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How Culture Tames Technology. Always.
From Fire to AI: How Culture Has Been Winning the War Against Technological Disruption for 300,000 Years
Every generation it seems, proclaims how a new technology is going to change, well, everything. Medieval scribes declared the printing press would destroy memory. So did some Greek philosophers. Victorian parents feared the telephone would ruin courtship (okay maybe kinda, but much later). Our grandparents thought television would be the death of conversation. Today, many say that smartphones are rewiring our brains and that AI will replace human creativity.
Except non of this happened and no, AI won’t replace human creativity either. We still tell stories at the dinner table, we fall in love in absurdly complicated ways, and we still create rituals and hierarchies that our ancient ancestors would find quite familiar.
When we look at technology through the lens of culture, we can cut through the AI hype and well, all technology hype, and take a little heart that while all this technology may be stressing us out and be overwhelming, it’s not that scary after all.
These technologies that were supposed to change everything? Instead they’ve been domesticated, trained and modified to fit cultural ebbs and flows.
