I am currently reading Sapiens and for me the takeaway thought from this book is that large scale social transformations (like agricultural or industrial revolutions) immeasurably increase the power of humanity as a whole while bringing hitherto unknown woes for the individuals.
I am quite convinced that invention of computers and the internet marks the beginning of the revolution on the same scale. Why should it be different then? Interesting and not quite pleasant times lie ahead.
One criticism I have of Sapiens is that he regards the hunter-gather lifestyle as ideal, a sort of Garden of Eden from which we descended when we invented agriculture.
The few Amazon, New Guinea and Kalahari hunter-gather tribes anthropologists have discovered live in what most modern humans would regard as terrible poverty and fear of violence.
There is definitely some of that (but then he spends some time discussing why modern hunter-gatherers can be a poor representation for prehistoric ones). May be an overreaction to the old sentiment about "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lives of prehistoric humans.
Also, there is little surprise that different value systems provide different value judgments. According to hunter-gatherers our lifestyle would surely be described as terribly sedentary and full of anxiety about tomorrow.
As for me, I find evidence that human brain could actually decrease in size throughout history a good reason not to be so smug about all-encompassing knowledge and abilities of modern humans.
> about all-encompassing knowledge and abilities of modern humans
I agree. The reason we achieve so much more is the network of human cooperation in space and in time (with the ancestors who pass down to us knowledge, methods, culture, technologies, items, infrastructure). I have not ever seen any substantiated claims individuals got better apart from better software gotten through soft programming, the stuff I mentioned as passed from ancestors. With "better" I mean this: Would a baby created today and immediately given to hunter-gatherers (now or 10,000 years ago by "magic") do better then their babies? I doubt it.
>I am quite convinced that invention of computers and the internet marks the beginning of the revolution on the same scale. Why should it be different then?
However, a criticism of induction is that the past cannot always help predict the future. We were given an example of the turkey that learns if he sticks his neck out the farmer will feed him. He keeps sticking his neck out and being fed every day, until one day he sticks his neck out, and where the past has told him to expect food, the farmer instead chops his head off and before he knows it he’s on the Christmas table.
The turkey metaphor rests on the premise that there is an end goal with the turkey; the farmer wants to eat it. Even before the story is fully told, we already know what's going to happen to the turkey.
Since we don't know the end goal for humanity, we don't know if "reaching our head out" is bad or not.
>we don't know if "reaching our head out" is bad or not.
as long as we're staying inside the cage, we're slaves to that guessing game. This is why breaking out of whatever cage we're in - and as we don't know what nested, probably infinite, "russian doll" style set of cages we're in - that means the continuous expansion and envelope pushing in all directions is the key for continuing species existence.
>The turkey metaphor rests on the premise that there is an end goal with the turkey; the farmer wants to eat it.
No, it really doesn't. The same thing could have happened to the "empiricist dog".
The only reason it is a turkey is for the added emphasis and "foreshadowing" the reader would get.
But the gist of the parable is not about "this is what happens to turkey", it is "this is the problem with induction", whether there is an end goal or not. The slaughter here is just "whatever lies ahead".
Note also that in the case of the real world, we ARE like the turkey in the parable, and are as oblivious to thanksgiving as any turkey is. That is, in the course of the parable is that you shouldn't identify with the reader, but with the turkey.
Oh yes, the past is often a poor predictor for the future. But then a turkey that has received an unpleasant electric shock each time it did some thing and then expects that this time it should be different is just stupid!
I am quite convinced that invention of computers and the internet marks the beginning of the revolution on the same scale. Why should it be different then? Interesting and not quite pleasant times lie ahead.