PERSON
F. Allan Hanson
American cultural anthropologist whose 2004 essay The New Superorganic argued that artificial intelligence had vindicated Kroeber's thesis in a form the original proponent could not have anticipated.
F. Allan Hanson is an American cultural anthropologist and professor emeritus at the University of Kansas whose work has spanned Polynesian ethnography, the anthropology of testing, and the intersection of technology and culture. His 2004 essay 'The New Superorganic,' published in Current Anthropology, revived and extended Kroeber's superorganic thesis for the age of artificial intelligence. Hanson's central argument was that the incorporation of AI systems into social action — systems that make decisions, generate outputs, and shape outcomes — had rendered untenable the position of methodological individualism. If non-human agents participate in cultural production, then culture cannot be reduced to human psychology, and the superorganic is not merely a theoretical abstraction but the operationally necessary level of analysis for contemporary social science.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Hanson's argument reframed Kroeber's thesis in terms the original essay could not have used. Where Kroeber had argued that cultural forces operate above individual psychology, Hanson argued that the relevant agents of social action now include