % attention. Actually, this would be almost like overbearing to a child from an independence perspective. So it's really more about the quality rather than the quantity.
Louka Parry (13:47)
Hm-hm.
Isabelle Hau (14:00)
and this ability to reconnect after there has been an interruption or an interference in the relationship. This being said, you're leading me to raise one of my great concerns in our modern times, which is that we as adults are far too many times interrupted by technology.
So there's a lot of discourse on screen time for children, which we can go back to if you'd like, if you feel like there is a lot on that discourse. Where there is a little bit less, and I would like to see more, is technology for adults. So let me pick one stat, which I find really interesting.
Louka Parry (14:37)
Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (14:43)
Any adult in the US, so I don't know in Australia where the stat is, but in the US, adult, the average American picks up their device 205 times a day.
So in concrete terms, that means that there are a little bit over 200 opportunities for an adult when they speak or when they play or when they look at a child to be interrupted in that beautiful relational moment. And the problem with technology is that once we have been, often what happens is
Louka Parry (15:09)
Hmm.
Isabelle Hau (15:18)
several things. One is that the child may understand that interruptions mean that the device is more important than they are.
but also very often and it relates to the still facing conclusion about the ability to reconnect very often and I don't know if you've experienced this but I have it very often where I'm getting a notification from work and I'm not, it's very, very difficult for me to recenter with the same equivalent mood as before because maybe there's text or notification or email.
was not as pleasant or brings me to think about something else that I need to do or anyway, my mood changes and so the child also perceives so that changes our change of mood and change of reaction. anyway, all of this to say that whether it applies to parents, family members or educators at large,
Louka Parry (16:07)
you
Isabelle Hau (16:18)
we should all be very careful also about these interferences from technology, especially when we are with young children.
Louka Parry (16:29)
mmm that's so powerful I just think this this piece on
The repair or the reconnection, as you say, you know, that even I think as adult and the Gottman Institute, I think about all adult relationships and interrelations as the ability to repair is an offer. know, it's almost takes me back to my drama days, you know, like in improvisation, you offer and does someone receive your offer or is it blocked? You know, it's such a powerful way that relationships seem to work or otherwise.
depending on how we repair. So fascinating. So just before we get into the AI question, because I do want to know like where that might take us in terms of our ability as well. What other things, what other pieces of advice or what other kind of system conditions should we build for our education systems to support the families as the first teachers?
Isabelle Hau (16:58)
Yes, exactly,
Louka Parry (17:20)
And then of course, the early childhood sector and then as it moves up and often, and some of our work, I've become increasingly more interested in early childhood. Cause I've realized, you know, it is the Heckman equation, you know, the best social return on investment, you know, it's really how do we pay attention to that and support our parents in a, you know, yeah, know. you know, Dr. Amy Fabry, our head of early years and professionally with, you know, she's been educating me as well. I'm just really, I'm curious as to like what you would say.
Isabelle Hau (17:37)
Yeah!
Louka Parry (17:48)
about the kind of system piece, because it seems to me most parents love their children, but maybe they don't understand that. You know, they might think, well, we want you be reading at age two and get you into tutoring classes. you know, I don't know, what would you, what's your kind of perception from your read on the research and what we're learning?
Isabelle Hau (18:06)
Yeah, I have four broad recommendations from a system perspective. One, the first one is at the family level. how can we make family time relational time? So right now, look at is a little bit of a paradox in our families because families actually are spending more and more time with their young children. If we look at the...
Louka Parry (18:21)
Mm.
Isabelle Hau (18:32)
reasonably long period of the past, let's say 50 to 100 years, families have been spending more and more time, especially fathers actually, have been spending more and more time with their children. So great news, parents are more physically present. But the bad news is that they are more and more emotionally absent because of technology. And work-related reasons that are fostered by
Louka Parry (18:43)
Mm.
Isabelle Hau (18:55)
this constant access to technology. So how can we make sure that this increase in family time is really dedicated for this relational time? again, it doesn't need to be quantity, it needs to be quality. So how can we ensure that families preserve those very special moments? It could be dinner time, it could be bath time, it could be...
You know, in my family, for example, we have every Sunday night, we have a few minutes of disco night where we all go crazy and dance. ⁓ Yeah, yeah. We literally go wild. And whoever is in our household that evening, by the way, is invited to dance or doesn't have a choice.
Louka Parry (19:29)
that's great.
Yeah, great. Part of their entropy.
Isabelle Hau (19:45)
But
it's like one of those little routines for our family where, it doesn't need to be, it's very joyful. It doesn't need to be very long. It's literally just a few minutes where we connect with each other in a beautiful way. So that's on the family side. On the school side, I would love to see schools become
Louka Parry (19:52)
Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (20:09)
a lot more become actually what I call relational hubs. As you pointed out, Luca, I believe that all educators have come to the profession and stay in the profession because they are relational. They love relationships. They love being with little humans and other adults.
Louka Parry (20:13)
you
Isabelle Hau (20:26)
But the systems are such that sometimes it's difficult to, you know, we have not constructed an education system to optimize for relationships. ⁓ We have optimized for access and other things, but we have not optimized for relationships. So how can we make our schools, our early learning environments a lot more relational, for example, by inviting parents a lot more?
Louka Parry (20:35)
Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (20:50)
into the spaces where children are, how can we ensure that teachers are focused on connection and not only instruction, you all these things that seem like really obvious, but just because our systems are not optimized around relationships, are also leaving educators feeling
not fully satisfied because they are ending up wanting to focus more on relationships and not having the time nor the tools to do it well. And then on little friends which actually is a really important circle of relationship as well. I would love to see everyone focus a lot more on play.
Louka Parry (21:20)
Hmm.
Isabelle Hau (21:32)
because literally play drives more friends. We literally have research on this. As if we needed research on this. We have research on that, actually more play drives more friends. And play has been receding in our societies, especially free play, free unstructured play. And I live in an area in the US in...
Louka Parry (21:38)
Now interesting.
It's great research.
Isabelle Hau (21:57)
Palo Alto where we have an incredible push toward more and more structured activities at younger and younger age groups. So I see it firsthand, but that leaves very little time for children to just replay, especially outdoors.
So that's a call to action here for any listener on how can we ensure that if we are a parent, an auntie, grandpa, an educator, how can we ensure that, or just civil society member, how can we ensure that children just simply play? Play is a critical foundational for learning.
something that every animal species has plays of a critical for many things, but it's also critical for if we want a society of future entrepreneurs, for example, plays. It's amazing for, you know, being creative and free thinker and independent and interacting with others. Anyway, plays has a lot of benefits.
And then the last bucket from a system change perspective is community. And I would love to see our communities become more careful. ⁓ And that includes some amazing work that is already underway in many cities, but about thinking how can we...
Louka Parry (23:20)
Nice.
Isabelle Hau (23:30)
structure our urban environment or rural environments to embed more play, more care for our children and facilitate those human connections.
Louka Parry (23:41)
Oh, that was such a rich answer. He said, oh, thank you. The piece on play, it just really gets, it gets me, you know, and it kind of seems if you're an alien species that arrives on the you would kind of question that one. You know, it's, it's such clearly a core part of our human experience. And, and I just make the point that, you know, you
running the Stanford accelerator for learning, you know, and the more time I spent at Stanford, the more playful, especially the D school, it's playful. It's entrepreneurship itself is around experimentation and forging into the unknown. These are the things that play is ideally placed to help us cultivate these kinds of capabilities. And yet for some reason it's, it's we're in this era, at least in the Australia. And I would even say the U S space where structure.
control and command, you know, seems to still be dominant or, know, even explicit direct instruction. Not as part of the toolkit, but as a dominant pedagogy, which is to say, I do then we do then you do. And there's a time and place for that, of course, and can, you know, really critically, but where's the kind of unknown? Where's the like, what could we do? What does this thing do? You know, like,
I think that we lose something across, we lose something from our childhood and that's why I think you can go down and look at the early childhood quality pedagogical principles and then just upscale them across all the way out through to the university and think, okay, being, belonging, becoming. Yeah, it just really strikes me on that one in particular, that we have to make the case for it when it seems like the case should just be self-evident.
Isabelle Hau (25:18)
Yeah, and there are obviously different types of play. We have a lot of evidence that guided play in many settings is actually drives actually greater academic outcomes than direct instructions. And free play has huge benefits too.
especially from a mental health perspective. just ensuring that we have different, yeah, that play remains a critical piece of, you know, of the equation. And as you say, there's maybe a balance among direct instruction, guided play and free play.
but certainly ensuring that these forms of those free... One area that I'm actually really concerned about, it's not directly in education settings, but it's play dates. Play dates used to be one of those form of free play where you had a mom or dad calling their neighbor and organizing, or little ones saying, oh, I'm going to play with XYZ.
Louka Parry (26:16)
Mm-hmm.
Isabelle Hau (26:21)
And what I'm observing is that a lot of the play dates are actually becoming more and more structured with a lot more and more parental intervention. So parents feeling like they have to organize those play dates and maybe provide kids or provide activities or provide, you know, where...
Louka Parry (26:28)
Hmm.
Isabelle Hau (26:43)
or here we have goodie bags and sometimes even an entertainer or someone facilitating the playdate anyway. Yeah, it's interesting societally to see this. Like playdates are becoming more and more structured and it's not a healthy thing. So, that children have time to, you know,
Louka Parry (26:49)
wow.
Hmm.
Isabelle Hau (27:03)
play freely without any parental intervention is really, important. And this can also happen in recess at school. Same issue, recess time, at least in the US. Again, I don't know the stat in Australia, but in the US, we have seen a decrease in recess time.
Louka Parry (27:04)
Yes.
Yes.
Isabelle Hau (27:25)
thinking that, okay, recess time needs to be focused on academics when in fact recess time is critical for a lot of the creative thinking, critical thinking, collaboration skills, all these future skills that we know are critical in this future economy.
Louka Parry (27:43)
Hmm
Hmm. Such a great point. Yeah. I was just thinking about kind of what we're seeing in Australia as well. And this kind of thesis that you can change a lot of things, but until you train, change the structures of schooling, you might not actually see a really significant transformation, you know? So we're like tweaking things around the edges rather than saying, we're to do recess three times a day, you know, for this period of time. And we see it as learning time.
not as a break from learning. So much of this to me seems to be a framing argument, Isabel. What do define as in-script? What do we find useful? And what do we kind of, we create these kind of hierarchies of importance, which I always often start with the most cerebral abstract and then move down to the most tactile and tangible. In most, in a lot of settings anyway. I want to ask you like one, ⁓ yeah.
Isabelle Hau (28:32)
Yeah, and Luca, I would add
maybe to that framing that in education, we are driven by certain metrics that people are looking at as measures of success. by, I mean, here's a test in particular.
that are very cognitive based. So they measure a certain type of intelligence. They do not measure for the more, and by the way, they are mostly individual based. They rarely measure our social capacity.
or our ability to collaborate with others. So we have decided that cognitive skills were the most important and we decided this a long time ago. There is a big question in my mind whether we are now at a new time, especially with artificial intelligence, where we need to maybe revisit fundamentally some of those measures of success.
that may not be appropriate for this future that's already underway, where artificial intelligence has more and more of the capacity to replicate a lot of our cognitive human intelligence.
Louka Parry (29:46)
That's beautiful segue to this question that I've been meaning to ask you. How do you see the AI influence playing out right now? Because we did mention the kind of different scenarios. And you know, in this moment, appears, what are you seeing as kind of the emerging future possibilities? I guess is my question, especially on how AI is influencing the learning.
process, of course includes cognition, includes social connection, even includes things like affect and emotionality.
Isabelle Hau (30:12)
I think there is one scenario where artificial intelligence can really truly enhance human learning. And that scenario is absolutely there, absolutely a possibility if we use this tool as a way to increase human capabilities and...
support in particular in the areas of collaboration as well as creativity. So if AI becomes a creative tool for people to be more humans and do really their best, be at their best by being creative and collaborative, that would be one of the beautiful scenario. There is another scenario, of course there are many other scenarios by the way, where
Louka Parry (30:43)
Hmm.
Isabelle Hau (31:03)
AI makes us more more isolated and more lonely and more reliant on this technology and less able to be agents of our future. So there are all those possibilities.
Louka Parry (31:14)
Mmm.
Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (31:24)
One area that I am a little bit concerned, I am actually very concerned about is this area of companionship, which by the way, based on a recent HBR review article is number one use case for AI right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Louka Parry (31:33)
Yeah.
I saw that article and I was like, my goodness, that's interesting.
Isabelle Hau (31:48)
So we did a study on one of those AI companions. We did a study on replica.ai at Stanford. And there are multiple other studies that have come out recently. That study showed four things that are really interesting. And let me go quickly through them. One is that people who are more lonely are using those AI companions. Two is...
90 % of the users of replica.ai think that the interaction with a machine is human-like, 90 % line zero. So essentially we're very confused as humans about whether a companion is synthetic or human. Number three is that based on our study,
Louka Parry (32:20)
Interesting. Right.
Isabelle Hau (32:37)
it seemed like there was a slight benefit for the users in terms of mental health. So we observed a slight reduction in suicidal ideation. However, some of my colleagues also have noted that, again, human relationships have a much greater impact in suicidal ideation reduction.
Louka Parry (33:01)
Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (33:01)
Well,
there was a slight, I human connections are irreplaceable relative to the effects is much, larger. And then the fourth thing that I think is really interesting and sobering is that we also observed a slight displacement in human relationships. So in other terms, people who were more lonely used those tools and then became even lonelier.
Louka Parry (33:17)
Interesting.
Yeah. Yeah.
Isabelle Hau (33:25)
So there is a big risk here that those tools that are used by millions may make us more isolated and more lonely.
Louka Parry (33:34)
I share the same concerns, I think, Isabel, with that scenario. looked at being in South by, at South by Southwest a couple of months ago, and I was just struck by the amount of activity of people building things because they can. And that's great, but it's also, but should they, you know, in a certain way. And I think rather than that, we don't want the move fast and break things mantra with this kind of technology. I don't feel.
I looked at something called girlfriend.ai. So I can just imagine, know, swathes of teenage boys and young men forming a relationship with a chat bot rather than going through any educational process to potentially find someone that they may want to, you know, become viable with as Scott Galloway would say. So, you know, I'm just kind of really, I am kind of a, I'm a little...
I'm fearful, I guess, about where this might go. And of course, very powerful, you know, dopamine loops and engagement hooks and all the kind of things that we know also that playing into it. And so for me, this first scenario, the outline must be, it's like, how do we lubricate? How do we create, like be a liaison between, you know, like somebody that can introduce us to each other, that can...
maximize our ability to repair relationships. You that seems to be enormously useful in the current moment. So it's gonna be very interesting to see how it plays out. And I guess, I don't know, maybe the pragmatic part of me, Isabel thinks it'll be both. It'd be both realities. It'll kind of be, it'll depend for whom and under what conditions, you know, both scenarios perhaps.
Isabelle Hau (35:02)
Yeah, that's an area where maybe research can also help set up some frameworks for young people, young adults, older adults as well, help everyone think about what are the good use cases of those technologies. We would all think, for example, that maybe using a machine for, for example, for foreign language acquisition, if you are not lucky enough,
Louka Parry (35:17)
Mmm.
Isabelle Hau (35:27)
to have someone who is a foreign speaker next to you might be a good thing. But then if it's at the expense of building healthy relationships and you never get out of those machine interactions and you are so used to also those...
Louka Parry (35:40)
Hmm.
Isabelle Hau (35:43)
almost perfect settings ⁓ when in fact relationships are imperfect and that's the beauty of human relationships is that they are imperfect but you are so used to having these flawless systems you know how do you adapt to these you human environments
Louka Parry (35:45)
Mmm.
Yes, absolutely.
Mmm.
That is, oh gosh, this is so, I feel like our conversation has opened up even more questions for me, which is what a good conversation ought to do, I feel. But I do have one final question for you, which is if you were to leave us, you know, ruminating, know, contemplating any particular finding or insight from your recent work, what would that be?
Isabelle Hau (36:07)
Ha ha ha ha!
Yeah, let me say something that's related to my book, which is the title of the book is Love to Learn. And I believe that if we want our children and all of us to truly love to learn, we must start with learning how to love.
Louka Parry (36:42)
That's beautiful. What a wonderful way to finish our conversation. Congrats on the book. It's wonderful work. Thank you for doing it, Isabelle, and a delight to reconnect with you for this conversation on the Learning Future podcast.
Isabelle Hau (36:54)
Thank you for having me, Luca. I enjoyed every moment and I fear it feels like we could go for much longer.
Louka Parry (37:00)
Well, we'll schedule a disco. I'll put a few minutes on my Sunday for a disco dance at home in solidarity with your family celebration. Merci bien. Fantastic to be with you. Thank you.
Isabelle Hau (37:07)
I think I'll join this next Sunday. Thank you, Louka.
