June 5, 2023
"Technology" is one of these words with so many meanings that I need to subtitle it when I use it in a conversation. Most days it means some pretty object with electronics inside that I covet, or whose design flaws frustrate me. Other days it refers to algorithms shifting through data, possibly with biases or dubious motivations. With a sophisticated marketeer it is the concerted moves that shift narratives for a rebrand,
If I am with complex systems people, it may be systems of governance or markets and technological evolution, while with a cultural anthropologist it will span everything, from tools and family organization to morals and the conceptions of the world encoded in different languages. That enormous breath of angles on what technology means is really the same as the breath of angles on what it means to be human. It makes no sense to think of the world or of people without thinking about our technologies too because they are our sense-making organs. Not only do we build the world with our technologies, we can only see it through the spectacles they provide us, and can only tell our stories in their code.
Peter Richerson and Rob Boyd
Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal's. In this stunning exploration of human adaptation, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that only a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can explain these unique characteristics.
Culture completely changes the way that human evolution works, but not because culture is learned. Rather, the capital fact is that human-style social learning creates a novel evolutionary trade-off. Social learning allows human populations to accumulate reservoirs of adaptive information over many generations, leading to the cumulative cultural evolution of highly adaptive behaviors and technology. Because this process is much faster than genetic evolution, it allows human populations to evolve (culturally) adaptions to local environments
“Culture is (mostly) information stored in human brains, and gets transmitted from brain to brain by way of a variety of social learning processes.”
In 2009, Arthur published The Nature of Technology: What it Is and How it Evolves. The book is a theory of evolution for technology. It argues that technology, like biological life, evolves from earlier forms. But the main mechanism isn't Darwin's, it is the combining of earlier technologies—earlier forms—to make new technologies. The book explores in detail how this evolution works. And it argues that economy isn't just a container for its technologies; the economy emerges from its technologies.
In complex systems, technology is viewed as a complex adaptive system in an evolutionary setting. They are organisms in a fitness landscape searching for a path to a higher position, subject to the interaction of size and interdependence. In other words, new stuff eats the old if the conditions are right, and everybody gets a chance to change these conditions.
The nice thing about this description of technology and how new things come to be is that it is fully dynamical. You are not limited to looking at one technology while pretending that the world is not changed by it. The conditions that determine the features of the landscape are not separate from the technologies themselves.
This is done by expanding in a very interesting way how we think of what a technology is. Instead of saying “this cardboard packaging might take root if the corporate users are of type X, people care about the environment by Y much, and the regulations are Z ”, you can think of X, Y and Z as technologies themselves. They are social technologies (not to be confused with social networks like facebook). We can think of all the changes that happen in our world as the story of evolution of physical and social technologies.
The definitions are:
Physical technologies is what we usually understand as a technology: the wheel, the steam engine, microchips, the internet. They all are rearrangements of matter. Examples of social technologies are laws, norms, marriage and family structures in general, religion, education, politics, marketing, moral rules. We don’t usually think of them that way, but they are “machinery” that functions to rearrange people’s behavior in a certain way that determines the possible outcomes.
Who we are and how we live drives the technologies we develop, and our technologies change who we are and how we live. Opposable thumbs originally evolved for gripping tree branches but were also useful in making tools, and tool use then changed the shape of our thumbs, enabling more nimble hands to make new and better tools. Socially evolved brains enabled that knowledge to be transmitted and built upon, and our tools and knowledge enabled new ways of living – and so on, over a multimillion-year journey. This co-evolutionary dance between technologies, physiology, culture and institutions has been going on for millennia. [Aeon]
Thinking of social structures as social technologies is useful because:
That last point is key to understand people’s behavior, attention, and why we see the world and ourselves the way we do. We will be unpacking this throughout these notes.
It is tempting to imagine that physical and social technologies are just tools, that we use them to achieve a certain purpose without changing the fundamental nature of man. But that is not true. Not just physical and social technologies co-evolve with each other, but we do with them, in the most fundamental ways.
We didn’t just get better thumbs through our technologies and it does not take many generations and genetic selection to see changes. The printing press, for example, changed our brains:
Reading alters the brain’s wiring: thickens corpus callosum (connection between right and left brain), Broca’s area, enhances verbal memory, reduces facial recognition, reduces holistic perception of configurations in favor of analytic perception of component parts. This is an example of culture changing biology and psychology without altering the genetic code: Culture can and does alter our brains, hormones and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many other aspects of our minds. [J.Henrich]
This is a remarkable recent understanding. To stay with the example of reading, reading makes it harder to remember faces. That right-hemisphere bias in facial processing was assumed to be a basic feature of human neurocognitive functioning but it turns out to come from reading.
Importantly, our erroneous belief that this feature of facial processing was universal to humans is because _reading_ is universal among the subjects that lab studies have easy access to (psych undergrads). The surprising but obvious-in-hindsight fact is that once a physical technology takes hold, we adapt to fit it, behaviorally and biologically.
More fundamentally, physical and social technologies guide our attention. This is a basic information processing necessity. There is far too much going on around us, in the physical environment and in our social interactions. As we grow up from infants, a huge amount of pruning has to take place to compress that information so we can pay attention to what is relevant.
That is clearly not built-in biologically. It was different when we lived in the wild, changed with we had crops, and we don’t even notice the trees in the street when we walk down it now, checking our email in case something important has come in.
Our physical technologies is a matter-based map of the world with landmarks and paths pointed out for us. We survey what is relevant through it very directly. Social technologies do the same. We judge people, make alliances and enemies, decide what is fair through social technologies. We even base our view of ourselves, whether we live up to our expectations and if we are satisfied or frustrated on them.
Why are our technologies are so powerful in their ability to change us? Because they determine two absolutely fundamental things about who we are:
The term “social technologies” term has been around for more than a century. However, it is currently used in a rather narrow sense. As the definitions above say, technologies are things or systems created for a purpose. Does this mean that, say, how people interact with each other socially or how they think of love is not a technology?
No. The idea of “purpose” in technology can easily be misleading. If you’ve spent any time in technology innovation, you will know that technologies have a life of their own. I have a patent for a device but its best use turned out to be significantly different than what I thought it would be used for when the patent was written. The purpose was changed by the people who found it useful and by the economics of the market. That’s a universal rule. The initial purpose of your design changes by the time it gets traction.
It’s not just products that suffer that fate. For example, Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts tracks down how the quest for love has become an “agonizingly difficult experience” resulting in collective disappointment, and internalised by individuals as personal failing, through a series of changes in the current “architecture of choice” and its dependence on the economic landscape. Somewhere in that sequence key roles are played by things like advertising of makeup products, a social innovation a century ago.
Half-way between physical and social, the ways social media has changed behavior, attention, and our political landscape is a daily subject of discussion. What exactly its intended purpose was and what it actually does are only weakly connected. These “unintended consequences” are only a part of the highly dynamical interplay between technologies and people.
It is probably best to remove that “purpose” statement from the definition of a technology, especially a social one, and instead work to understand why and how they change people’s behavior.
In conclusion, there is no clear-cut separation between physical and social technologies, and there is no clear-cut separation between people and our technologies. Without them we would have no useful “eyes”, “hands”, or “voice”. We make no sense without it, it is as much a part of us as our brain.
It is a fundamental reason why there are few absolute statements about who people are and how they behave, or how they should behave. This is the framework through which to understand attention, behavior and cognition.