Culture and Artificial Intelligence

Let culture be a set of codes shared by groups of people who recognize them as a common ground for understanding each other. These codes are nothing but a set of rules that organize all human interactions among members of a community. One of its functions is to give a sense of cohesion and direction to human groups. Cultural manifestations can be very obvious such as the rituals for births, marriages, and deaths. There are also more nuanced examples, like the ways in which we greet, or the set of guidelines that define what is acceptable as normal.

Cultures are living entities that change across time and space. Its devises and mechanisms form systems that regulate the behavior of people who belong to certain communities. Some cultures are closely related to geography, language, and religion. However, all these things can be contingent to trade, technology, migration and, in extremis, war.

Let’s take one example from the beginning of the modern European Imperial expansion. The Spanish and Portuguese, propelled by their own multicultural interactions and conflicts, with the Arab world and the Northern European nomadic groups, developed very efficient naval technologies and armies that were used to trade and finally conquest. For three centuries these two nations developed fast and efficient ships that were used to expand the Roman way of doing things and trade across all the nations of the world.

An individual example is the Philippine Archipelago, formed by numerous islands and nations that have been subjected to multiple intercultural interactions across the centuries. With their initial appearance in the world stage as traders with China, and later as a Spanish colony administered from Mexico City. During these period, 400 hundred years, its population had to adopt the Spanish culture and religion.  The end of this era came in 1898, when Madrid lost its control due to the Spanish American War. After which the Archipelago turned into an American colony. (Wikipedia)

As a result of these interactions the Island had to change several times its cultural ways. From speaking local indigenous languages, such as Tagalog, to having Spanish names and last names, to speaking English and changing their ways to govern. By 1946, when it finally got its independence from the United States, the Philippino culture experienced several transformations that created a multicultural country very distinct within the Asian pacific islands’ context.

Some more centuries have elapsed, and all these dynamics are still present in our world. Cultures are still changing and evolving. Today war and conquest are less common than before. Religion was dormant in several regions and is starting to become more important, as when the Roman Empire fell. Trade became the main driver of cultural change after the Second World War, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall the production of culture itself was the main driver of cultural change.

Cultural production evolved from printed material, to radio and television waves and now to personal devices that allow us to create cultural content that is instantly shared with people from all ages, ethnicities, and places.

Social media has become the main channel for cultural propagation which, at the same time, has become the main and most powerful game changer. As social media permeates almost every single community due to the falling costs of devises, and the need to be continuously connected.

Ubiquity, flexibility and timeliness are its superpowers. These facts have not been neglected by tech companies. Great efforts have been done to harness them to understand the users data and behavior, and lately, to develop artificial empathy.

This means that your devises are not just trying to organically react to your likes and clicks but also to your emotions. AI does it based on your eye movement, your micro gestures, your words and voice inflexions, and your text messages.

All these interactions generate a dynamic environment in which your Tweeter timeline, your Instagram wall, your Facebook profile and your Tik Tok account, exchange information with each other, your followers and friends’ profiles and many other enterprises and institutions. These exchanges happen following a series of rules designed by engineers and scientists to maximize the utility of their organizations.

We should not think that these technologies are culture blind. They include its designers’ biases, either consciously or not, into the selection mechanisms to push brands, topics, stories, and people towards virality. Furthermore, AI is capable to either, boost, blow or generate, a trend, by strategically deviating traffic towards certain messages or players. All of these happens invisibly in front of our eyes.

This guides us to ask ourselves: To what extent are we the leading force of cultural change in our communities? Is it true that even communities with limited contacts with “foreign” cultures are exempted of this process? Are we really empowered to control the direction of our own cultures?