Related papers: Is Human Culture Locked by Evolution?
Human culture research has witnessed an opportunity of revolution thanks to the big data and social network revolution. Websites such as Douban.com, Goodreads.com, Pandora and IMDB become the new gold mine for cultural researchers. In 2021…
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…
Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…
Research in cultural evolution aims at providing causal explanations for the change of culture over time. Over the past decades, this field has generated an important body of knowledge, using experimental, historical, and computational…
AI is flattening culture. Evaluations of "culture" are showing the myriad ways in which large AI models are homogenizing language and culture, averaging out rich linguistic differences into generic expressions. I call this phenomenon…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
The remarkable ecological success of humans is often attributed to our ability to develop complex cultural artefacts that enable us to cope with environmental challenges. The evolution of complex culture (cumulative cultural evolution) is…
Cultural algorithm is a kind of evolutionary algorithm inspired from societal evolution and is composed of a belief space, a population space and a protocol that enables exchange of knowledge between these sources. Knowledge created in the…
Culture fundamentally shapes people's reasoning, behavior, and communication. As people increasingly use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to expedite and automate personal and professional tasks, cultural values embedded in AI models…
As general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly integrated with diverse human communities, cultural alignment has emerged as a crucial element in their deployment. Most existing approaches treat cultural…
With the increased expectation of artificial intelligence, academic research face complex questions of human-centred, responsible and trustworthy technology embedded into society and culture. Several academic debates, social consultations…
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively change their culture in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase…
The profound impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on biology has led to the acceptance of the theory in many complex systems that lie well beyond its original domain. Culture is one example that also exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary…
Large language models (LLMs) are able to engage in natural-sounding conversations with humans, showcasing unprecedented capabilities for information retrieval and automated decision support. They have disrupted human-technology interaction…
From the invention of writing and the printing press, to television and social media, human history is punctuated by major innovations in communication technology, which fundamentally altered how ideas spread and reshaped our culture.…
Cultural evolution allows ideas and technologies to accumulate across generations, reaching their most complex and open-ended form in humans. While social learning enables the transmission of such innovations, the cognitive processes that…
The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be" (1989, p.1). The study and pursuit of…
The boom of online social media and microblogging platforms has rapidly alter the way we consume news and exchange opinions. Even though considerable efforts try to recommend various contents to users, loss of information diversity and the…
There is an urgent need to incorporate the perspectives of culturally diverse groups into AI developments. We present a novel conceptual framework for research that aims to expand, reimagine, and reground mainstream visions of AI using…
The speed and transformative power of human cultural evolution is evident from the change it has wrought on our planet. This chapter proposes a human computation program aimed at (1) distinguishing algorithmic from non-algorithmic…