This post might be interesting to you if you want a conceptual model of cumulative cultural evolution and/or you’re curious how cumulative cultural evolution impacts AI forecasting and development.

In particular, I’ll argue that cumulative cultural evolution makes one argument for the discontinuity of AI progress more plausible and sketches out at least two possible paths of development that are worth further investigation.

Cumulative Cultural Evolution

Humans have altered more than one-third of the earths’ land surface. We cycle more nitrogen than all other terrestrial life forms combined and have now altered the flow of two-thirds of the earth’s rivers. Our species uses 100 times more biomass than any large species that has ever lived. If you include our vast herds of domesticated animals, we account for more than 98% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass. — Joseph Henrich

Cumulative cultural evolution is often framed as an answer to the general question: what makes humans so successful relative to other apes? Other apes do not occupy as many continents, are not as populous, and do not shape or use environment to the extent that humans do.

There are a smorgasbord of different accounts of this, referencing:

human capability for deception ratcheted up human sociality and intelligence via arms race like effects.
runaway signaling.
human’s general intelligence or improvisational intelligence
humans’ prosociality
a package of instinctual modules, such as language, intelligence, social learning, folk physics and biology
human’s cultural learning abilities

In this section, I’ll explain the account that refers to human’s cultural learning abilities. Cultural learning typically refers to a subset of social learning abilities such as mindreading, imitation, and teaching. I’ll use cultural and social learning interchangeably here.

Muthukrishna, Doebeli, Chudek, and Henrich’s recent paper “The Cultural Brain Hypothesis: How culture drives brain expansion, sociality, and life history” contains one of the best conceptual models of the cumulative cultural evolution story.

In the paper, Muthukrishna and co are in the business of making mathematical models which they can use to simulate the impact of brain size, sociality, mating structures, and life history. I’ll go the conceptual features of the primary model here and motivate it’s plausibility.

The components of the model are:

assumptio

...

Cultural knowledge