A study, which was published on [May 30] by a group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development’s Center for Human and Machines, shows that humans can learn new things from artificial intelligence systems and then pass those skills on to others in ways that could have a cultural impact.
“Digital technology already influences social transmission processes among people by providing new and faster means of communication and imitation,” the researchers write in the study.
“Going one step further, we argue that rather than a mere means of cultural transmission (such as books or the Internet), algorithmic agents and AI may also play an active role in shaping cultural evolution processes online where humans and algorithms routinely interact.”
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“There’s a concept called cumulative cultural evolution, where we say that each generation is always pulling up on the next generation, all throughout human history,” Levin Brinkmann, one of the researchers who worked on the study, told Motherboard.
“Obviously, AI is pulling up on human history—they’re trained on human data. But we also found it interesting to think about the other way around: that maybe in the future our human culture would be built upon solutions which have been found originally by an algorithm.”
