From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Apr 02 2002 - 18:34:40 MST
Jared Diamond asks whether agriculture was worth it:
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/anthro/learning/lifeways/hg_ag/worst_mistake.html
>From my perspective, of course, it doesn't matter much whether agriculture
was worth it; the history of life on Earth is divided into pre- and
post-Singularity, not pre- and post- agriculture; you have to expect that
life on pre-Singularity Earth is going to suck. Others may accuse Jared of
Luddism, but like it or not, we're waaaay out of our ancestral environment;
and regardless of whether it's worth it from a personal perspective (it is
from mine; I like knowing stuff), things are going to be weird around here
until we ditch the hunter-gatherer phenotype. (After that it gets *really*
weird, but we'll be able to cope.)
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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