On being an Anthropologist
A couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend. He was helping me to understand something that I kept taking for granted. Something I can now name “Anthro-Intelligence.” This term comes from an outstanding book recommendation that a beautiful woman psychologist recommended to me in a restaurant in DC. This blog is dedicated to this magical book by Gillian Tett.
“Anthro-Intelligence” is the other AI and I come by this type of intelligence because of my anthropological and archaeological training.
When an anthropologist studies human cultures, we detect the patterns and have names and frameworks for these patterns: a human’s memes, tropes, mores — their culture. I almost unconsciously think about what people are eating, wearing, saying, and doing and use my classification system to understand their culture and then ask questions and observe more.
“First person and Participant Observation” there are names for these things in Anthropology. I kept forgetting that not everyone thinks this way, a classic example of my lack of self-awareness. Why this was so important was that I had made a terrible mistake. I heard one of my peer social scientists — Jennifer Goldbeck — stand on the Ted stage in 2013 and talk about how it only took about 5 “likes” to determine whether someone had done drugs. I was like, whew, thank goodness — the cat is out of the bag!
Now everyone understands what we can do with a significant amount of data, and everyone gets that it is only to a degree of statistical certainty. The more data someone has about you AND everyone else — the better they can predict what you will do. Humans are pretty simple. There are less than 50 “features” that drive behaviors. Once a large enough culmination of predictions has been cataloged — it is easy to see why people believe that their “phones are listening” to their conversations.
The terrifying first, social scientists study culture because we want to understand how humans think and behave. Because our training has given us frameworks, we can “classify” very rapidly and use our neocortexes to infer a great deal from a minimal amount of data. We have also studied the atrocities that can come from this knowledge. Applications of this basic (non-computer-like) inference range from genocide to apartheid (designed racism) to gaslighting to everyday microaggressions that all humans have felt. Because we are taught how to use our frameworks and what happens when people misuse these frameworks, we understand our responsibilities and do our best to create the “ethos” or the atmosphere that we want to live in. Ethics is taught through the understanding of the accountability that a human has, often through the extreme negative applications of this acquired knowledge.
When digital communities — like Slack or Facebook groups — came into businesses. I know I started to immediately understand that my role (as a trained anthropologist) was to help curate the community and create the ethos that helped people understand. It is natural for humans to be xenophobic (afraid of outsiders or humans that don’t look and act like us). It is part of our biological system makeup — stranger danger. Xenophobia can lead to ethnocentrism and racism — a prejudice that is an emotional commitment to ignorance. The power of understanding what “features” or buttons to push to make someone outraged enough to “engage” is written all over the human “exhaust” we call data. When this data is combined, collected, and classified, and inferences are made — it “seems” like magic, but it is not.
Only sufficiently advanced technology is in the hands of a small homogeneous set of humans that are using their power without taking responsibility for its impact on humans. The fundamental flaw in humanity is when one human believes they are “better than” another. At the birth of modern anthropology came this idea of “cultural relativism,” a notion that threatened the very nature of what being “human” and “civilized” meant. It threatened the business models of colonialism and slavery, and the books by Boas were some of the first ones the Nazis burned.
I have often been asked how I sleep at night, knowing what I know about how the business models of today and powerful AI that are being used to sow hatred and division for something as pedestrian as money.
For me, it is simple — I believe in humanity; we got this — we have done it before and can do it again. Humans are magical in our ability to transform.
Most folks are waking up to the fact that the “outrage to engage model” is primarily to sell you things. The more subtle manipulation has to contend with our biological black swan events like pandemics and climate change. However, the terrifying reality has another side, and there are alternatives.
Here is secret knowledge that should be shouted from the rooftops — a human’s ability to change and transform is our superpower. We have the choice; we can change how we imagine our future and choose to use technology to unite us and learn from each other. We can even make a large amount of money doing this as well. The models that we need to employ to see our better future are harder to find and even more difficult to implement, but sustainable change takes time and work. Many of the humans I surround myself with are not afraid of this work — like I said, we got this !
One of anthropology’s greatest gifts is to be “the antidote to nativism, the enemy of hate [and] vaccine of understanding, tolerance, and compassion that can counter the rhetoric of demagogues.” Wade Davis via Gillian Tett in Athro-Vision.
