Collective computation is the process by which groups store and share information to arrive at decisions for collective behavior.How societies engage in effective collective computation depends partly on their scale.S...Collective computation is the process by which groups store and share information to arrive at decisions for collective behavior.How societies engage in effective collective computation depends partly on their scale.Social arrangements and technologies that work for small-and mid-scale societies are inadequate for dealing effectively with the much larger communication loads that societies face during the growth in scale that is a hallmark of the Holocene.An important bottleneck for growth may be the development of systems for persistent recording of information(writing),and perhaps also the abstraction of money for generalizing exchange mechanisms.Building on Shin et al.,we identify a Scale Threshold to be crossed before societies can develop such systems,and an Information Threshold which,once crossed,allows more or less unlimited growth in scale.We introduce several additional articles in this special issue that elaborate or evaluate this Thresholds Model for particular types of societies or times and places in the world.展开更多
Dear readers,It is our pleasure to welcome you to a special issue of the Journal of Social Computing.This issue contains articles examining the evolution of collective computation within(pre)historic societies.There i...Dear readers,It is our pleasure to welcome you to a special issue of the Journal of Social Computing.This issue contains articles examining the evolution of collective computation within(pre)historic societies.There is special emphasis on the possibility that the development of writing(together with both the technologies that arise with writing,and the technologies that writing helps enable)constituted a bottleneck in the more or less continuous growth in scale that has long been a hallmark of human societies.展开更多
基金the National Science Foundation(No.SMA-1620462)T.A.Kohler further acknowledges support from the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS,EXC 2150the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft(DFG,German Research Foundation)under Germany’s Excellence Strategy.
文摘Collective computation is the process by which groups store and share information to arrive at decisions for collective behavior.How societies engage in effective collective computation depends partly on their scale.Social arrangements and technologies that work for small-and mid-scale societies are inadequate for dealing effectively with the much larger communication loads that societies face during the growth in scale that is a hallmark of the Holocene.An important bottleneck for growth may be the development of systems for persistent recording of information(writing),and perhaps also the abstraction of money for generalizing exchange mechanisms.Building on Shin et al.,we identify a Scale Threshold to be crossed before societies can develop such systems,and an Information Threshold which,once crossed,allows more or less unlimited growth in scale.We introduce several additional articles in this special issue that elaborate or evaluate this Thresholds Model for particular types of societies or times and places in the world.
文摘Dear readers,It is our pleasure to welcome you to a special issue of the Journal of Social Computing.This issue contains articles examining the evolution of collective computation within(pre)historic societies.There is special emphasis on the possibility that the development of writing(together with both the technologies that arise with writing,and the technologies that writing helps enable)constituted a bottleneck in the more or less continuous growth in scale that has long been a hallmark of human societies.
