Post by University of Tennessee College of Arts & Sciences

From stone tools to supercomputers, every leap in human progress has been powered by collaboration and expertise. But, will AI accelerate or undermine the way humans innovate? 💻 The following is an excerpt from a story titled "Will AI accelerate or undermine the way humans have always innovated?" published in The Conversation U.S. and written by Department of Anthropology Professor Alex Bentley. "But individual learning has limits. No matter how much someone experiments through trial and error, improvement eventually hits a ceiling. Humans have been throwing javelins for a few hundred thousand years, yet performance has largely plateaued. At the 2024 Olympics in Paris, the gold medal javelin throw was about 5% shy of Jan Železný’s 1996 record. The level of expert play in the strategy game Go was essentially flat from 1950 to 2016, when artificial intelligence changed the equation. Throughout humanity’s existence, these limits on individual learning have not applied to technology. Since IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, supercomputers have become a million times faster – and now routinely outperform humans in chess and many other domains. Why is technological improvement so different? My work as an anthropologist on cultural evolution and innovation shows that, unlike individual performance, technology advances through combination and collaboration. As more people and ideas connect, the number of possible combinations grows superlinearly. Technological innovation scales with the number of collaborators." #UTArtSci #CASAdvantage