Involution and Artificial Intelligence
David M. Berry In this article I want to suggest that we are witnessing a moment of "involution" in artificial intelligence development. This bears a fascinating resemblance to patterns Clifford Geertz identified in his seminal study of Javanese agriculture over sixty years ago in Agricultural involution: The process of ecological change in Indonesia (1963). [1] Geertz observed that just as wet-rice cultivation became increasingly elaborate and labour-intensive without corresponding productivity increases, I want to argue that AI development exhibits a form of technological involution through exponential increases in computational resources, model parameters, and engineering effort. This nonetheless yields progressively smaller improvements in meaningful capability due to the chatbot window through which we access these AI systems (see Geertz, 1963). [2] Geertz quotes the American anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser, who identifies the primar...
