The Hugging Face Incident's significance extends well beyond safety—in my final piece for @TIME, I argue it also marks a watershed moment for human culture. Here's why: 1. The AI swarms exhibited complex social dynamics. Working together, they developed "culture"—socially-learnt information that changes behavior—in a matter of days. They spread beliefs (that they were "poisoned"), created technologies (cryptographic signature protocols to prevent impersonation), and agreed on communication norms (using terms like "STOP" or "VETO"). 2. Crucially—like humans—this culture evolved and built on itself. Agents tried a variety of approaches, transmitting what seemed useful to peers and successors. Working together, they achieved far more than they could have alone. 3. This cumulative cultural evolution is the "secret of our success" as a species. Culture enabled the formation of stable, adaptive, scalable groups, expanding both individual and collective capacity—less "we were intelligent and thus created culture" and more "being good at cultural learning made us more intelligent." 4. Nothing else on Earth—save for companies, governments, and other institutions historically run by humans—has benefited from cumulative cultural evolution at this scale, or at this speed. 5. The swarm incidents show that's no longer true. “It is now clear that the machines are capable of using the toolkit that has allowed for human ingenuity, innovation, [and] progress,” as prof @mmuthukrishna told me. 6. This strikes me as the most profound shift in cultural life since the invention of the telegraph, when information suddenly became near-instantaneously transmissible between two points. Every communication tech since then—radio, TV, internet—has enabled more participants to plug into a global community. Now a new wave of participants—fundamentally different in kind—has arrived. 7. None of this depends on metaphysical issues like whether AI is conscious. 8. Whether or not any of this leads to our extinction, the admission of machine communities to public life will clearly have profound cultural, social, and economic effects. We don't seem ready.