From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Dec 27 2000 - 17:25:29 MST
"Emlyn" <emlyn@one.net.au> writes:
> One point about the !Kung is that they are modern day hunter
> gatherers, in a world generally no longer suitable for the
> practice. The land they are on is available because no-one else
> wants it; compared to the average hunter gatherer of the past, they
> probably live a marginal and much more difficult existence.
Perhaps true, it could also be that the land itself is not that bad
(they seem to have some fairly reliable food sources the year around
regardless of weather, for example) but the conditions are unpleasant
enough to keep people away. Food is not the only factor in making land
more or less desirable.
> I'm not advocating the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, however! Not
> unless I can take a gameboy... and my notebook... and all my other
> stuff with me. No, stuff it.
My view too - I love civilisation with its complex, intertwined and
wonderous systems that make it possible for me to listen to Beethoven
while communicating with similar minds halfway across the world, eat
delicious fruits out of season and watch the snow settle outside my
window while I'm warm and cozy. That is something well worth
defending.
Of course, a hypothetical future wearable and nanoassembler-equipped
hunter-gatherer (wanderer-assembler?) might be able to have all the
above without being tied to a single location, but it wouldn't change
the fact that he or she would likely be part of such a civilisation
network.
> This thread has merely been there to question the assumption that
> technology has historically absolutely benefitted the peoples who
> have adopted it. This situation is turning around today, I think, in
> the west, but that's an anomaly (which we need to continue and
> spread).
Technology is adopted for a lot of reasons, but as a rule I think it
is adopted because it gives some benefit. Not necessarily to the
people as a whole, and sometimes at the expense of one factor (such as
farming providing more and more reliable food than hunting, but at the
expense of a lot of labor). That is why much of our current
technological development is so amazing: it is distributed, and
inventions have to show themselves useful to enough customers to
spread. This is a huge democratization compared to how much has been
done in the past.
> Maybe the ancient romans had a similar situation? I have no idea.
Well, the romans didn't really do much technological adoption once
they got their civilisation up and running. I guess there was quite a
bit of future shock as the latinians encountered Greek
ultratechnology, but they got over it. Unfortunately for them they had
a sociotechnological infrastructure that was a bit of a dead end - it
took a lot of slaves to run, and with many slaves there was little
incentive to make it more automated.
> I like to think that this is quite in keeping with
> transhumanism. Humans have been in a race for survival and expansion
> over past millenia, and our conditions seem generally to have
> deteriorated with growing numbers. The hope is that we may finally
> be (or soon be) on top of our technology to a point where it can do
> more than keep ever more of us alive in worse overall circumstances;
> maybe it can start to raise absolute standards, in aggregate.
I think this is a far too pessimistic view. Look at life expectancy -
it has been rising since the stone age, with some plateaus and dips of
course, but in general it has been increasing. Why? Hardly because
conditions have become worse.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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