The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms
176
The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms
176Paperback
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Overview
From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves.
Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution.
Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262551977 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MIT Press |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2024 |
| Series: | Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Michael J. O'Brien is Provost and Professor of History at Texas A&M University–San Antonio and the coauthor of I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping Social Behavior and The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (both published by the MIT Press).
An internationally recognized leader at the intersection of design and technology, John Maeda is Executive Vice President/Chief Experience Officer at Publicis Sapient. He was the 16th President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He is the author of Design by Numbers, The Laws of Simplicity, and Redesigning Leadership, all published by The MIT Press.
Table of Contents
Foreword John Maeda vii
Preface: In the Middleton Theater xi
1 Traditional Minds 1
Producers and Scroungers 6
Cultural Intelligence 9
What's in a Name? 12
2 Change is Not Norman 15
Serious Partying 20
Family Feuds 22
3 Check the Transmission 25
Transmission Experiments 28
Cultural Attractors 29
Social Information Bias 32
Slicing and Dicing in the Digital Age 35
4 Cultural Trees 39
The Acheulean Hand Ax 40
Emulation versus Imitation 43
Evolutionary Trees 45
Languages and Folktales 46
Complex Technology 48
5 Bayesians 51
The Bayesian Mind 53
Bayesian Modeling and the Bantu Expansion 55
Across the Pacific 61
6 Traditions and Horizons 67
Diet 70
Gender Relations 73
Charitable Giving 77
7 Networks 81
E-Networks 84
Influence versus Homophily 90
8 Hindsighted 93
Predicting the Past 95
Predicting the Game in Real Time 97
Understanding Collective Behavior 99
9 Moore is Better? 103
The Tasmania Hypothesis 105
An information Explosion 108
The Explosion Hits Science 110
Without Selection 113
10 Free Willy 115
Bluefins and Herring 117
Orcas 120
Along Come Mice 126
Bibliography 129
Index 151
What People are Saying About This
An entertaining and thought-provoking analysis of the nature of cultural change and how that nature is being transformed, for good or ill, in our ever-more-connected world. A fresh look at our past, and a tantalizing glimpse of our future.
Much of our world is a product of our collective imagination—what we call culture. Understanding cultural evolution is the key to understanding economic, social, and technological evolution. The Acceleration of Cultural Change provides a fascinating, insightful, and engaging account that takes readers from the Stone Age to the Social Media Age.
Much of our world is a product of our collective imagination—what we call culture. Understanding cultural evolution is the key to understanding economic, social, and technological evolution. The Acceleration of Cultural Change provides a fascinating, insightful, and engaging account that takes readers from the Stone Age to the Social Media Age.
—Eric Beinhocker, Executive Director, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford; author of The Origin of Wealth
An entertaining and thought-provoking analysis of the nature of cultural change and how that nature is being transformed, for good or ill, in our ever-more-connected world. A fresh look at our past, and a tantalizing glimpse of our future.
—Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School; coauthor of Creating LanguageMuch of our world is a product of our collective imagination—what we call culture. Understanding cultural evolution is the key to understanding economic, social, and technological evolution. The Acceleration of Cultural Change provides a fascinating, insightful, and engaging account that takes readers from the Stone Age to the Social Media Age.
—Eric Beinhocker, Executive Director, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford; author of The Origin of Wealth