7 ms·

I'll use analogies with previous technologies. Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armi

I'll use analogies with previous technologies. Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes. Gradually these grew up became empires and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions. The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc). Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam. Radio, television and publicity shaped our daily lives to consume a lot of crap we don't really need, from cigarettes to diamond rings. Social media shaped our political discourse into tribal stupidity and paranoia. So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message. Technology shapes humans and culture. AI will shape humans and culture. We just don't know how.

visarga 3y ago
I see all this as the evolution of language, because that's how ideas are preserved and replicated. Ideas evolve over time. They form an evolutionary system, moving much faster than biology. Humans and AI both rely on the corpus of language to learn and apply ideas. We're no longer the only way ideas can replicate - LLMs have joined the party. Language gained a new mechanism for self-replication. We should focus less on humans vs AIs, and more on the language corpus itself, the true source of intelligence. This corpus was built through experience, slowly and collaboratively, by billions of people in parallel. No single human could have done it alone - it's smarter than any one of us, the product of our collective work and luck. When you train an LLM on it, the model becomes generally competent. But did the competence come from the model or the data? Should we obsess over architectures, or look to our datasets?
- diego_moita 3y ago
  I've heard that before, mostly on Ray Kurzweil talking about singularity. But I have a problem with this usage of the "evolution" and "evolutionary system" expressions. I believe that it entails "improvement", that it is judgmental. I think it is self-centred and presumptuous to imply that the world improved toward us. I don't think Darwin used the expression "evolution" with a judgmental meaning. He only meant that it was an adaptation to existing environmental conditions.
  - visarga 3y ago
    It's just self replication. Ideas that are useful in some way get replicated, other ideas forgotten. They travel a lot and mutate. They all depend on human interests, but exist beyond individual humans.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Nice to see that the idea of Richard Dawkins' meme lives on, fittingly enough.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    And failure to adapt leads to extinction. AGI has the potential to be an improvement on humans because it has the potential to be relentlessly rational, reality-aware, and self-correcting. We don't - most likely can't - operate like that. Although we like to flatter ourselves that we're a rational and intelligent species all of us live in an unaware haze of myths, factoids, media-seeded fake narratives, self-serving fantasies, and outright reality denial. We have a rational process called "science", but politically it lives in a special box. If it starts to interfere with established power hierarchies it's shouted down. And hardly any humans science at all. Current AI is just a warm-up for what happens next. Metaphorically it's the equivalent of 8-bit computing. 32-bit AI will be entirely different, very possibly incomprehensible, and potentially far more threatening.
    - ChatGTP 3y ago
      If AGI is something that becomes real, I don't think it would be recognizable to us for long, I don't think it will be a type of steady state even like humans, reading books to it's chidren in the cloud and get really good at coding and similar tasks, and improve itself infinitely (into what?). I think life has a special property in that it is constrained, so it exists. Imagine being able to become pretty much anything, what would you choose? We can't even comprehend what a system like you describe would evolve into, but I don't think we can even fathom it, it's not going to be like some ultimate task master who gets 18 whole in ones at gold on Friday and take all our jobs, for some reason ? What I think we're doing is applying our problems and the things we'd want (infinite self-improvement) because they're things we feel would be an advantage to us. A robotic system though? Not sure it would care. It seems like AI is the ultimate end game, but I'd imagine if we survie the AI era, we'll be past it pretty farking fast.
diminish 3y ago
Controversially, agricultural societies late to industrialization, have more population now and are replacing early industrial societies due to lower birth rates in industrial workers. So I doubt humans with AI will replace humans without.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  What does the population have to do with the parent's point?
  - r00fus 3y ago
    Population advantage translates into victory in simple Darwinian analysis. Not that I particularly agree in this case but that’s what I learned in my human nature college course.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  Now compare quality of life between both.
  - mantas 3y ago
    Quality of life in a very narrow materialistic definition for an individual? Or overall and sustainable society quality of life?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - wiseowise 3y ago
      Enjoyment from life.
      - mantas 3y ago
        What is enjoyment though? Suicides, mental health issues, obesity, various substances abuse… Let alone that such enjoyment is on next generations. Wether by wasting resources, abusing environment. Or generation that will never be born thanks to crappy birth rate. So much enjoyment and such a high quality of life that people ain’t willing to procreate. Yay. Usually nature reacts in such a way in opposite environment.
Blikkentrekker 3y ago
> and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions I often see this interpretation that monotheism is somehow more “advanced” than polytheism, even Age of Empires suggested so but why exactly? Because Christianity and Islām became so popular?
- Buttons840 3y ago
  Maybe by creating more unity in their societies?
  - mrob 3y ago
    Alternatively, follow the pre-Christian Ancient Roman approach and maintain unity by assimilating foreign religious practices. I think polytheism makes this method easier.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      Christianity has assimilated other religions and their practices, though. As a prime example, many elements of Christmas such as the yule log originate from so-called pagan religions such as Norse.
      - KineticLensman 3y ago
        > Christianity has assimilated other religions and their practices, though. And over the years Christians have persecuted many when their beliefs didn't agree with the dominant interpretation. The Romans were relatively tolerant of indigenous beliefs, as long as they didn't lead to rebellion.
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      At certain points in its history, Christianity was fairly eager to ingest aspects of existing religions if it meant that they got the account (conversion). This eventually became controversial (eg see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy), but a lot of early regional Christian saints, say, are, well, suspiciously similar to pre-existing deities or other pagan figures.
brazzy 3y ago
Analogies are treacherous. There is absolutely no guarantee that just because all these technologies shaped humans, this new one will shape them in similar ways and scope.
einpoklum 3y ago
> governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes. More like it facilitated small groups taking over larger communities or communally-usable resources, creating governments to manage their wealth and underlings and armies to attack and loot other tribes.
shafyy 3y ago
I think that homo sapiens was happiest in the hunter gatherer era, right before we've started to think more and more in abstract and conscious ways. Sure, it's cool we can fly humans to the Moon and robots to Mars, but everybody is miserable in the capitalist hamster wheel and an increasing number of people are getting depressed and committing suicide. The other day I was at the lake and looking at ducks, contemplating this. Is a duck really less happy than an average human? Sure, they can't buy fancy iPhones and might get eaten tomorrow, but it's all relative anyways, right? And before you start suggesting that I'm depressed: I'm not, I have been lucky. I have a happy life, great job, great friends and family. But still, one can't stop and wonder about these things...
- 52-6F-62 3y ago
  There’s nothing odd about that thinking. You’re just scratching the surface of philosophy and you should continue. Nothing is an inevitability and tomorrow will look different than anyone here or anywhere else tries to predict. Don’t stop wondering. But I definitely recommend exploring others’ wondering. Especially when it has nothing to do with tech and all to do with your own existence.
  - shafyy 3y ago
    Do you have have any good book recommendations?
    - 52-6F-62 3y ago
      Beware dogma. It’s mostly trappings. Study classics, eastern and western and everything besides. Then reading Carl Jung and modern theoretical physicists will then blow the doors off of what you think you knew. Feynman sees ways around everything. Bohm sees behind everything. Whitten’s trying to connect it all together. They will all point you to other readings worth some time. After that reading Robert Anton Wilson, Terrance McKenna, Ram Dass, and Tim Leary will leave you probably going back to the start to find all of the things you’ve missed. Don’t take them at their word, either. They use a lot of tricks, but it’s just to add perspective. Then if you’re still feeling wild take a journey through comparative religion and it will add another dimension to it all yet again. …then you will go all the way out and back again. Don’t take anything for granted. It’s your life you’re living, and all of these writers and more could recognize at least that. Just don’t forget your good humour. Wilson will remind you of that.
b112 3y ago
https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/marshall-mcluhan https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/marshall-...
euroderf 3y ago
> So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message. Also McLuhan: every communication medium is an extension of man. AI is a turbo extension of man's ability to string noises together into meaningful phrases: phrases which, like language in general, project the speaker's thought into the mind of the recipient. AI magnifies this into a stream of babble that can be generated at zero marginal cost and at light speed, altho with the caveat that the stream may have self-reinforcing perturbations (internal feedback loops ?) that may or may not refer back to "reality".
darkclouds 3y ago
> Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes When looking at Europe and all the different languages spoken, along with the over arching religion of the region if not the world, Catholicism, headquartered in Europe, are you not left wondering why they didnt put more effort into getting different tribes to communicate in a common dialect to break down barriers? Or if Latin was their common dialect, then does it show that royalty and govt's are the divisive one's pitting people against each other, continuing to get a free pass whilst their atrocities are airbrushed out of history?
p0w3n3d 3y ago
Agriculture did not shape monotheism. It happenrd both on nomadic and non nomadic nation's, as well as polytheistic religions of Asia. No correlation here. Meanwhile currently AIs are just an empty linguistic models that have no proper knowledge, nor can tell what's true from what's fully BS, and will defend both or ask for forgiveness for telling both: truth and rubbish hallucination
- 4h53n 3y ago
  Indeed oldest known surviving buildings are thought to be of religious and monumental in nature.[1] As far as we know it could be the religion which made people settle and do agriculture. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_known_surviving_buildings#By_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_known_surviving... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/gobeki-tepe https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/gobeki-t...
armada651 3y ago
> Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam. Copenhagen and Amsterdam were well on their way to becoming as car dependent as any other American city. It's not just that those cities were built before the car, it's that at some point they decided to stop shaping their city for the car.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > Amsterdam were well on their way to becoming as car dependent as any other American city. This claim gets trotted out quite often, but it is only valid if you are specifically referring to the development of Amsterdam’s bicycle infrastructure. Even during those years when Amsterdam saw a rise in car traffic, the city never stopped offering public transit of the sort that most Americans could only dream of. So, the average resident was not forced to own a car.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    I don't think that occurred through an act of God though. The point was that those cities didn't follow the American model because of the will of their people.
  - m0rphling 3y ago
    Also, it's worth noting that American cities demolished good infrastructure (for bikes, pedestrians, and transit) to make way for the veiled promises Big Auto and Big Oil. The transition to car dependence in America was a willful and deliberate act, albeit heavily influenced by lobbying and propaganda by auto and oil industries.
malaya_zemlya 3y ago
monontheism is far from an universal consequence of agriculture. It's really limited to Abrahamic religions and religions influenced by them. Pre-christian Roman empire, Ancient Greece, China, India are all examples of advanced ancient civilizations that were happily polytheistic
PurelyApplied 3y ago
> The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc). Surely you aren't suggesting that mathematics, language, philosophy, or abstract thought in general is only 300 years old. Surely not.
- zehnfischer 3y ago
  These ideas becoming mainstream - that's what is just 300 years old. Before few people could read...
narrator 3y ago
AI will change society by getting rid of the necessity of vast numbers of people to be involved in production. Factories will become like farms, which need few people to produce goods for billions thanks to combine harvesters and so forth that were 20th century inventions. You'll have auto plants out in the middle of nowhere overseen by a few technicians. Cities will be for the poor. People will be stacked and warehoused on UBI. This is "Ze Sustainable awwnd incluzive fewcha [said in a thick german accent]." Here, let me pull up Klaus Schwab's "Covid-19: The Great Reset." "As far back as the Black Death that ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351 (and that suppressed 40% of Europe’s population in just a few years), workers discovered for the first time in their life that the power to change things was in their hands. Barely a year after the epidemic had subsided, textile workers in Saint-Omer (a small city in northern France) demanded and received successive wage rises. Two years later, many workers’ guilds negotiated shorter hours and higher pay, sometimes as much as a third more than their pre-plague level. Similar but less extreme examples of other pandemics point to the same conclusion: labour gains in power to the detriment of capital. Nowadays, this phenomenon may be exacerbated by the ageing of much of the population around the world (Africa and India are notable exceptions), but such a scenario today risks being radically altered by the rise of automation, an issue to which we will return in section 1.6. Unlike previous pandemics, it is far from certain that the COVID-19 crisis will tip the balance in favour of labour and against capital. For political and social reasons, it could, but technology changes the mix." Schwab, Klaus; Malleret, Thierry. COVID-19: The Great Reset (p. 39). Forum Publishing. Kindle Edition.
bufferoverflow 3y ago
These are all bad analogies, because they are just better tools. They help with manual labor or the speed of transmission. Computers actually did replace human computers (literally the origin of the word, people who sat all day and did math). But now we're creating artificial minds. And I haven't heard a good argument why they can't replace humans pretty much everywhere. Human minds are limited by the size of the skull. Digital minds don't have that limitation. They can, seemingly, be arbitrarily large (and maybe arbitrarily smart, as a result).
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Everyone who says AI won't replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left. Because we out-smarted, out-bred, and out-killed all the others.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Everyone who says AI won't replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left. Because we out-smarted, out-bred, and out-killed all the others. Everyone who says AI will replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left because we out-smarted, out-bred, and, especially, out-killed all the others. And we (collectively, at least, not individually) know where the AI’s power hookups are.
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      Until it's running off a heavily-shielded fusion battery with a lifetime of a century, I assume? :)
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        Yeah, don't do that. Just in case.

visarga 3y ago

I see all this as the evolution of language, because that's how ideas are preserved and replicated. Ideas evolve over time. They form an evolutionary system, moving much faster than biology. Humans and AI both rely on the corpus of language to learn and apply ideas. We're no longer the only way ideas can replicate - LLMs have joined the party. Language gained a new mechanism for self-replication. We should focus less on humans vs AIs, and more on the language corpus itself, the true source of intelligence. This corpus was built through experience, slowly and collaboratively, by billions of people in parallel. No single human could have done it alone - it's smarter than any one of us, the product of our collective work and luck. When you train an LLM on it, the model becomes generally competent. But did the competence come from the model or the data? Should we obsess over architectures, or look to our datasets?

diego_moita 3y ago
I've heard that before, mostly on Ray Kurzweil talking about singularity. But I have a problem with this usage of the "evolution" and "evolutionary system" expressions. I believe that it entails "improvement", that it is judgmental. I think it is self-centred and presumptuous to imply that the world improved toward us. I don't think Darwin used the expression "evolution" with a judgmental meaning. He only meant that it was an adaptation to existing environmental conditions.
- visarga 3y ago
  It's just self replication. Ideas that are useful in some way get replicated, other ideas forgotten. They travel a lot and mutate. They all depend on human interests, but exist beyond individual humans.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Nice to see that the idea of Richard Dawkins' meme lives on, fittingly enough.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  And failure to adapt leads to extinction. AGI has the potential to be an improvement on humans because it has the potential to be relentlessly rational, reality-aware, and self-correcting. We don't - most likely can't - operate like that. Although we like to flatter ourselves that we're a rational and intelligent species all of us live in an unaware haze of myths, factoids, media-seeded fake narratives, self-serving fantasies, and outright reality denial. We have a rational process called "science", but politically it lives in a special box. If it starts to interfere with established power hierarchies it's shouted down. And hardly any humans science at all. Current AI is just a warm-up for what happens next. Metaphorically it's the equivalent of 8-bit computing. 32-bit AI will be entirely different, very possibly incomprehensible, and potentially far more threatening.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    If AGI is something that becomes real, I don't think it would be recognizable to us for long, I don't think it will be a type of steady state even like humans, reading books to it's chidren in the cloud and get really good at coding and similar tasks, and improve itself infinitely (into what?). I think life has a special property in that it is constrained, so it exists. Imagine being able to become pretty much anything, what would you choose? We can't even comprehend what a system like you describe would evolve into, but I don't think we can even fathom it, it's not going to be like some ultimate task master who gets 18 whole in ones at gold on Friday and take all our jobs, for some reason ? What I think we're doing is applying our problems and the things we'd want (infinite self-improvement) because they're things we feel would be an advantage to us. A robotic system though? Not sure it would care. It seems like AI is the ultimate end game, but I'd imagine if we survie the AI era, we'll be past it pretty farking fast.

diminish 3y ago

Controversially, agricultural societies late to industrialization, have more population now and are replacing early industrial societies due to lower birth rates in industrial workers. So I doubt humans with AI will replace humans without.

satvikpendem 3y ago
What does the population have to do with the parent's point?
- r00fus 3y ago
  Population advantage translates into victory in simple Darwinian analysis. Not that I particularly agree in this case but that’s what I learned in my human nature college course.
wiseowise 3y ago
Now compare quality of life between both.
- mantas 3y ago
  Quality of life in a very narrow materialistic definition for an individual? Or overall and sustainable society quality of life?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    Enjoyment from life.
    - mantas 3y ago
      What is enjoyment though? Suicides, mental health issues, obesity, various substances abuse… Let alone that such enjoyment is on next generations. Wether by wasting resources, abusing environment. Or generation that will never be born thanks to crappy birth rate. So much enjoyment and such a high quality of life that people ain’t willing to procreate. Yay. Usually nature reacts in such a way in opposite environment.

Blikkentrekker 3y ago

> and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions I often see this interpretation that monotheism is somehow more “advanced” than polytheism, even Age of Empires suggested so but why exactly? Because Christianity and Islām became so popular?

Buttons840 3y ago
Maybe by creating more unity in their societies?
- mrob 3y ago
  Alternatively, follow the pre-Christian Ancient Roman approach and maintain unity by assimilating foreign religious practices. I think polytheism makes this method easier.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Christianity has assimilated other religions and their practices, though. As a prime example, many elements of Christmas such as the yule log originate from so-called pagan religions such as Norse.
    - KineticLensman 3y ago
      > Christianity has assimilated other religions and their practices, though. And over the years Christians have persecuted many when their beliefs didn't agree with the dominant interpretation. The Romans were relatively tolerant of indigenous beliefs, as long as they didn't lead to rebellion.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    At certain points in its history, Christianity was fairly eager to ingest aspects of existing religions if it meant that they got the account (conversion). This eventually became controversial (eg see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy), but a lot of early regional Christian saints, say, are, well, suspiciously similar to pre-existing deities or other pagan figures.

brazzy 3y ago

Analogies are treacherous. There is absolutely no guarantee that just because all these technologies shaped humans, this new one will shape them in similar ways and scope.

einpoklum 3y ago

> governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes. More like it facilitated small groups taking over larger communities or communally-usable resources, creating governments to manage their wealth and underlings and armies to attack and loot other tribes.

shafyy 3y ago

I think that homo sapiens was happiest in the hunter gatherer era, right before we've started to think more and more in abstract and conscious ways. Sure, it's cool we can fly humans to the Moon and robots to Mars, but everybody is miserable in the capitalist hamster wheel and an increasing number of people are getting depressed and committing suicide. The other day I was at the lake and looking at ducks, contemplating this. Is a duck really less happy than an average human? Sure, they can't buy fancy iPhones and might get eaten tomorrow, but it's all relative anyways, right? And before you start suggesting that I'm depressed: I'm not, I have been lucky. I have a happy life, great job, great friends and family. But still, one can't stop and wonder about these things...

52-6F-62 3y ago
There’s nothing odd about that thinking. You’re just scratching the surface of philosophy and you should continue. Nothing is an inevitability and tomorrow will look different than anyone here or anywhere else tries to predict. Don’t stop wondering. But I definitely recommend exploring others’ wondering. Especially when it has nothing to do with tech and all to do with your own existence.
- shafyy 3y ago
  Do you have have any good book recommendations?
  - 52-6F-62 3y ago
    Beware dogma. It’s mostly trappings. Study classics, eastern and western and everything besides. Then reading Carl Jung and modern theoretical physicists will then blow the doors off of what you think you knew. Feynman sees ways around everything. Bohm sees behind everything. Whitten’s trying to connect it all together. They will all point you to other readings worth some time. After that reading Robert Anton Wilson, Terrance McKenna, Ram Dass, and Tim Leary will leave you probably going back to the start to find all of the things you’ve missed. Don’t take them at their word, either. They use a lot of tricks, but it’s just to add perspective. Then if you’re still feeling wild take a journey through comparative religion and it will add another dimension to it all yet again. …then you will go all the way out and back again. Don’t take anything for granted. It’s your life you’re living, and all of these writers and more could recognize at least that. Just don’t forget your good humour. Wilson will remind you of that.

b112 3y ago

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/marshall-mcluhan https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/marshall-...

euroderf 3y ago

> So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message. Also McLuhan: every communication medium is an extension of man. AI is a turbo extension of man's ability to string noises together into meaningful phrases: phrases which, like language in general, project the speaker's thought into the mind of the recipient. AI magnifies this into a stream of babble that can be generated at zero marginal cost and at light speed, altho with the caveat that the stream may have self-reinforcing perturbations (internal feedback loops ?) that may or may not refer back to "reality".

darkclouds 3y ago

> Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes When looking at Europe and all the different languages spoken, along with the over arching religion of the region if not the world, Catholicism, headquartered in Europe, are you not left wondering why they didnt put more effort into getting different tribes to communicate in a common dialect to break down barriers? Or if Latin was their common dialect, then does it show that royalty and govt's are the divisive one's pitting people against each other, continuing to get a free pass whilst their atrocities are airbrushed out of history?

p0w3n3d 3y ago

Agriculture did not shape monotheism. It happenrd both on nomadic and non nomadic nation's, as well as polytheistic religions of Asia. No correlation here. Meanwhile currently AIs are just an empty linguistic models that have no proper knowledge, nor can tell what's true from what's fully BS, and will defend both or ask for forgiveness for telling both: truth and rubbish hallucination

4h53n 3y ago
Indeed oldest known surviving buildings are thought to be of religious and monumental in nature.[1] As far as we know it could be the religion which made people settle and do agriculture. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_known_surviving_buildings#By_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_known_surviving... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/gobeki-tepe https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/gobeki-t...

armada651 3y ago

> Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam. Copenhagen and Amsterdam were well on their way to becoming as car dependent as any other American city. It's not just that those cities were built before the car, it's that at some point they decided to stop shaping their city for the car.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> Amsterdam were well on their way to becoming as car dependent as any other American city. This claim gets trotted out quite often, but it is only valid if you are specifically referring to the development of Amsterdam’s bicycle infrastructure. Even during those years when Amsterdam saw a rise in car traffic, the city never stopped offering public transit of the sort that most Americans could only dream of. So, the average resident was not forced to own a car.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  I don't think that occurred through an act of God though. The point was that those cities didn't follow the American model because of the will of their people.
- m0rphling 3y ago
  Also, it's worth noting that American cities demolished good infrastructure (for bikes, pedestrians, and transit) to make way for the veiled promises Big Auto and Big Oil. The transition to car dependence in America was a willful and deliberate act, albeit heavily influenced by lobbying and propaganda by auto and oil industries.

malaya_zemlya 3y ago

monontheism is far from an universal consequence of agriculture. It's really limited to Abrahamic religions and religions influenced by them. Pre-christian Roman empire, Ancient Greece, China, India are all examples of advanced ancient civilizations that were happily polytheistic

PurelyApplied 3y ago

> The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc). Surely you aren't suggesting that mathematics, language, philosophy, or abstract thought in general is only 300 years old. Surely not.

zehnfischer 3y ago
These ideas becoming mainstream - that's what is just 300 years old. Before few people could read...

narrator 3y ago

AI will change society by getting rid of the necessity of vast numbers of people to be involved in production. Factories will become like farms, which need few people to produce goods for billions thanks to combine harvesters and so forth that were 20th century inventions. You'll have auto plants out in the middle of nowhere overseen by a few technicians. Cities will be for the poor. People will be stacked and warehoused on UBI. This is "Ze Sustainable awwnd incluzive fewcha [said in a thick german accent]." Here, let me pull up Klaus Schwab's "Covid-19: The Great Reset." "As far back as the Black Death that ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351 (and that suppressed 40% of Europe’s population in just a few years), workers discovered for the first time in their life that the power to change things was in their hands. Barely a year after the epidemic had subsided, textile workers in Saint-Omer (a small city in northern France) demanded and received successive wage rises. Two years later, many workers’ guilds negotiated shorter hours and higher pay, sometimes as much as a third more than their pre-plague level. Similar but less extreme examples of other pandemics point to the same conclusion: labour gains in power to the detriment of capital. Nowadays, this phenomenon may be exacerbated by the ageing of much of the population around the world (Africa and India are notable exceptions), but such a scenario today risks being radically altered by the rise of automation, an issue to which we will return in section 1.6. Unlike previous pandemics, it is far from certain that the COVID-19 crisis will tip the balance in favour of labour and against capital. For political and social reasons, it could, but technology changes the mix." Schwab, Klaus; Malleret, Thierry. COVID-19: The Great Reset (p. 39). Forum Publishing. Kindle Edition.

bufferoverflow 3y ago

These are all bad analogies, because they are just better tools. They help with manual labor or the speed of transmission. Computers actually did replace human computers (literally the origin of the word, people who sat all day and did math). But now we're creating artificial minds. And I haven't heard a good argument why they can't replace humans pretty much everywhere. Human minds are limited by the size of the skull. Digital minds don't have that limitation. They can, seemingly, be arbitrarily large (and maybe arbitrarily smart, as a result).

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Everyone who says AI won't replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left. Because we out-smarted, out-bred, and out-killed all the others.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Everyone who says AI won't replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left. Because we out-smarted, out-bred, and out-killed all the others. Everyone who says AI will replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left because we out-smarted, out-bred, and, especially, out-killed all the others. And we (collectively, at least, not individually) know where the AI’s power hookups are.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Until it's running off a heavily-shielded fusion battery with a lifetime of a century, I assume? :)
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      Yeah, don't do that. Just in case.