The author is Jared Diamond - IMHO one of the great thinkers of our time, who certainly deserves serious consideration. His books, "Guns, Germs and Steel", "Col

The author is Jared Diamond - IMHO one of the great thinkers of our time, who certainly deserves serious consideration. His books, "Guns, Germs and Steel", "Collapse", "The Third Chimpanzee" are excellent, thought-provoking (even worldview-altering) reads. That said.. he is right, but from the vantage point of someone in this day and age, who loves science and technology, who has benefitted from the efforts of the billions of post-agricultural humans, I selfishly prefer this outcome to sitting around gathering nuts in uncomfortable underwear, waging endless war with neighbouring bands and tribes. Sure, agriculture produced a Long Dip in living standards, with population increases outstripping any gains made in production. But the whole point of a large population - perhaps the only redeeming feature of civilization - is that one can trawl the probabilistic waters and produce the few very mad, very interesting geniuses who make it all worthwhile. I've always thought that the Matrix really came about due to the natural tendency of civilization to increase population density. From the open savannah to cubicles, cars and capsule hotels.. the Matrix is just highly aggressive telecommuting. And it worked, too. Humans maintained ever higher population densities, produced lots of crazy geniuses who kept improving the interfaces, until significant bits of personalities could jump across from brain to brain. "AIs" were nothing more than mobile multiple-personality disorders. Morpheus' crowd were basically scavengers, helping keep the Matrix clean of dangerous personalities while maintaining a reserve pool of free-range human at Zion, in case the Matrix needed to be repopulated... which it did, from time to time, after epic meme-virus infections which killed off most of the existing inhabitants. The whole "AI vs humans" story and attempts to kill Morpheus & co was a big piece of drama to keep them righteously motivated rather than relaxing with the blue pill.