Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to analyze in full detail a concept I merely introduced at the end of the previous Chap. 8, that is the possibility of a Terminator Niche. The concept of terminator niche should intuitively represent a cognitive niche that instead of benefitting its users with a decreased local selective pressure, has eventually a negative impact on the population’s welfare. I will specify this concept along the chapter, first characterizing the specificity of techo-cognitive niche construction, then showing how some maladaptive niches can be individuated in human beings’ evolutionary past. Finally I will properly consider the techno-cognitive terminator niche and elaborate upon two relevant cases.
The original version of this paper, here revised and expanded, was presented at the Laval Virtual Conference in Laval, France (April 2013). I am grateful to prof. Colin Schmidt, to the organizers and the participants for the useful comments that were later incorporated in this revision.
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Notes
- 1.
Think of virtual realities such as Second Life: avatars can easily “create” things because there is no gap between information and matter. Matter is reduced to coding, and the only space requirement is available memory to host the coding.
- 2.
It could be argued that smoking is an adaptive trait inasmuch as it allows smokers to better cope with stresses and hardships of modern life, but this seems rather as a post hoc justification, or better as a by-product. One does not start smoking, and develop an addiction, in order to be able to better cope with life events. I, so far, have not found any paper discussing the evolutionary weight of smoking.
- 3.
This aspect will be further examined in Sect. 9.4.2 about the emergence of contemporary finance as a terminator niche. As cognitive niche s acquire also a moral value as orthodoxies, we can expect a violent reaction against those who suggest safer alternatives just because they are alternatives (Magnani 2011).
- 4.
For specific events (for instance a roulette table) we can calculate the probability of the outcome. Conversely for others—such as catastrophes and other events, which have been often used as the underlying of many derivatives instruments—we just cannot measure the probability of the outcome.
- 5.
One could make a pun and claim that these AI’s are not that intelligent after all, but the tricky part of hyper-technological niches (so far) is that they cannot outsmart human beings at what they were programmed for: if a financial algorithm is programmed to compute risk as something calculable, and inform consequent market strategies, it cannot be blamed for doing so.
- 6.
The sad story of Natufian s has been described in Sect. 9.3.1.
- 7.
I am talking about dismantling a cognitive niche . History shows that, in order to break the resilience of a cognitive niche , significant impetus is required: for instance, massive invasions, cataclysms and similar things.
- 8.
Such a reflection can help us further understand the dramatic intervention performed by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his New Deal: the New Deal is indeed aformidable cognitive niche reconfiguration, but it could be enacted as a gambit, only once the precedent (terminator) niche, Hoover’s Blanket, was proved inevitably doomed. The New Deal was enacted because Americans felt that there was nothing left too loose in a gambit involving counterintuitive politics such as deficit spending and so on.
- 9.
Movies such as The Terminator , Matrix and so on are perfect examples.
- 10.
Notwithstanding the legitimate criticism, one must acknowledge that the fast food culture is indeed a product of a high level knowledge society, that can support studies on chemical and mechanic engineering of food—so to reduce costs and augment taste, logistic planning, merchandising and so on. Therefore it can be rightfully be defined a cognitive niche .
- 11.
As shown in Chap. 3, in the previous part, not all scientific models should be understood as creative and able to poietically inform new phenomena.
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Bertolotti, T. (2015). The Crises of Techo-Cognitive Niches: From Maladaptive to Terminator Niches. In: Patterns of Rationality. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17786-1_9
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