What Is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him?: How We All Already Have Our Superintelligent AI-Assistant :: POSSIBLE LECTURE OUTLINE
Anthology Intelligence: humanity's collective brain is already our superintelligent friend: We don't need to build superintelligence because we did it already. We have it. It is us. Behind the...
Anthology Intelligence: humanity's collective brain is already our superintelligent friend: We don't need to build superintelligence because we did it already. We have it. It is us. Behind the paywall because I am behind, and so it is not yet a thing, but only an outline…
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, And hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands...
How bipedalism, bureaucracy, and the binding of time forged the only superintelligent hypersocial superorganism on Earth.
Or, alternatively: the improbable ascent of the East African Plains Ape to planetary dominion—by way of gossip, gift-exchange, and Google.
Or is it, perhaps: Is your smartphone really just the latest chapter in a multi million-year story of collective superintelligent cognition?
I was provoked this AM to turn back to this project by Doug Jones’s showing us a very interesting chart:
And writes:
Doug Jones: Calories and curves <https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2025/06/16/calories-and-curves-9/>: ‘Comparing energy expenditure (TEE or Total Energy Expended) and fat among humans and our closest relations: chimpanzees…gorillas… and orangutans (Pongo)… adjusted for differences in overall body mass…. Humans are a high-energy species. Also we carry a lot more body fat… particularly… women… extra fat to meet the high energy demands of human infants, gestating and (even more) nursing. But it even applies to men…. A high-energy life-style means… an extra reserve of fat in case of emergencies. We don’t know [for] how long ago our ancestors [had done this]…. A high energy life-style also goes with extensive food sharing and changes in human kinship…
(The chart is from Pontzer & al. (2016),” Metabolic acceleration and the evolution of human brain size and life history” <https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17654>.)
This bears immediately and strikingly on Joseph Henrich’s work.
He has this line about how we are not all that much smarter than our ape-cousins, but we mature much more slowly, and so our brains are plastic much longer and can learn a huge amount of cultural information relevant to our survival. The hypersocial-animal anthology-intelligence point:
Joseph Henrich (2016): The Secret of Our Success <https://archive.org/details/secretofoursucce0000henr>: ‘‘Physically weak, slow… dependent on eating cooked food, though we don’t innately know how to make fire or cook…. Our colons are too short, stomachs too small, and teeth too petite. Our infants are born fat and dangerously premature… not so impressive when we go head-to-head in problem-solving tests against other apes….
We are a cultural species. Probably over a million years ago, members of our evolutionary lineage began learning from each other in such a way that culture became cumulative…. Our capacities for learning from others are themselves finely honed products of natural selection…. Cultural learning abilities gave rise to an interaction between an accumulating body of cultural information and genetic evolution that has shaped, and continues to shape, our anatomy, physiology, and psychology…
And, at least as I understand Henrich, we are a cultural-evolution anthology intelligence species long before we develop language:
Joseph Henrich (2016): The Secret of Our Success <https://archive.org/details/secretofoursucce0000henr>: ‘Gesher Benot Ya'aqov… 750,000 years ago…. Stone-tool manufacturing… food processing… controlled fire… hand axes, cleavers, blades, knives, awls, scrapers, and choppers… from flint, basalt, and limestone, tool manufacture was done on-site, often from giant slabs carried in from a distant quarry…. Freshwater crabs, turtles, reptiles, and at least nine types of fish… [plus] seeds, acorns, olives, grapes, nuts, water chestnuts… the submerged prickly water lily….
In the next 300,000 years after the activities at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Homo erectus changed sufficiently, including a brain expansion to 1200 cm3, to justify a new species name, Homo heidelbergensis… projectile weapons… a variety of techniques for producing stone blades… consistent within sites or populations but… vary[ing] between populations. Distinct tool traditions and composite tools that exploited natural glues weren’t far behind.….
By 750,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, there’s little doubt that we are dealing with a cultural species who hunts large game, catches big fish, maintains hearths, cooks, manufactures complex tools, cooperates in moving giant slabs, and gathers and processes diverse plants. The bottom line: cumulative cultural evolution is old in our species’ lineage, dating back at least hundreds of thousands of years, but probably millions of years…
There are a huge number of other evolutionary changes that Doug Jones tracks on his Logarithmic History weblog <https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com> that are milestones along our way to becoming the hypersocial anthology-intelligence species that we are. And Melissa Dell, when she teaches this stuff, stresses how useful Joseph Henrich <https://archive.org/details/secretofoursucce0000henr> is for getting students to recognize how extraordinarily important, deep, and foundational are all the things that make for humanity’s economic and also cognitive division of labor—again, the anthology intelligence point.
I guess I should decide if I want to elevate this topic to a full class next year. I am very hesitant to do it because of the extremely marked tendency for any attempt to grapple with the issue to rapidly degenerate into simply just so stories to justify particular positions with respect to the issues of today. On the other hand, I do have the belief that it is very important indeed.
So here goes. I guess?:
Humanity: A Globe-Spanning, Time-Binding, Hypersocial Superintelligent Anthology Intelligence
I. Framing the Problem of Human Uniqueness
Central Question: How did a moderately-sized primate become a civilization-building, globe-spanning, time-binding, hypersocial, superintelligent anthology intelligence, anyway?
Definitional Preliminaries:
“Time-binding” (Korzybski): The accumulation, transmission, and compounding of knowledge across generations.
“Hypersociality”: Networked, large-scale cooperation beyond kin.
“Anthology Intelligence”: Not just individual brains, but a collective, cumulative, self-reinforcing intelligence.
II. Deep Roots: From Cosmic Origins to Primates
The Cosmic Lottery: Big Bang, planetary formation, & the preconditions for life.
The Long Crawl: From prokaryotes to eukaryotes, multicellularity, vertebrates.
Mammals & Primates: Grasping hands, stereoscopic vision, & the neural substrate for social complexity.
Miocene Apes: Diversity of apes, experimentation with locomotion (Dryopithecus, Oreopithecus, Graecopithecus, Sivapithecus).
Specialization Trap: Knuckle-walking, energetics, evolutionary “dead ends” among other great apes.
III. The Hominin Experiment: Bushiness, Bipedalism, Brains, & Bootstrapped Additional Benefits
Bushy Hominin Tree: Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, Ardipithecus, Australopithecines; complexity of ancestry vs. collateral relatives.
Bipedalism: Anatomical changes, energetic consequences, freeing the hands (see: “Four legs good, two legs better”).
Tool Use and Handedness: Acheulean handaxes, cognitive leaps, social implications of artifact possession.
Brain Evolution: From 400cc to 1400cc—social brain hypothesis, ecological intelligence, sexual selection.
Emergence of Culture: Fire, cooking (Wrangham), domestication of the human body.
IV. Time-Binding & the Cultural Ratchet
Cumulative Culture: The “ratchet effect” (Tomasello), high-fidelity transmission, and the emergence of teaching.
Language: Adaptive release from quadrupedal vocal constraints; laughter, song, symbolic communication.
Upper Paleolithic Revolution: Art, ritual, burial, “creative explosion” (Gabora & Kaufman).
Anthology Intelligence: Individual brains networked into collective minds, from band to tribe to chiefdom to city.
V. Homo Sapiens: The Civilized, Hypersociable, Language- & Tool-Using East African Plains Ape
Form: Mammals with opposable thumbs, upright posture, big brains.
Numbers: 7.5 billion (and counting).
Behavior: Sociable, linguistic, tool-using, gossipy, environmental engineers.
Division of Labor: Markets and exchange create a social division of labor exceeding even social insects.
Gift-Exchange and Trust: From kin-based obligation to money-mediated trust among strangers.
VI. Neolithic & Literacy Revolutions: Scaling Hypersociality
Neolithic Revolution (12–10kya):
Agriculture and herding as transformative for early adopters—tripling or quadrupling food supply.
Infant mortality declines as nomadism recedes.
But: Malthusian agrarianism and population pressure; preventative (female infanticide & others) & positive checks.
Questioning the “progress” of agriculture—possibly the “worst mistake in the history of the human race” (Cohen, Diamond).
Literacy Revolution (7–4kya):
Writing as collective memory; reliable transmission of knowledge, ideology, &, yes, lies pleasing & useful to someone.
Slow technological improvement, but a positive trajectory emerges post-3000 BCE.
VII. The Wealth of Nations & Its System of Natural Liberty
Adam Smith’s Insight: “Truck, barter, and exchange” as natural propensities; gift-exchange & money as trust technologies.
System of Natural Liberty: Secure property, alternatives in exchange, & decentralized coordination enable prosperity.
Records as Infrastructure: For scaling trust, cooperation, & knowledge.
VIII. The Modernity Singularity: Industry, Science, & the Global Brain
Industrial Revolution: “Phase transition” (DeLong)—energy, information, & acceleration of change.
Science as Institutionalized Time-Binding: Peer review, replication, cumulative archive.
Anthropocene: Humanity as a planetary force—feedback loops, climate, existential risk.
The Internet and the Noösphere: Globe-spanning anthology intelligence; the promise and peril of hypersociality.
IX. Theoretical Reflections & Counterpoints
Superintelligence: Is it already here or always just ahead? (Vinge, Bujold, Asimov’s “Second Foundation”).
Bushiness in Culture: Dead ends, lost civilizations, contingency of progress.
Cooperation and Conflict: Ethnocentrism, cosmopolitanism, paradoxes of hypersociality.
X. Conclusion: Where Next? The Future of the Anthology Intelligence
Time-Binding in the 21st Century: Can the project survive?
Anthology Intelligence as Evolutionary Threshold: Are we on the cusp of something unprecedented?
Open Questions:
Is the global brain wise?
What is lost—and what is gained—in the ascent from band to planet?
XI. Discussion Questions
How do biological and cultural evolution interact to produce the modern human condition?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Machiavellian hypothesis?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the cultural intelligence hypotheses?
How does the “time-binding” nature of humanity shape our moral, social, and technological evolution?
Was agriculture a blessing or a curse?
Is Malthusian stagnation the default, or the exception?
What would an alien intelligence, “vast, cool, and sympathetic,” make of us?
In what ways does the digital age represent a new phase in the evolution of collective intelligence?
XII. References:
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books. <https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595/>.
Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton. <https://archive.org/details/gunsgermssteelfa0000diam_x4r7>.
Gabora, Liane, & Scott Barry Kaufman. 2010. “Evolutionary Approaches to Creativity.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, eds. James C. Kaufman & Robert J. Sternberg, 279–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Gabora-Kaufman2010.pdf>
Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, & Making Us Smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. <https://archive.org/details/secretofoursucce0000henr>.
Jones, Doug. 2015–2025. Logarithmic History. <https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com>.
Korzybski, Alfred. 1933. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems & General Semantics. Lancaster, PA: The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company. <https://archive.org/details/sciencesanityint00korzrich>.
Pontzer, Herman, & al. 2016. “Metabolic Acceleration & the Evolution of Human Brain Size & Life History.” Nature 533 (7603): 390–392. <https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17654>.
Smith, Adam. [1776] 1976. An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Eds. R.H. Campbell & A.S. Skinner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. <https://archive.org/details/wealthofnationsa00adam>
Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. <https://archive.org/details/culturaloriginso00toma>..
Wrangham, Richard. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books. <https://archive.org/details/catchingfirehowc00wran>.
I should summarize:
The last five million years of biological and cultural evolution have made humanity the planet’s only time-binding, hypersocial superintelligent organism. But how did a middling primate become a civilization-builder? The answer compresses eons of cosmic, biological, and cultural change into a single, logarithmic narrative? The answer unfolds in stages: from the rise of mammals and the “ape explosion” of the Miocene, to the “bushy” experiments of hominins who toyed with bipedalism, tool use, and—eventually—brain expansion and hypersociability.
It was that hypersociability that made possible the real revolution: cultural evolution. Humans are not merely or indeed much smarter apes. We are a cultural species whose brains remain plastic for a very long time—and thus capable of absorbing vast stores of cumulative knowledge. The ratchet effect of teaching, imitation, and language allowed Homo sapiens to outpace rivals, inventing art, ritual, and social norms that bound groups together across time and space. The Neolithic Revolution, while a boon for early adopters, soon led to population pressure and near-stagnation. For the first several thousand years writing made little difference. But then the game board was upset and then transformed by the long-run slow rise of writing and its powerful implications: the eventual takeoff of science and industry.
Today, we live in the shadow of these transformations. Markets, gift-exchange, and the “system of natural liberty” (pace Adam Smith) enable a nature manipulation division of labor unrivaled by any other species. Gossip, writing, and bureaucracy enable a cognition division of labor unrivaled by any other species. Yet the Anthropocene appears a time of peril as well as promise: the global brain we have built may prove too clever for its own good, or, alternatively, not clever enough. Our collective superintelligent anthology intelligence is supersmart. But does that also make it superwise? Or does that merely make it more powerfully superstupid?
So how should this be pruned? Shifted? Extended? What do the good people of the internet think?
Have you read "The energetics of uniquely human subsistence strategies"? It was published in Science 24 Dec 21. Here's the conclusion of the summary:
"These findings revise our understanding of human energetics and evolution, indicating that humans afford expanded energy budgets primarily by increasing rates of energy acquisition, and not through energy saving adaptations (such as economical bipedalism or sophisticated tool use) that decrease overall costs. Relative to other great apes, human subsistence strategies are characterized by high-intensity, high-cost extractive activities and expanded day ranges that provide more calories in less time. These results suggest that energy gained from improvements in efficiency throughout human evolution were primarily channeled toward further increasing foraging intensity rather than reducing the energetic costs of subsistence. Greater energetic gains per unit time are the reward for humans’ intense and behaviorally sophisticated
subsistence strategies. Humans’ high-cost but high-return strategy is ecologically risky, and
we argue that it was only possible in the context of increased cooperation, intergenerational food sharing, and a division of labor. We contend that the time saved by human subsistence strategies provided more leisure time for social interaction and social learning in central-place locations, which is critical for cumulative cultural evolution."
From an economic viewpoint, the history of mankind has been the rising intensity and efficiency of our extractive capabilities to the point where our history is dominated by issues of distribution. This latter thanks to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Social insects deal with the surplus problem by creating new colonies, but space colonization is not a practical solution and is not likely to become one any time soon.
Not a review as such, but a few immediate point observations:
1. I'd extend "Division of Labor" beyond "Markets and exchange" - not because those aren't immensely powerful and arguably our best tools for that, but because they aren't the only historically relevant ones. (Picard, for one, has famously commented on that.)
2. I think it's implied in IX.a, but, specially in the current environment, I think part of the work of the course is to separate the semiotics imported from SF (often via misreadings - the shift of "singularity" from a mathematical to a mystical sense might be the main example) from what we end up seeing in reality.
3. I'd add Lem and Herbert (maybe not limited to Dune, although his other forays into superintelligence have aged badly) to the set of relevant authors; Solaris or The Invincible take good notice of other forms of intelligence, and much of Dune -particularly the later books- explores different forms and limitations of collective/anthology intelligence; the lack of computers I think is a very good frame to help highlight the cultural aspects of our anthology capabilities.
4. Rather than a super-/non-super-intelligence binary (I take "superintelligence" like "AI" as a cultural rather than technological category) the relevant future-looking question might be which specific collective cognition/decision-making problems that are currently beyond our capabilities might become doable, and when.