[ExI] Technology, specialization, and diebacks...Re: I love the world. =)

[lists1 at evil-genius.com]

> From: Charlie Stross<charlie.stross at gmail.com>
>> > In a not-quite-worst-case
>> >  scenario we are forced to Nuke the Internet and revert back to
>> >  Amish-level technologies.  Not a pretty situation, but humanity would
>> >  adapt.

> Humanity*in the abstract*  might adapt; but if we have to go there,
> you and I, personally, are probably going to die.

The fact people forget is that late Pleistocene hunter-foragers had 
larger brains than post-agricultural humans!  (And were taller, 
stronger, and healthier...only in the last 50 years have most human 
cultures regained the height of our distant ancestors.)

The implication, of course, is that hunting and foraging *required* that 
brainpower -- otherwise it would not have been selected for.  In other 
words, successfully hunting and foraging was *intellectually 
challenging*, and you didn't reproduce unless you were very good at it.

In contrast, agriculture takes a genius to invent, but can be practiced 
by nearly anybody.  Follow the ox, back and forth, sow and weed and 
harvest.  Don't get 'distracted' (which was, for millions of years, a 
survival characteristic known as 'noticing something possibly edible 
amidst the blooming confusion of life').

Industrialization and mass-production increased this divide.  The entire 
point of the Industrial Revolution was to decrease cost of goods by 
eliminating expensive skilled craftsmen and replacing them with low-wage 
unskilled labor.  Each advance in technology involves more and more 
specialized knowledge whose fundamentals grow more complex with each 
step, and are understood by fewer...

..and which decrease the base level of intelligence and physical 
capability required to survive.  In modern Western societies, absolutely 
*anyone* survives, even the persistently vegetative.

Where this all ends up: technology allows a very few smart and capable 
people to enable the survival of *billions* of much less capable people. 
  So if you take away that technology and require everyone to fend for 
themselves, you would expect a large dieback.

> ... If we have to Nuke The Net Or Die, it'll mean the
> difference between a 100% die-back and a 90% die-back.

Given the world's rapidly disappearing supply of topsoil and ocean fish 
and continued population growth, that 90% figure you mention is 
basically a guarantee at some point in the not-too-distant future. 
(Anyone who wants to make the Julian Simon argument needs to also look 
at the rapidly disappearing supply of climax predators: world lion 
population has crashed from 200,000 to 20,000, a 90% decrease in ten 
years, due to habitat loss, and tigers are essentially extinct in the 
wild.  Agricultural productivity has flattened out: all we've been doing 
is using up our buffer zones -- which *used* to have wild animals in 
them, hence their rapid decline.  And you can't increase productivity 
via genetic engineering without using up your topsoil more
quickly...unless you're returning human waste to the soil your food grew 
in, which we aren't.)

> Meanwhile, the Mormons, with their requirement to keep a year of
> canned goods in the cellar, will be laughing. (Well, praying.)

I'm not sure one can learn subsistence farming or hunting in one year of 
hiding in a cellar.

The Amish and Mennonites have the skills to manage...but I'm not sure 
they survive the waves of heavily armed and *very* hungry urban gangs 
exploding outward from the cities.

The thing to remember is that 90%+ dieoffs are very common throughout 
the Earth's history...and given the rapid rate of replenishment relative 
to the geological record, don't tend to even show up unless 
environmental change held the population down for an extended period of 
time.  Human population is thought to have hit a bottleneck of 5K-10K 
somewhere in the Late Pleistocene.  So if there were a 99.9% dieoff and 
the only remaining humans were a few thousand Amish, Hadza, Ache, !Kung, 
and New Guinea highlanders, it wouldn't make a great deal of difference 
in the long-term.  But you and I might not be too happy about it.