Cultural evolvability and cognitive technologies
Résumé
Cognitive technologies enhance and expand our problem-solving capabilities beyond what we can do on our own, unaided. This means that as new cognitive technologies are invented and used, and as these new technologies form traditions specific to those populations that harbor them, our species increases its cognitive capabilities through time. Human cognition is, in this sense, a historically moving target. Cognitive technologies also played and continue to play a role in the invention, development, and improvement of new technologies, including further, more empowering cognitive technologies. This means that as cognitive technologies are developed, they expand our inventive capabilities. This dynamic process generates a positive feedback loop, wherein earlier cognitive technologies enable the invention and advancement of more powerful cognitive technologies in an iterative, open-ended manner. In this paper, I argue that the process of cumulative cultural evolution is at pains of explaining the evolvability of human technologies, describe how cognitive technologies make us ever smarter at invention, and clarify how cognitive technologies enable a bootstrapping dynamic leading to evolvable, open-ended technological change.
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