Henry Farrell on LLMs as Cultural Technologies

Discussion

Chor Pharn:

"Henry Farrell – LLMs as Cultural Technologies and the Return of the Prophetic Spirit

Henry Farrell’s view is LLMs are “cultural technologies”, deeply enmeshed in human social systems rather than isolated artificial brains. Human beings, as Herbert Simon reminds us, are remarkably limited in individual problem-solving capacity and thus outsource much of our cognition to larger social systems. Over centuries we have leaned on markets, bureaucracies, organised religions, and knowledge institutions to think and decide collectively what none of us could manage alone. Language itself – our tropes, clichés, and archetypes – is a prime example of this outsourcing. Such tropes and stereotypes are essentially “congealed” cultural heuristics, accumulated formulas that do a lot of our intellectual work for us. Yes, you should think of memes this way too.

An individual mind is limited; a culture armed with tropes isn’t. LLMs, in his view, are extensions of this process: they are machines that summarise, remix, and recombine the vast treasury of cultural patterns we’ve already produced. In effect, they codify and manipulate our collective memory and style at unprecedented scale. This makes them powerful new cultural transmitters – akin to past technologies like writing or print – but not independent originators of truly novel knowledge about the physical world. They rely on human-generated text and thus remain one step removed from brute reality, much as a library or a spreadsheet does.

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/a-new-continent-forming-llms-protocols)