Open-Ended Technological Evolution: The Co-Evolution of Invention and Cognitive Technologies

The cumulative evolution of technology has proven central to our species' ecological success, allowing for cultural rather than biological adaptation to environmental challenges. While cumulative improvement explains how specific technological traditions can get increasingly better at solving pre-existing adaptive problems, it remains fundamentally an optimization process, one which halts when an optimal solution is found. Yet, humans are also capable of open-ended or evolvable technological change, that is, we have the capacity for generating novel and useful technological solutions for an ever-expanding set of increasingly complex problems. How novel problems of increasing complexity are accessed, however, remains an open issue. Here, I argue that human open-ended technological evolution emerges from the cultural evolutionary bootstrapping of our inventive capabilities through cognitive technologies. By inventing technologies that enhance our cognitive capabilities, we become able to invent technologies that would have been impossible to design using only our core (noncultural) cognitive abilities. These inventions include further empowering cognitive technologies, creating a feedback loop through which inventors become increasingly capable of making themselves even more capable inventors. I propose a model for how the cultural evolution of increasingly sophisticated cognitive technologies enables access to previously unreachable invention problems, driving open-ended technological change. This process differs from cumulative optimization as it involves expanding the range of problems that can be solved (evolvability) rather than optimizing solutions to existing problems (adaptation). This paper contributes to our understanding of human technological uniqueness by identifying a mechanism enabling open-ended cultural evolution.