Related papers: Culture, Computation, Morality
In lieu of an abstract here is the first paragraph: No other species remotely approaches the human capacity for the cultural evolution of novelty that is accumulative, adaptive, and open-ended (i.e., with no a priori limit on the size or…
Nolan and Temple Lang (2010) argued for the fundamental role of computing in the statistics curriculum. In the intervening decade the statistics education community has acknowledged that computational skills are as important to statistics…
Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However, science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the mind of…
Productive interactions between diverse users and language technologies require outputs from the latter to be culturally relevant and sensitive. Prior works have evaluated models' knowledge of cultural norms, values, and artifacts, without…
Compositionality is a key property for dealing with complexity, which has been studied from many points of view in diverse fields. Particularly, the composition of individual computations (or programs) has been widely studied almost since…
Computation is commonly defined as the execution of abstract algorithms over symbolic representations, with physical systems treated as substrates that realise predefined operations. While effective for engineered machines, this separation…
In this paper three computational models for the study of the evolution of cooperation under cultural propagation are studied: Kin Selection, Direct Reciprocity and Indirect Reciprocity. Two analyzes are reported, one comparing their…
Contemporary discussions in AI ethics often treat culture as a source of normative divergence that needs to be accommodated, tolerated, or managed due to its resistance to universal standards. This paper offers an alternative vision through…
Learning to code, and more broadly, learning about computer science is a growing field of activity and research. Under the label of computational thinking, computational concepts are increasingly used as cognitive tools in many subject…
The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of machine culture, culture mediated or generated by…
We present what we call the Interpretation Problem, whereby any rule in symbolic form is open to infinite interpretation in ways that we might disapprove of and argue that any attempt to build morality into machines is subject to it. We…
Language understanding is a key scientific issue in the fields of cognitive and computer science. However, the two disciplines differ substantially in the specific research questions. Cognitive science focuses on analyzing the specific…
The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative behavioural definition of computation (and of a computer) based simply on whether a system is capable of reacting to the environment-the input-as reflected in a measure of programmability.…
When sociologists and other social scientist ask whether the return to college differs by race and gender, they face a choice between two fundamentally different modes of inquiry. Traditional interaction models follow deductive logic: the…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
It is shown that, in certain circumstances, systems of cultural rules may be represented by doubly stochastic matrices denoted called possibility transforms, and by certain real valued possibility densities with inner product. Using such…
The cultural integration of immigrants conditions their overall socio-economic integration as well as natives' attitudes towards globalisation in general and immigration in particular. At the same time, excessive integration -- or…
Cultural evolution is driven by how we choose what to consume and share with others. A common belief is that the cultural artifacts that succeed are ones that balance novelty and conventionality. This balance theory suggests that people…
Despite often being perceived as morally objectionable, stereotypes are a common feature of social groups, a phenomenon that has often been attributed to biased motivations or limits on the ability to process information. We argue that one…
Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various…