In May, I gave a talk titled “Cultural Evolution and Alignment” at the Post-AGI Workshop: Economics, Culture and Governance hosted at Lighthaven in Berkeley, California.

In my presentation, I drew on the Cultural Brain Hypothesis and human evolutionary history to argue that we have already lived through a cognitive-outsourcing event: human brains shrank in volume over the Holocene as cognition moved into externalized stores, institutions, and distributed networks. I argued that AGI represents a phase transition because tools do not deliberate, but AGIs act as self-replicating agents subject to multi-agent evolutionary selection regimes.

Rather than focusing solely on aligning individual AI models, I emphasized that civilizational alignment is a property of the selection landscape itself. Preserving human flourishing requires either maintaining human utility within competing AGI lineages or engineering a new cultural-overlay equivalent for AI populations.

My sincere thanks to the organizers, David Duvenaud, Raymond Douglas, and Jan Kulveit, for putting together such an interdisciplinary and forward-looking workshop!