This Might Take a While
WEIRD-est People in the World My recent research suggests the how do we use it question has a much more practical punch than you might think. We who use AI and other tech marvels of the last 50 years have been described by some as WEIRD — an acronym for Wealthy, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratized. That pretty much sums up Western society, including most English speakers and allies such as the EU, Japan, Australia, and others. According to Joseph Henrich, author of “The Weirdest People in the World,” an earlier tech revolution that began around 1500 CE changed our brains and made us much more likely to invent things like capitalism and modern democracy, but also internal combustion engines, nuclear reactions, and space telescopes, and all that go with them. We’re only talking about the last 500 years, which means that changes in our brains are not the result of evolution or genetics. Rather, these are changes such as the increased size of the corpus callosum , the cer...
