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

[Mike Dougherty]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 10:21 PM,  <lists1 at evil-genius.com> wrote:
> 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.)

By comparison the Apple IIc I had when I was ten years old was more
than twice as powerful as the computer i'm currently using to type
this email.  Perhaps fossil evidence shows a larger brainbox but can
say nothing about the neural density / efficiency of the brain
contained therein.  Are you suggesting that a sperm whale is 5x
smarter than the average human only because of its larger brain?

> 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.

Yeah.  No wonder the future looks bleak.  Even without die-back
there's the apparently inevitable dumbening that's sure to overtake
all but the top 0.1% who'll run everything (possibly the Mr.Smiths)