In any case, to stand here, in history, at this absolute climax of wealth inequality, government capture, and feudal existence being created and to surmise that "technology" is the problem and not "money" or just "distribution of new wealth" even is absolutely beyond me.

"In no way is misfortune wished." Well, whether you're hinting that your abstract philosophy demands these people be put to death or not, you can spare yourself the altar, these people already live with misfortune that I don't think someone with your apparent level of fortune can even properly calculate.

You think money, rather than technology? I think the problem is humans. And no, fewer of them won't fix them.

That's rather a silly way of approaching things. Imagine if your house were on fire, and I said, "the problem isn't flammable curtains or an expired fire extinguisher. It's houses and flames!"

Okay, sure, but we can hardly get rid of houses and flames now, can we?

Even if we could somehow get rid of all humans, that wouldn't meaningfully solve anything. We wouldn't end up with a fixed world, we'd end up with a barren world, void of consciousness, with nobody around to enjoy it. There are plenty of those elsewhere in the solar system.

Does wealth disparity really matter when every human in the western world has a magic box that can deliver endless global entertainment, communication, and information? Imagine if you had no clean water, people around you died of random diseases every day, you stepped in shit on your way to your 85 hour a week job [1], and then also, the aristocrats laughed at you from their rich ivory towers. That's a far drier powderkeg for the french revolution. People sometimes feel outrage today, but ultimately the feed keeps them happy.

It'll all end eventually. But everything always does. The best we can do is keep it going for as long as possible. Anyone who would actually use a time machine to take them anytime, anywhere in the past would be in for a rude awakening. Maybe I'd go back to the 1980s, only to relive the era we're in now all over again, except to buy a ton of AAPL and NVDA this time around.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

Saying that technology advanced alongside extreme wealth inequality doesn't prove inequality was necessary for that advancement.

Your argument is effectively a deflection from the real question, which is whether life is better than medieval times, but whether we could have the technology benefits we have today without the power concentration and disparity.

No one is trying to prove anything, because these things can't be proven. All we can do is study history and study the present. These things remain true to my eyes:

1. Wealth inequality is an intrinsic fact of human society. There's vanishingly few societies anyone reading this would choose to live in which had significantly lower levels of wealth inequality. Part of that is because: There are vanishingly few societies which had exceedingly low levels of wealth inequality, period. Its human nature, and society always seems to converge at a scale expression of human nature, even if there are pockets of attempts to circumvent it which near-always internally fall to corruption or get out-competed (e.g. the USSR).

(I only say near-always because e.g. modern uncontacted amazonian/north sentinel island tribes likely have a pretty egalitarian society, and they haven't fallen yet. you could go live with them if you want to experience what that's like)

2. You're talking about managing wealth inequality on a social media site operated by a venture capital company. This behavior pattern generalizes to modern society: Desktop Linux exists, but people broadly prefer operating systems which enrich hyperwealthy oligarchs. Local markets exist, but Walmart and Costco reign supreme. Taylor Swift and Drake attract ten times the listeners of ten thousand indie artists combined. Human behavior patterns, even in extremely competitive and choice-heavy markets, tend to concentrate wealth.

3. None of that is to state that we live in a perfect or even good system. There may just exist the Least Bad. None of that is to state that we shouldn't make efforts to improve our system. Wealth inequality being an intrinsic fact of human society is not a blank check to aim for or even allow infinite wealth inequality.

4. Maybe technology could have evolved in a more egalitarian society; in other words, a society which does not exclusively and significantly compensate inventors for their inventions. There are some historical examples; technology development during the early USSR was quite impressive and significant. Of course, it barely lasted one human lifespan, and if you ever talk with anyone who lived in the USSR during the 70s and 80s its worth asking them if they feel they'd prefer to live under that system, or our current one.

Whether the universe as a whole evolves (pockets) in that direction as some fundamental goal is a philosophical question, but that it does so is clear.

Wanna move right to the top to live a good life just like the French in the past.

This is not how other biological organisms work. They are currently in equilibrium because when they aren't they wipe almost everything else out and then create a new equilibrium or collapse the population. Humans are following in this grand tradition of nature. It is destructive tradition and I think we should break with nature on this point.

There is a decent chance that industrial civilization is so disruptive it brings about its own destruction. We should be taking steps to not speed run our own extinction and the extinction of a good chunk of complex life on this planet, but it does not seem that at the present moment that we are willing to do what is necessary.

Anyway, the Georgia Guidestones are just one weirdo's hot takes. They vary from blandly unobjectionable ("avoid petty laws and useless officials"? yeah nobody supports "useless" and "petty" things) to dubious ("rule passion — faith — tradition"? I guess passion's fine, but faith and tradition lead a person in weird directions) to outright eugenicist ("guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity").

Another note: The largest beaver dam discovered is about .5 miles in length. Even if it was purely destructive to local eco systems it would hardly compare to human development.

Of course, when species are destructive to their environments, that's natural too. Consider the mass extinction caused by cyanobacteria back when they first evolved. It's not "nature" we want, it's biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. Shrinking the human population to 500M might feel "natural" to some people, but it really has little to do with our actual environmental goals.

Still, there's a lot of cool technology out there, and a lot of room to use it better.

Also, the rarity of farming in the animal kingdom makes me worried about the sustainability even of multi-species domestication. A few ants cultivate trees or fungi or aphids, but they seem to specialize in just domesticating just one species at a time. This is telling us something important: I suspect domesticating too many species leads to vulnerabilities to so many parasites/bacteria/viruses/pests that pestilence and famine risk will eventually outweigh any benefits of domestication. If they didn't, ants would be farming lots of species!

In the real long term, then, humans will get one (or zero) domesticated species, and maybe some electricity if we can make self-sustaining solar power operations using common elements like aluminum and silicon from dirt, or sodium, chlorine, oxygen, and hydrogen from water, and that'll be it for technology, Everything else will be foraged animals and plants, in an ecosystem that keeps our population in check through predation.

As for the transition, it's going to suck. And I don't trust any governing body to "ramp down" the population smoothly without committing some major atrocities.

And if we did extract the majority of those particular resources then there would be so much of them in circulation that wide scale recycling becomes viable. It already is for copper. And if you're thinking then that recycling is going to be more energy intensive, that's not clear for copper and lithium either - both require high energy to extract in the first place and potentially less to keep them going around.