Tag: technology

Modelling the emergence of open-ended technological evolution

James Winters, Mathieu Charbonneau
Humans stand alone in terms of their potential to collectively and cumulatively improve technologies in an open-ended manner. This open-endedness provides societies with the ability to continually expand their resources and to increase their capacity to store, transmit and process information at a collective-level. Here, we propose that the production of resources arises from the interaction between technological systems (a society’s repertoire of interdependent skills, techniques and artifacts) and search spaces (the aggregate collection of needs, problems and goals within a society). Starting from this premise we develop a macro-level model wherein both technological systems and search spaces are subject to cultural evolutionary dynamics. By manipulating the extent to which these dynamics are characterised by stochastic or selection-like processes, we demonstrate that open-ended growth is extremely rare, historically contingent and only possible when technological systems and search spaces co-evolve. Here, stochastic factors must be strong enough to continually perturb the dynamics into a far-from-equilibrium state, whereas selection-like factors help maintain effectiveness and ensure the sustained production of resources. Only when this co-evolutionary dynamic maintains effective technological systems, supports the ongoing expansion of the search space and leads to an increased provision of resources do we observe open-ended technological evolution.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

Dynamics of Disruption in Science and Technology

Michael Park, Erin Leahey, Russell Funk

Although the number of new scientific discoveries and technological
inventions has increased dramatically over the past century, there have also
been concerns of a slowdown in the progress of science and technology. We
analyze 25 million papers and 4 million patents across 6 decades and find that
science and technology are becoming less disruptive of existing knowledge, a
pattern that holds nearly universally across fields. We link this decline in
disruptiveness to a narrowing in the utilization of existing knowledge.
Diminishing quality of published science and changes in citation practices are
unlikely to be responsible for this trend, suggesting that this pattern
represents a fundamental shift in science and technology.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

Is the cultural evolution of technology cumulative or combinatorial?

Explanations of human technology often point to both its cumulative and combinatorial character. Using a novel computational framework, where individual agents attempt to solve problems by modifying, combining and transmitting technologies in an open-ended search space, this paper re-evaluates two prominent explanations for the cultural evolution of technology: that humans are equipped with (i) social learning mechanisms for minimizing information loss during transmission, and (ii) creative mechanisms for generating novel technologies via combinatorial innovation. Here, both information loss and combinatorial innovation are introduced as parameters in the model, and then manipulated to approximate situations where technological evolution is either more cumulative or combinatorial. Compared to existing models, which tend to marginalize the role of purposeful problem-solving, this approach allows for indefinite growth in complexity while directly simulating constraints from history and computation. The findings show that minimizing information loss is only required when the dynamics are strongly cumulative and characterised by incremental innovation. Contrary to previous findings, when agents are equipped with a capacity for combinatorial innovation, low levels of information loss are neither necessary nor sufficient for populations to solve increasingly complex problems. Instead, higher levels of information loss are advantageous for unmasking the potential for combinatorial innovation. This points to a parsimonious explanation for the cultural evolution of technology without invoking separate mechanisms of stability and creativity.

Source: osf.io