It's only been 340-ish years since we started on the electricity tech tree in any rigorous sense. That's 16 or 17 moms ago, at most. If you had a durable, stabl

It's only been 340-ish years since we started on the electricity tech tree in any rigorous sense. That's 16 or 17 moms ago, at most. If you had a durable, stable culture 200,000 years ago and dropped a series of carefully selected experiments in their laps, they'd have been able to create with electricity with as much brain power as we have today. Still, we had thousands of years of cultural experiments to survive to eventually arrive at a confluence of social structures that allowed for us to explore science and rational natural philosophies. From the Greek mathematics and Sumerian city states to Roman empire building and onward, we carry pieces of those things that perform best at giving us life less full of struggle and suffering. A smartphone, seen from Kurzweil's view of human progress as a function of structured information, you get a sense of being present for something vast and terrifying and beautiful. Stacked amateurs all the way back to the brave little rodents thriving after the dinosaurs died.