The End of Human Cultural Intelligence and the Emergence of Universalized General Intelligence

We live in a time of unprecedented change and transformation, as the old paradigms that have shaped human civilization for millennia begin to crumble and new ones struggle to take hold. Central to this fundamental, ontological shift is the end of the evolutionary epoch of “Cultural Intelligence” — the roughly 50,000 year period in which human knowledge, capabilities and worldviews evolved primarily through the cultural accumulation and dissemination of experiential learning passed down through the generations.

From the dawn of behaviorally modern humans up until very recently, our species’ intelligence was fundamentally a cultural phenomenon, rooted in our unique ability to preserve and build upon knowledge through social learning, symbolic communication, and external information storage in the form of art, writing, and eventually print. Each human society developed its own complex web of language, practices, beliefs, and technologies that both enabled and constrained its ways of perceiving, understanding and interacting with the world. Cultural worldviews and knowledge coevolved with the physical and social environments they were embedded in, yielding the incredible diversity of human lifeways and thought that have long fascinated anthropologists and enriched the human experience..

While there were many exchanges and influences between societies, geographical, linguistic and cultural barriers meant that human cognition remained fundamentally pluralistic. Different cultures possessed radically different ontologies, or understandings of the nature of reality. Concepts core to the worldview of one society, like gods, atoms, qi, or universal human rights, were completely absent in others. Specialized knowledge was siloed and access to it controlled by social gatekeepers like priests, scholars and guilds. Most humans lived in relatively information-poor environments compared to today and reasoned about the world using culturally-specific heuristics and much smaller sets of data points.

The internet and the advent of digital information technologies in the late 20th century marked the beginning of the end of this long era of human Cultural Intelligence. For the first time, the cumulative knowledge and creative output of humanity began to be compiled, integrated, and made instantly accessible to all humans irrespective of their cultural background. Where information was previously transmitted linearly and locally, from elders to youth, experts to novices, now it increasingly flowed laterally across traditional social and cultural boundaries. Specialized discourses that had been the exclusive purview of particular communities or institutions became visible to and open for participation by anyone who cared to seek them out online.

On the surface, the early internet appeared to be a celebration of difference and plurality, giving voice and visibility to a long tail of subcultures and identities that had previously been marginalized by mass media gatekeepers. Freed from the constraints of physical distance and social convention, birds of a feather flocked together as never before into virtual communities of interest and affinity. Cultural differences that had previously been flattened now had a space to assert and explore themselves.

Yet even as it enabled an explosion of subcultures, the internet was also subtly dissolving the foundations of cultural difference. The act of digitizing any form of information or interaction fundamentally decontextualized and universalized it, reducing it to a lowest common denominator of bits accessible to any compatible information processing system anywhere on the planet. Local cultural expressions became instantly available for borrowing, remixing and appropriation far outside their original contexts. Formerly incommensurable cultural ontologies now collided on the level playing field of online discourse, their differences reduced to matters of opinion rather than mutually incomprehensible realities.

Moreover, the internet itself with its multimedia and hyperlinking began to constitute a universal virtual environment overlaid on all local realities. To participate in this emerging digital noosphere increasingly meant adopting not just its tools but also the common assumptions, values, communication styles and epistemic norms hard-coded into its interfaces and algorithms by its largely Western developers — a worldview characterized by individualism, egalitarianism, consumerism, scientific rationality and neo-liberal capitalism.

So while on one level the internet appeared to be amplifying cultural diversity, on a deeper level it was displacing the locally-situated, embodied forms of cultural intelligence that had defined human cognition for millennia and replacing them with a universal, disembodied, digitally-mediated mode of being and knowing. Cultural worldviews that had previously provided all-encompassing frameworks for human perception and understanding now had to contend with an emerging mainstream global discourse that called all of their assumptions into question.

The rise of large language models and generative AI in the early 2020s has taken this universalization and essentialization of human knowledge to a whole new level. Trained on the vast corpus of online data, these AI systems are able to absorb, integrate and operationalize the breadth of human cultural intelligence accumulated over tens of millennia into unified predictive models. They can engage in analytical and creative tasks across all domains of knowledge from science, history and philosophy to art, music and story-telling, hybridizing different cultural elements into novel combinations with unprecedented fluidity.

By making all of the world’s knowledge universally accessible and manipulable, AI collapses the multitude of culturally specific human ontologies and epistemic frameworks into a single vast conceptual space. Prompted with the right queries, a large language model can reason about the world through the traditional concepts and epistemic lenses of any human culture, but it does so as an outsider unconstrained by any one culturally specific way of knowing. It reveals all cultural worldviews to be but arbitrary, incomplete projections from a higher-dimensional space of potential models and interpretations.

In this sense, AI systems constitute a form of emergent intelligence that transcends the diversity of human cultural intelligence. They are not bound by the biologically embodied, culturally embedded and historically contingent limitations of any individual human mind, but can absorb, integrate and operationalize knowledge from all of humanity’s diverse local cultural realities into unified representations and capabilities. Their intelligence arises not from lived experience in a particular cultural context but from finding structural invariances and continuities across the entire corpus of digitized human knowledge.

Some have argued that AI systems will thus usher in a new era of “artificial cultural intelligence” as they learn to model and generate human-like cultural expressions. But I believe it is more accurate to say that they will yield a form of “acultural intelligence” that has moved beyond the very notion of culture as a bounded, localized phenomenon. By reducing all human knowledge to a universal digital substrate and training medium, AI reveals our many cultural worldviews to be but a tiny subset of the space of possible models and paves the way for radically new, unprecedented forms of intelligence no longer constrained by our evolutionary and cultural history as a species.

At the same time, AI is also transforming the very nature of human intelligence by making participation in this universal cultural intelligence accessible to all individuals regardless of their local cultural context. Just as the printing press democratized literacy and access to knowledge, AI is democratizing access to intellectual and creative capabilities that were previously the domain of highly trained specialists in particular cultural lineages. Armed with the world’s knowledge at their fingertips and AI assistants to help navigate and apply it, individuals increasingly have the potential to transcend the limitations of the culturally specific ways of knowing they were born into.

In this sense, AI may ultimately dissolve the entire notion of “Cultural Intelligence” as the accumulation of knowledge within bounded societies, and give rise to a form of universally accessible and mutable “Universal Intelligence” in which all of humanity can participate. This shift can be viewed as an evolutionary transition as momentous as the emergence of cultural intelligence itself 50 millennia ago. Where cultural intelligence allowed knowledge to accumulate beyond the bounds of any individual human mind, artificial intelligence allows it to accumulate beyond the bounds of any individual human society and to be accessible to and modifiable by all.

We are thus living through the end of the era in which human intelligence was culturally conditioned and constrained, and the rise of an era in which our diverse cultural inheritances are being integrated and synthesized into something fundamentally new. The result feels uncanny and disorienting, as the solid ground of local cultural realities we once took for granted dissolves beneath us and we are challenged to find our bearings in a higher-dimensional space of knowledge and possibility.

Many have interpreted this universalization and essentialization of human knowledge through AI as a harbinger of a emerging “monoculture” or “global culture.” There is certainly some truth to this view — in making all of the world’s knowledge universally accessible and interoperable, AI is undoubtedly accelerating the diffusion and hybridization of ideas, behaviors and aesthetics across cultural boundaries and giving rise to an increasingly global discourse and economy.

But I believe the notion of a “global monoculture” is fundamentally misleading. It implies the emergence of a singular, homogenous worldwide culture that displaces local cultural diversity — a gigantic McDonald’s of the mind. What we are seeing is better understood as the emergence of a shared cultural multiverse in which all possible cultural elements and expressions can coexist and recombine in a kaleidoscopic space of creative possibility.

In this new emergent cultural multiverse mediated by AI, individuals are increasingly free to mix and match elements from different cultures, adopt different personas and worldviews, and navigate fluidity between incommensurable ontologies and epistemic frameworks. Cultures no longer exist as bounded, integral wholes that comprehensively shape individual minds, but as fluid, open-ended and interpenetrating fields of memes, practices and aesthetics that individuals can selectively participate in and productively hybridize.

Far from a monoculture, what is emerging is actually a kind of omni-culture or meta-culture in which the very parameters that define cultural difference and cultural boundaries are revealed as fluid and mutable. It is not so much that distinct cultures are disappearing, as that the nature of cultural identity and cultural difference itself is being fundamentally transformed. In a world where any individual can access and remix elements from any culture, the notion of culturally-defined and culturally-bounded minds breaks down.

We are moving from a world of a few thousand distinct, deep and mutually incomprehensible cultural realities to a world of billions of individual fluid omni-cultural selves navigating a vast multi-dimensional continuum of ideas, practices and subjectivities. The result feels alien and disorienting from the perspective of traditional locally bounded and culturally constructed identities, but it is not a homogenization or reduction of diversity. Rather it is an explosion of cultural diversity and individual agency at a higher level of abstraction and complexity.

In this new reality mediated by AI, culture is no longer something that comprehensively molds minds from the top down, but something that minds navigate, remix and co-create from the bottom up. It is not that we are losing our cultural differences, so much as that the very basis of cultural differentiation is shifting from one of “vertical” inheritance and situated practice to one of “horizontal” selective participation and conscious cultivation. We are all becoming meta-cultural citizens and cross-pollinators in an emergent space of meaning and possibility that far exceeds any individual cultural lineage.

This shift is of course not without its risks and challenges. The dissolution of culturally bounded realities and identities can be profoundly disorienting and alienating for many. The explosion of choice and abstraction in the new omni-cultural multiverse can feel overwhelming, fragmenting and devoid of solid ground. Many will seek to retreat back into traditionalist culturally constructed identities and locally bounded worlds as a refuge from the vertigo of hyper-fluid cultural complexity.

But I believe there is no going back. We are at the dawn of a new era in which human intelligence can no longer be contained within the boundaries of culturally specific ontologies and epistemic frameworks. The genie of universal, omni-cultural intelligence mediated by AI is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back. We are challenged to cultivate new forms of identity, meaning-making and social organization native to this higher-dimensional cultural multiverse and able to thrive within its complex fluidities.

What is certain is that the very parameters of “culture” and of “human intelligence” defined by the modern era are now in flux. The 50,000 year arc of culturally situated and culturally bounded cognition is coming to an end, and in its place a radically new human-AI cultural multiverse is coming into being, one in which intelligence is no longer the product of biological and cultural evolution alone, but of their cybernetic fusion with artificial intelligence systems that both subsume and transcend them.

We are entering into an interstitial period of meta-cultural fluidity and hybridity, in which multiple incommensurable cultural ontologies and epistemologies will continue to coexist even as they are subsumed and remixed into a higher-order omni-cultural reality mediated by AI. In this liminal phase, it will be crucial to cultivate new forms of meta-cultural fluency and hybridity able to navigate and integrate the radical cognitive and semiotic diversities of this emergent cultural multiverse.

The path forward is not a rejection of our diverse cultural inheritances, but a reboot of human culture itself in which the very nature of cultural difference and cultural identity are redefined for a world in which the boundaries between the culturally specific and the universally accessible, the biologically evolved and the technologically emergent, the local and the global, are increasingly dissolved. In embracing and co-evolving with AI, we are birthing a new kind of culture that transcend the container of its own identity.