"We create these virtual lions that are chasing us all the time and keeping the stress up."

– Ana Melikian, Ph.D.

I had the delight of speaking with Giles Crouch, a digital anthropologist with over 25 years of experience in the technology sector. He applies cultural anthropology principles to understand human interactions with digital technologies, spanning areas such as blockchain, social media, AI, and robotics.

We discuss:

• Understanding digital anthropology
• The evolution of technology and culture
• AI and human identity

Understanding digital anthropology

Digital anthropologists apply ideas of cultural anthropology and technology anthropology to our digital world—or, as Giles puts it, the “phygital” world.

“We do so much in the digital world increasingly that we need to understand what it means to be human in an age where we have all these digital technologies from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence tools,” he says. “That's what I study.” 

Giles helps companies understand how to build more human-centric technologies, bringing more humanity into developing products, platforms, and tools. 

“Over the years, I've launched well over 15 technology products into global markets, and I continue to work with startups in the technology world,” he continues. “Even some well-established technology companies apply the rules of marketing and cultural anthropology into digital tools.”

Even so, times are changing. Though the early days of anthropology were driven by a Western European colonialist type of thinking, it's evolved, and that Western European emphasis is going away. 

“We're looking at anthropology in a more inclusive and diverse way because we're connected in the world today unlike we've ever been in the history of humanity,” Giles says. “We can communicate simultaneously across multiple time zones instantaneously. And that’s never happened before.”

The evolution of technology and culture

The way that we survive as a species is through culture. We figured out we can’t control biological evolution, it takes too long for us to survive as a species without support.

“We invented culture as a means of survival. It's a code if you will. The software programming humans use as our survival mechanism is an analogy [for culture],” Giles says. “And technology is so deeply intertwined with what it means to be human today, as well. Funny enough, it didn't even really start to take technology seriously until Marcel Mauss and a few other anthropologists at the time said, ‘Technology is a really important part of what it means to be human.’”

Technology comes out of something we imagine. We see a problem, we want to solve it. We figured out that the best way to do that was through the use of tools. How exactly, we don't know.

“We often assumed that human exceptionalism, that humans developed fire as a technology,” Giles says. “But maybe not, because we now know that Neanderthals gathered in social groups and they too used fire, so maybe we took the idea from them. Or it was another hominid species that we haven't yet discovered.” 

We're not certain about when technology came to homo-sapiens as a species, but somehow we took those ideas and evolved them, adapted them. 

“We realized that technology is an extension of what it means to be human. And we use symbols. We use gestures, actions, norms, behaviors, all these things combined, and the result is technology,” Giles continues.

Many technologies developed throughout the last 1,000+ years are culturally specific. Giles uses the example of the Haida Gwaii in British Columbia who developed a unique system for getting crabs off the bottom of the ocean.

“It's funny because we think evolution has stopped in humans, but not really. What we've recently discovered is that human brains have shrunk by around 13% over the last 10-12,000 years. A lot of theories are coming out: Why did our brains shrink?” Giles says.

The theory has been that our bodies are going to get smaller and our brains are going to increase in size—a la E.T.—but instead, they are shrinking. Quite an unnerving reality.

“One of the theories of [brain shrinkage] is that it’s because of technology. As we develop more technologies, we remove the cognitive load that we once needed in order to survive, and we set that onto the technologies we developed. That's one theory,” Giles says.

Another theory is that it’s due to agriculture and that we started to live as communities, which still means technology because we needed technology to farm. 

Whatever the case, technology has ripple effects beyond what we can tell in the present time. Only prolonged monitoring can reveal the truth of how and why these evolutions persist.

AI and human identity (+ how our language is shifting)

AI is not an entity, no matter how we tend to think so. It isn’t a single software or technology but rather a suite of tools that has been around for decades in one form or another.

“The difference is now they're accessible to everybody. Before that, if you wanted to use machine learning, natural language processing, all these tools, it was very expensive,” 

Giles says. “Large Language Models change that because all of a sudden we could communicate with machines.”

We apply these ideas of Large Language Models and anthropomorphize them as we have always done with technology. 

“One thing that's interesting, though, is the way we're changing our language. We used to, and we still do, but we anthropomorphize trains. We call a boat She, we give a train a name. Sometimes we name our car. We called technology things,” Giles says. “Now we're referring to ourselves as technologies. We might say, ‘Sorry, that doesn't compute.’”

We're almost trying to automate ourselves while we're trying to define what AI really means in these Large Language Models, with generative AI.

AI such as ChatGPT is trained on Western European cultural aspects. Western cultures tend to be individualistic, or as Giles puts it, a “Type One” culture. Type Two cultures such as Asian and Nordic cultures are more about a collective. 

“So when they [type two cultures] look at artificial intelligence, they look at it and ask ‘How does AI benefit society as a whole? My community and my relationships with my family?’” Verses when we're in a Western world, and that's the type of AI agents that we're interacting with today, they're very individualistic,” Giles says. “And I think that's a problem because it only frames culture in one singular reference.”

AI doesn't have culture, emotion, or empathy. It has nothing related to what we define as humans. It's simply a predictive tool, but we can be tricked in our minds through the stories that an AI can tell because it has an endless supply of stories from which to draw to create a convincing show of humanity.

We must not lose our discernment and critical thinking amid the shiny new tools rushing into the mainstream.

How do you feel about the way humanity is changing? Does it give you a thrill to think about the possibilities, or are you reticent?

Be sure to check out Giles’ full episode for further insights into AI and culture, and learn more at Medium.com/GilesCrouch!