{"id":217647,"date":"2026-02-26T09:23:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T14:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/26\/will-ai-accelerate-or-undermine-the-way-humans-have-always-innovated\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T09:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T14:35:10","slug":"will-ai-accelerate-or-undermine-the-way-humans-have-always-innovated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/26\/will-ai-accelerate-or-undermine-the-way-humans-have-always-innovated\/","title":{"rendered":"Will AI accelerate or undermine the way humans have always innovated?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will AI accelerate or undermine the way humans have always innovated?<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/theconversation.com\/will-ai-accelerate-or-undermine-the-way-humans-have-always-innovated-272246<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-26 09:23:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: theconversation.com<\/a><\/p>\n

In graduate school, my experimental archaeology professor told a student to create a door socket \u2013 the hole in a door frame that a bolt slides into \u2013 in a slab of sandstone by pecking at it with a rounded stone. After a couple of weeks, the student presented his results to the class. \u201cI pecked the sandstone about 10,000 times,\u201d he said, \u201cand then it broke.\u201d<\/p>\n

This kind of experience is known as individual learning. It works through trial and error, with lots of each. Also known as reinforcement learning, it is how children, chimpanzees, crows and AI often learn to do something on their own, such as making a simple tool or solving a puzzle.<\/p>\n

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 \u017delezn\u00fd\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Throughout humanity\u2019s existence, these limits on individual learning have not applied to technology. Since IBM\u2019s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, supercomputers have become a million times faster \u2013 and now routinely outperform humans in chess and many other domains.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

My new book with anthropologist Michael J. O\u2019Brien, \u201cCollaborators Through Time,\u201d reveals these patterns across human existence. It traces how 2…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will AI accelerate or undermine the way humans have always innovated? https:\/\/theconversation.com\/will-ai-accelerate-or-undermine-the-way-humans-have-always-innovated-272246 Publish Date: 2026-02-26…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":217648,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/720562\/original\/file-20260225-63-qx8nbg.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.0&rect=0%2C432%2C5184%2C2592&q=45&auto=format&w=1356&h=668&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-217647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217647"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217647"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":217649,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217647\/revisions\/217649"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}