7 Comments

I liked your dreamtime essay, but also felt very frightened by it. I also mentioned the parallels during the talk you gave. :)

It seems obvious that a return to poverty, or some other enforcing situation, is likely going to be very hard for many or most. Of course you're likely referring to lenghtened periods of stagnation and decline here as well.

In an other old post, I asked whether peak oil (including EROIs decreasing and increasingly advanced or costly technology required to reach or use reserves) might set a cap to growth. You replied that we're nowhere near absolute limits to growth.

I agree, but if humanity goes through a long decline accompanied by not having cheap, abundant, easy-to-use fossil fuels to boost the next growth spurt, might this not place an effective ceiling on growth, at worst? Given that selection pressures might not give enough time/focus/riches to develop alternative high-end technologies to achieve the same ends?

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Re:selection pressures and rough changes - if not periods of decline/stagnation, then Malthusian, capitalistic or some similar pressures

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I really appreciate your work. I came online to write about similar topics. In the hopes to understand and also restore what I can.

I can't help think when referencing the past that although things were potentially more fragmented in some ways... they were also less complex, and the daily nuances and pressure were different (I am not quanitifying).

The roles people played were different, and the support and feeling of connection were likely stronger.

Now people don't know there neighbours... they know people online.

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I must point out that in calling our wealthy, buffered lives the "dreamtime", you were referring to another society based on mass delusion, in which whatever happened in dreams governed their reality. And that society was about as old and primitive as they come.

I understand your argument that selection kept them close to adaptive, but there are & have been many primitive societies where that doesn't seem true--for instance, the Sawi in Papua New Guinea and the Yoruba in southern Nigeria, who had beliefs and traditions that perpetuated endless cycles of distrust and murder within and between villages. Or take the killing of "witches", which occurred all around the world until the 17th century, and still occurs in parts of Africa. Is that adaptive; and if so, is it adaptive for individuals or for groups?

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As far as I can tell, that "something" is shorter timelines for machine intelligence. If machines take over most economic labor later this century then an innovation crash due to there being fewer humans around seems much less likely - and people are likely to have other things on their mind besides a shortage of babies. It's not that the human fertility crash won't happen. We will get to "peak human" and then see the human population decline. However, the process seems likely to be too slow to be an important part of the future.

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Worth mentioning that Robin did begin several posts addressing the subject with "Assuming no AGI / ems by then... ... innovation will likely decline" or something like that. Lately he seems to have dropped that, but I assume that the premise is still there.

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Yes, Agree that Robin knows about his premises, and that he states them fairly frequently. They seem a bit contrarian to me - but I suppose that it takes all sorts.

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