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Cross post: the_ivory_tower (rdrama.net) :
The limitations of humanity:
In the 21st century we saw the exponential scaling of human capabilities. Our ingenuity has led us down a path of a million miracles. The capacity to not just harness the resources around us but to go as far as to alter them and apply them to our purposes. On this design uniquely singular in it's extreme propensity in human beings, we have created entire civilizations, tech trees, ecologies, social systems, ideologies, none of which would have been possible in the past.
However even through the age of miracles and seemingly infinite growth one question persists, what if humanity is not infinite in its capacity, what if it's nowhere close to fulfilling a neverending greater purpose. What if we are just another branch on the tree of life that goes so far and nevermore?
Are we the greatest child of this Earth, or are we the harbingers of something greater, whether it be an elevated species other than ourselves, or an AI master race. Or perhaps, we are simply a dead end.
Today I write to you to discuss the slow downs in human society and the hurdles that lie ahead of us. The limitations of humanity:
The fatdemic. One of the greatest threats to the future of mankind. Every year the percentage of the world's population that becomes fat keeps rising. Till date there has been no reversal in the trends and it is likely that the only way to reverse it would be an authoritarian hand over the people's choices in food. With the abundance of food, as a species we have become weaker, stupider, more lethargic, with a higher propensity to heart disease and other comorbidities and an increased economic constraint over the system than is naturally deserved. In our fatness we have put ourselves in a position where we are almost regressing back in humanity's growth and potential. In our fatness is the clear cut sign of our lacking self control as a species.
The peaceful stupidity - It is said that some of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind come during times of war. Where the nation is put at risk and all resources are put into maximizing upgrades to ones technology or any capacity to beat the enemy. It was war that boosted the process of splitting the atom. It was the pressure of war that sent satellites into space. It was war that sent men to the moon long before they had any right to be there. That is not to say that there is no creation during a time of peace. Many things are invented during times of peace. Yet in the previous lines there is a symbolism which we see once again in the fact that in the most developed societies of the west we have now begun to see people get dumber over time. A society wide fall in overall IQ. A warning of the possibility of bad days ahead. Even a possible sign that we in the past century went way past the point of our natural capabilities and now find ourselves in a world that none of us understand.
The culture wars - There is utility in conflict. In an openly hostile setting where ideas come across each other, only the best survive. However, the 21st century appears to be way past that point of competing cultures and has instead fallen into a trap of trying to place equal value on all cultural systems. It is of course a polite impossibility. Our cultures define how we live our lives, how we live our lives defines the outcome of our lives. Then how can it be that all cultures are expected to provide equal results? It is a lie. However this is not the worst of it. We find ourselves in conflict with different systems of human life even when within nations themselves the ideas once again split apart along irreconcilable lines. We find ourselves fighting both within and without, but never breaking into open conflict. So now we are as animals forever drowning, falling further and further into the pitfalls of a culture warfare where there is no release, so we keep digging deeper and deeper, until all sanity and values that hold us to reality are lost on the path. The end product, the risk of it is simple enough, a collapse of society under it's own decadence without any release of the turmoil in time.
Loss of growing up - Imagine you are 10, you now find out that for your entire life you could keep being 10 years old and acting the part and life would still work out for you. Would you then take the hard path where you fall and get hurt and learn and change? Or would you rather remain the 10 year old that can watch cartoons till he is dead? In a society that is so deep in success that a man need no longer be forced to lift a single finger, the man seems to prefer the latter option. All growth is lost, because the man can subsist even remaining within his childish nature. Society is put at risk, for any group or individual or external entity that chooses to grow up or learn greater maturity is now in a position to take advantage of the naive and innocent, which is all that we are filled with now, the sheep flocks so huge there is no longer enough grass for them to graze, nor enough wolves left to lessen their numbers. A death by decay of the spirit.
Pace of progress - This one is the hardest to track of all the points made. However a simple way to think of it is this, a thousand years ago one man could revolutionize multiple fields, today it takes thousands of men to simply collate the data from the past. Often times the lack of progress is not even due to the information not being available, but the fact that two fields of science have their specialists never interact with each other. Which slows down progress as well due to all the relevant information not being available with the experts as the amount of information has far outpaced the amount of time available to a man to educate himself and even his intellectual capacity to collect all the data in the first place in a multidisciplinary way. Worse still, all the low fruit in inventions has already been picked up for the most part, so the only way to keep moving up is with higher effort with diminishing returns. Anyone who has taken an economics class knows how that graph looks, at some point those diminishing returns will always reach zero, and at that point either something new would be made to boost progress again or humanity will stagnate at that point.
Conclusion - The first four points regarding the fatdemic, lowering IQ's, the culture wars, and the loss of growing up when it is one of two or more options all display a limitation of our current cultural trends. As far as we have come, and as much cultural evolution as we have gone through, we find ourselves now faced with a wall that we are in this generation unable to overcome. Only time will tell how we surmount this obstacle and what the future after will look like, or if we even surmount these obstacles at all and haven't yet reached past a breaking point we do not yet recognize.
My final point as to the pace of progress primarily focuses on the increasing amount of time, energy, and education required to create new things to progress society. So far at the top of society, our capabilities at the top have kept up with the demands for further returns, the question that comes to mind is, with the failures of our current cultural peak, will we be able to keep progressing as a society? Already the soldier has fallen and military's see their numbers decline each year, if it could happen to the military, then why not the sciences in the years ahead?
Thank you.
Interesting. The ratsphere started with fears of AI risk, so declensionist, stagnationist, or collapse-oriented arguments like this tend to get a frigid reception here. Then again, maybe that's just reality having a rationalist bias.
I think you're confusing the cart and the horse. Rising obesity is not a problem in of itself. It's a visible symptom of technology outrunning the self-control, prudentia, and conscientiousness of the population — or of technology hurting those, directly. People looking like orbs out of WALL-E doesn't prevent an advanced technological society. It only causes retired pensioners with obsolete skillsets to die earlier.
I don't know about this. WWII is the most salient event in recent memory, so I think people generalize it to the whole human experience, and in WWII war did drive progress. But, to offer a counter-example, probably the most dramatic period of social and technological progress in human history was the Victorian era from 1815 to 1914. (Looking forward to Vicky 3!) That century is marked by an unusual lack of any bloody general European wars, certainly none that were existentially threatening to England, where the progress was most extreme.
Read Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. You might find it interesting.
Obesity is an interesting subject. I think a distinction needs to be made between childhood/teen obesity and adult obesity. People tend to gain weight as they get older, at around 1-2 pound /year, up until around 60. I think looking at childhood/teen obesity gives a more accurate perspective of the situation. Childhood obesity is particularly bad because the complications later in life are perhaps worse.
Closer to 1 pound/year on average, IIRC. Not that that's not bad enough.
Though, I'd love to know for sure whether "tend" in this sentence is a law of nature or just another modern abnormality. One of the most astonishing claims from that Slime Mold Time Mold series was:
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