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Analysis of a colossal anthropological dataset that systematically collects characteristics of societies around the world throughout all of human history and prehistory shows that an important bottleneck preventing growth in 'collective computation'—the ability of social groups to solve problems—may be the development of writing systems.
An essay exploring this hypothesis and introducing a special issue of the Journal of Social Computing devoted to the question of historical laws governing collective computation was published in that journal on February 10.
For a long time archaeologists have recognized that writing systems often appear at about the same time as the large settlements we call cities, and the political structures for making decisions and managing data that we call states. Nevertheless, the development of writing in societies around the world is often presented by archaeologists and historians as "something that just happens" without quantitative exploration of why it happens at certain times and places, but not in others.
Image credit: CC0 Public Domain
