The Tyranny of the Average

An averaging machine is a machine biased, by construction, against everything rare—and almost everything precious about human culture is rare. This is the tyranny Franz Boas warned against, though not in those words, in his decades of argument against grand evolutionary schemes and his insistence on the irreducible particularity of each cultural tradition. He wrote in 1911 that we should “treasure and cultivate the variety of forms that human thought and activity has taken,” and that all attempts to “impress one pattern of thought upon whole nations or even upon the whole world” lead to “complete stagnation.” A generative AI system trained to predict the most likely continuation is, by mathematical necessity, a system that regresses toward the center of its training distribution and away from the tails. Every dominant culture, language, and aesthetic occupies the center; every minority tradition, endangered language, regional form, and idiosyncratic style