Explaining why and how human technology is uniquely open-ended

Establish a comprehensive explanatory account of the mechanisms that enable human technology to exhibit uniquely open-ended evolution, clarifying both the causes (“why”) and processes (“how”) that differentiate human technological evolution from other cultural or biological evolutionary dynamics.

Background

The paper motivates the need for a macro-level theory of technological evolution that accounts for open-endedness, emphasizing the co-evolution between technological systems and search spaces. Despite existing modeling efforts, the authors note that a general explanation for the distinctive open-ended character of human technology remains unresolved in the broader scientific literature.