The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms

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R. Alexander Bentley (Professor, University of Tennessee) Michael J. O'Brien (Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Texas A&M University - San Antonio)

The Acceleration of Cultural Change

Name: The Acceleration of Cultural Change
Price: 55 AUD
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ISBN: 9780262551977

From Ancestors to Algorithms

R. Alexander Bentley (Professor, University of Tennessee), Michael J. O'Brien (Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Texas A&M University - San Antonio), John Maeda (Global Head, Computational Design and Inclusion, Automattic, Inc.)

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English

MIT Press
21 May 2024

Social & cultural anthropology; Evolution

Series: Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life

How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors.

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.

By: R. Alexander Bentley (Professor University of Tennessee), Michael J. O'Brien (Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Texas A&M University - San Antonio)
Foreword by: John Maeda (Global Head Computational Design and Inclusion Automattic Inc.)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 137mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780262551977
ISBN 10: 0262551977
Series: Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
Pages: 176
Publication Date: 21 May 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

R. Alexander Bentley is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee and 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). 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.