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

Bentley, R. Alexander; O'Brien, Michael J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262036959 ISBN 13: 9780262036955

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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) and before that was Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is a designer, technologist, and catalyst behind the national movement to transform STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) to STEAM with the addition of the arts. He is the author of Design by Numbers (1999), The Laws of Simplicity (2006) and Redesigning Leadership (2011), all published by The MIT Press.

Review

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 Language

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

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0262036959
• ISBN 13: 9780262036955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176