MEMETICS IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE- Susan Blackmore PhD

About this episode

The episode explores memetics and its implications in the age of artificial intelligence with guest Susan Blackmore.

What are memes and why do some replicate while others disappear? Are the memes selected for always for the benefit of the host culture? How are our new technologies changing the way memes feedback into our cultural evolution? In this episode we have the slightly disconcerting ideas of Memetic theory to get our heads around; as we learn how successful ideas and information are replicated by humans before being re-transmitted back out into world. We’ll see how these memes evolve our culture and minds over time, similarly to how our genes evolve through natural selection. But concerns will arise when we realise that this replication is not only selected for memes that are good for human evolution, and so memes seem to take on some type of evolutionary survival of their own. So when we now find ourselves in an internet era, with AI algorithms replicating ideas in an artificially amplified feedback loop with our own human memes, we get a cultural run away train, in which we are not really in control of our own culture and ideas. So fortunately, to get our head around this tough topic we have one of the inventors of the field, author of the 1999 book “The Meme Machine”, and by now, in…

People in this episode

Host: Freddy Drabble

Guest: Susan Blackmore

Topics covered

• memetics
• cultural evolution
• artificial intelligence
• feedback loops
• human evolution
• psychology

Keywords

• memes
• cultural evolution
• AI algorithms
• feedback loop
• natural selection
• psychology
• Susan Blackmore

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Meme Machine, Zen and the Art of Consciousness, Consciousness: An Introduction, Seeing Myself

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