The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)

How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. 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 Foreword / by John Maeda -- Preface : in the Middleton Theater -- Traditional minds -- Change is not Norman -- Check the transmission -- Cultural trees -- Bayesians -- Traditions and horizons -- Networks -- Hindsighted -- Moore is better? -- Free Willy.;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. 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. How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. 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... evolution; cultural anthropology; business; evolutionary psychology; culture; theory; social sciences; information; sociology; cultural inheritance; archaeology; transmission; AI; artificial intelligence 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. 00Bentley 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 小电影院、计算机语言、手斧、iPhone----在亚历山大·本特利(R. Alexander Bentley)和迈克尔·奥布莱恩(Michael J. O 'Brien)引人入胜、轻松有趣的论文中,许多普通但有趣的物品都成了文化和"文化传播"的例子。他们讨论的话题很广泛,包括虎鲸和口述历史,他们通过细节来解释文化传播。作者清晰地讲述了不同地区的文化演变,如啤酒和史前抛射工具克洛维斯石矛,令人回味无穷。他们将思想与历史进程联系起来,为研究文化、变革及当今世界面临的挑战提供了新的洞见。