人工智能与文化新科学

中文摘要 AI 辅助

认知与文化长期以来被视为平行的研究对象，更多地通过隐喻而非机制联系在一起。我们认为，二者是以一种现在可以在经验上加以处理的方式共同构成的：主体性可以被测量为通过高维文化场的局部轨迹，而该场本身又是这些轨迹的集合。机器学习的最新进展，包括嵌入方法和大型生成模型，提供了首个通用框架，用于从微观认知到宏观社会结构测量这种共同构成。向量几何能够恢复个体概念结构、组织沟通和大规模意识形态；捕捉文本之外的多模态文化内容；并生成关于文化涌现的可检验预测，包括独立发现在遥远心智中的同时出现。我们将这种同时创新的可预测性视为共同构成观点的证据：当文化场的几何结构可测量时，通过它的认知搜索轨迹变得可预测。然后，我们将生成式AI代理视为人类主体性的模拟器，以及一种质的新的协调基质，其插入社会生活引入了人类文化史上前所未有的进化动力学。我们将这种反身性条件形式化为生成式AI的海森堡式不确定性原理：作为固定文化位置的仪器变得越精确，我们预测其轨迹的能力就越退化，因为文化描述和文化行动机制已经融合。最后，我们提出了由AI介导的文化漂移、递归合成文化以及人类文化能动性限度所引发的伦理问题，为关于AI与文化的安全、公平和隐私保护研究提供指导方针。

英文摘要

Cognition and culture have long been treated as parallel objects of study, joined more by metaphor than by mechanism. We argue they are co-constituted in a manner now empirically tractable: subjectivities can be measured as local trajectories through a high-dimensional cultural field, and the field is itself the aggregate of those trajectories. Recent advances in machine learning, including embedding methods and large generative models, provide the first general framework for measuring this co-constitution from micro-cognition to macro-social structure. Vector geometry recovers individual conceptual structure, organizational communication, and large-scale ideologies; captures multimodal cultural content beyond text; and generates testable predictions about cultural emergence, including the simultaneous arrival of independent discoveries across distant minds. We treat this predictability of simultaneous innovation as evidence for the co- constitutive view: when the geometry of the cultural field is measurable, trajectories of cognitive search through it become predictable. We then examine generative AI agents as simulators of human subjectivity and as a qualitatively new coordinating substrate whose insertion into social life introduces evolutionary dynamics unprecedented in human cultural history. We formalize this reflexive condition as a Heisenberg-like Uncertainty Principle for generative AI: as instruments for fixing a culture's position grow more precise, our capacity to predict its trajectory degrades, because the machinery of cultural description and cultural action have merged. We close with ethical questions raised by AI-mediated cultural drift, recursive synthetic culture, and the limits of human cultural agency, offering guidelines for safe, equitable, and privacy-preserving research on AI and culture.

发表机构

• Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
• University of Oxford（牛津大学）
• University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）

机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。