Technology and Evolutionary Mismatch

• Vaccination
• Shipping Container
• Printing Press
• Transistors
• Computers
• Smartphones
• Databases
• Modern Kitchen Appliances
• Water Heater
• Air Conditioner
• Steam Engine
• Light Bulbs
• Photography
• Radios
• Television
• Cheap, Accessible Music
• Locomotives
• Automobiles
• 3D Printers
• Airplane Transportation
• Improvements in Medical Care and Health Treatments
• Improvements in Building and Construction
• The Internet

It’s true that technological progress has slowed down towards stagnation since the 1970s. Nevertheless, Gwern has written a great list summarizing all the main improvements that have happened since then.

• Fire
• Shelter
• Clothing
• Wheel
• Agriculture
• Domesticated Animals
• Building / Hunting / Agriculture Tools
• Aquaducts
• Naval Transportation
• Clocks
• Writing Systems
• Positional Base-10 Numbering System (maybe not developed the same time period as the rest of these, but still important none the less)

• less in-person social interaction
• insomnia caused by reception of blue light within human eyes
• carpal tunnel and repetitive stress injury caused by non-ergonomic keyboards
• unrealistic expectations for relationships, life, etc.
• light pollution
• traffic congestion
• decreased attention spans
• identity theft
• hacking
• worrying about hacking and identity theft
• worrying about personal information being collected by companies when you buy/use their products
• The increasing potential for smokescreens by AI will make it ever more difficult to distinguish between what’s fake and what’s real in the world.
• cryptocurrencies are making it easier for people to commit crimes
• The development of myopia in the modern world
• Amusing Ourselves to Death? - Gwern
  • A suggested x-risk/Great Filter is the possibility of advanced entertainment technology leading to wireheading/mass sterility/population collapse and extinction.
  • As media consumption patterns are highly heritable, any such effect would trigger rapid human adaptation, implying extinction is almost impossible unless immediate collapse or exponentially accelerating addictiveness.

• depression and alienation caused by social media websites
• loneliness
• increased gossip
• cancel culture
• online echo chambers
• virtue-signaling tragedy of the commons, made even worse thanks to social media
• captive subscribed brainwashed audiences
• invasive advertisements, spam, commercials, solicitors, etc.
• over-exposure of personal information
• porn addictions
• abnormal behavior caused by watching pornography
• lack of confidence in body-image

The most notorious virtue-signalers implicitly feel that #1 goal of someone’s life is to be considered a good human, not actually be a good human, although they don’t explicitly realize this.

• depression
• binge eating disorder
• anorexia / bulimia
• obesity
• drug addictions
• sedentary lifestyles
• heart problems
• cardiovascular problems
• myopia

• rising dysgenics
• imminent overpopulation crises
• inceldom; it’s harder than ever to find a partner these days.
• deformed body parts
• materialistic consumer culture
• boring jobs
• graveyard shift jobs
• rigid scheduling
• lack of sleep caused by demanding jobs (this also occurred during the industrial revolution)
• pets’ physical disorders caused by selective breeding
• needing to euthanize pets
• time-demanding world
• other social problems
• how Apple AirTags have been abused for stalking people, despite being intended to help people keep track of their potentially missing belongings.
• increased carbon emissions that cause environmental problems
• increased pollution
• increased plastic pollution
• car accidents
• ever-decreasing linguistic diversity (sad if you value linguistic diversity and/or find languages to be interesting)

I don’t believe that AI will lead to a malevolent singularity, but I’m still pessimistic about how it will affect society. With all things considered, I’m convinced that AI generation will do more harm than good for humanity’s future, especially if it gets used by malevolent actors/criminals and authoritarian governments like China and North Korea.

• AI may cause mass unemployment.
• AI will cause further evolutionary mismatch.
• AI will further alienate humans from their objective purpose.
• AI will make it harder for humans to go through the power process.
• AI creates misleading/malicious/harmful deepfakes for images, video, text, etc.
• Deepfakes will make it easier to scam people. It’s already started happening, and it’s only going to get worse.
• AI makes it easier to intrude on people’s privacy.
• AI makes it easier to cheat on school assignments.
• AI is/will cause humanist, anti-white, biological denialist bias to further permeate into society, due to biased algorithms and programming.
• AI could always be used for many other malicious intents.
• Slaughterbots are a way how technology companies and governments could potentially assassinate whomever they want quickly, easily, and effectively. With this kind of technology, governments could potentially assassinate entire cities, without doing the same kind of destructive damage that nuclear weapons would cause.
• Et Cetera.

When deciding if a new technology or social change should be made to the population, we should be asking if it will be worth the impact that it will have on human evolution.

• For example, vaccines are worth implementing since they don’t significantly increase the dysgenics of the population, for as long as it is possible to mass produce vaccines for all humans, and all livestock.
• On the other hand, a public healthcare system is a bad idea since it subsidizes unhealthy people and unhealthy lifestyles, whereas allowing natural selection would make it possible to get rid of dysgenic genes that make people more likely to smoke, more likely to become obese / sedentary, more likely to get cancer, etc.

Historically, the people who move society’s technology forward are going to be smarter than the average person in the population. So historical discoveries in primitive technology were made by the smartest humans, while the less intelligent rest of the population learned and followed how to use the newer, more technologically advanced technologies. Using such technologies may select for higher intelligence in some cases after a while, but probably not always, and certainly not instantaneously. What I’m trying to get at here is that most people in a society don’t need to be particularly intelligent in order to cause rapid technological advancement, as long as it has a sufficient number of intelligent people to drive said advancement. The end result is that it’s easy for a majority of a society’s population to end up surrounded by technology that they use, technology that is maladaptive to their behavior, and technology whose effects that they cannot fully predict or comprehend until it is too late.

Near the end of this podcast episode, Dr. Gregory Clark talks with Steven Hsu about how the turning point for when average IQ started to decrease instead of increase was around the 1850s for Europe.

Theoretically, the advancement of free trade and economic development of a country could potentially have negative effects in the short-term if it caused different types of jobs to be worked in the country, compared to what the population was used to. The societal changes could interfere with the population’s ability to adapt to the modern industrial-technological world.

For example, a society that transitions from rural agricultural jobs to manufacturing and other blue-collared jobs, and then to white-collared jobs would have to stumble through the natural selection imposed by the previous stages of the society’s jobs. This could make natural selection in favor of a population that’s adapted to modernity take somewhat longer in the society. As with everything, more evidence would be required to prove that this is not just speculation.

IBM workers have had a saying for two decades “If it can be worked remotely, it can be outsourced”. This has been reality in the IT field for 20 years. Anecdotally, it’s been said that the outsourced workers has often been terrible, and most of their work has to be re-done by actual skilled employees.

Outsourcing lowers the service quality everywhere it has been done. It is a way for incompetent, so-called leadership to show how they saved money. Everyone at the company suffers as well as their customers when this is done. The company still has to maintain staff to fix all the issues outsourcing creates. Outsourcing is a terrible idea and it doesn’t work as many have expected.

The Power Process, as defined and explained in Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski

The “Power Process” described by Ted Kaczynski is most similar to the following terms that are used in Academia:

• Wiktionary: Self-Actualization
• Wiktionary: Transcendence (philosophy)
• Wiktionary: Existentialism

When Humanists are clamoring about wanting people to “flourish”, they don’t specifically define the term, but what they most likely mean that they want people to go through the power process. Unfortunately, Humanists don’t have the philosophical grounding to understand what the power process is, or how technology prevents people from experiencing the power process.

Transhumanists don’t have any solutions for ensuring that people are able to find purpose and meaning in their lives in the Modern World. Somehow, they believe that creating even more technology will automatically make everything better, even though it will more likely make the problem even worse by making purpose even harder to attain. On the other hand, Anarcho-Primitivism has very easy solutions for ensuring that people will still be able to find purpose and meaning. Anarcho-Primitivism seems in line with many absurdist and existentialist ideas.

People don’t want to use philosophical thinking to figure out their purpose. They just want to be placed on a hamster wheel and have their purpose be given to them. This used to happen before birth control existed because once a baby was born and you couldn’t do anything to stop it, you had to take care of it, and that would become your purpose. But that purpose is now gone in modernity.

There’s probably a finite amount of good ideas out there to discover, due to the physical materialist nature of the Universe. The opposite belief (i.e. there’s an infinite amount of good ideas) seems less logical. A lot of times, there’s only one best way to do something. A lot of the agricultural methods that were developed thousands of years ago in the world’s great river valleys are still used today. The same could be said about how the wheel, fire, and many other inventions are still used today. Once humanity discovers the best of the best, there’s often not many ways to improve beyond that.

In many ways, humanity has already reached “peak technology”. There’s still room for improvement in many areas, like urban planning (Georgism would help with this), AI, maybe nanobots, and other things, but once we achieve them, there will be even less room for future growth. There are physical and economic limits to what technology can achieve. For instance, it’s very probable that humanity will probably never colonize Mars or others planets, and this is explained in Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen

Biological immortality is likely impossible, as explained in Sex, Death, and Complexity. One fact that’s not mentioned in that essay is telomeres. At the end of every DNA strand in your chromosomes there is a repeated sequence called a “telomere”, which causes the strand to fold on itself and prevents it from unraveling. The telomere gets shorter each time the DNA strand is replicated. The length of the telomere limits the number of times that the cell can replicate. (This is a slight simplification.) We could probably use genetic engineering to turn on the gene that produces telomerase in all of our cells. That enzyme adds telomere sequences to the end of the DNA strands, so it allows cells to replicate indefinitely by mitosis. But that would probably increase the likelihood of cancer. It probably wouldn’t extend your lifespan by much, and it might even shorten it. Even if biological immortality were possible, it would have to require an extensive amount of advanced technology, which is going to be much less feasible once the scale of civilization and economics declines since infinite economic growth is impossible. Biological immortality also creates major problems for overpopulation.

Further reading: Technology and Progress

For a more extensive critique of some Transhumanism ideals and its ambitions for the Future, I recommend reading: Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford

And if people guessed that the people of the future (100+ years after the Ford Model T came out) wanted better cars, then they’d be wrong on that too. A rational modern civilization doesn’t want cars. It would rather have high-speed rail and a combination of efficient, sustainable, and low-pollution transpiration methods and infrastructure. 20th-Century Human Civilization failed to figure this out because modern civilization is irrational.

Everybody is using up gasoline and oil these days as if it is water. Unless someone is walking, riding bicycle, or riding a horse, they have to use oil, one of the world’s most valuable and energy-rich resources to travel anywhere that they want to go. Even if people use electrical vehicles, EVs still inherit all the problems of cars and they increase carbon emissions and pollution around the world, which exacerbates climate change and global warming.

The purpose of electric cars was not to save the environment, but rather to save the automobile industry. People won’t be able to drive cars anymore if the world runs out of gasoline, so the theory is that replacing them with electric vehicles instead should cause people to continue buying cars even after global oil depletion happens. Unfortunately, no one with significant political power seems to care about how unsustainable this may be, in terms of unnecessary resource consumption.

I really hate how the world is designed this way. It’s so dystopian to me. The developed world and other societies all around the world could’ve started out by building more sustainable, more time-efficient, and more economically beneficial transportation infrastructure, but they didn’t. Nobody in positions of power bothered to extensively think out how human societies should be organized, so the 20th-century urban planners designed the world’s cities in such a brainless manner. If cars were limited to only practical rural transportation, Humanity also could’ve avoided making a significant amount of lead pollution until leaded gasoline was gradually banned around the world. None of this had to be this way, but it is.

The Three E’s of the Peak Prosperity’s Crash Course were: Economy, Energy, and Environment. Energy is probably the least worrisome, assuming that humanity starts using nuclear energy, since there is no cleaner, abundant energy alternative with a high Energy Return On Investment (EROI). However, nuclear energy can’t power gasoline-powered cars. Electric vehicles will be able to replace some of society’s transportation needs, but they rely on scarce resources that the West doesn’t have enough access to, and all batteries have finite lifespans. Once gasoline becomes expensive enough, most people simply won’t be able to afford to drive unless they have EVs.

Global oil depletion will have many devastating consequences on society.

WTF Happened In 1971?: This site has a lot of graphs and metrics that went haywire after 1971, the same year that the US ended the gold standard.

What ultimately matters in this world is who has the power to enforce their rules. The probability of industrial society collapsing in the hands of revolutionaries is infinitesimal because a vast majority of people would never consider destroying the society even when presented with a strong argument to do so.

Additionally, countries or groups with better technology tend to dominate those without. Hypothetically speaking, if a country like the United States were to deindustrialize and return to a primitive state, what’s going to stop other countries like Russia or China from conquering the country? If they were to do it, they would inevitably subjugate the lives of American inhabitants and reestablish some type of techno-industrial society. Similarly, even in a nuclear apocalypse scenario, groups or individuals with better technology (such as preppers or the rich) are far more likely to survive than those without said technology.

The two things that are actually guaranteed to bring down the techno-industrial society to a more primitive state are time and natural resource depletion. As Blithering Genius has said, “collapse is forever”.

Addressing Anprim Arguments

Warfare only became more prevalent after 12000 BC. Humans were (mostly) peaceful before that.

It’s probably true that humans probably fought less wars against each other before all/most of the megafauna went died off over 10k years ago. Among the large animals in North America and South America that disappeared around 13,000 years ago, there were horses, camels, ground sloths, all of the elephant species (including mastodons and mammoths), giant beavers, giant armadillos, the short-faced bear, the various saber-toothed cats, and so on. Before the megafauna died off, humans most likely would’ve been working together to hunt and kill megafauna. Once the megafauna died off, what most likely happened is that the food supply dropped, famines started to occur, and that incentivized humans to start fighting wars against each other to steal other people’s land and get food (because there were no other viable food sources, and thus no other viable choices).

Where large animals survived, they were either forest dwellers such as deer, mountain dwellers such as mountain goats and mountain sheep, and animals that had fairly recently migrated from Eurasia, such as the Bison (which were kind of aware of humans and weren’t naive, so they survived). But most of the big animals got wiped out, and the Native American population perpetrated the first great ecocide in the Americas.

If I encounter any other arguments by Primitivists, I will write rebuttals to them here.

Once gasoline becomes expensive enough, most people simply won’t be able to afford to drive unless they have EVs. Unfortunately, nuclear energy can’t power gasoline-powered vehicles. Once most of society can no longer afford to drive cars, trucks and planes, we can predict that the following will happen:

• All prices in the economy will increase drastically, as they always do when gasoline prices rise.
• Work from home will have to become the norm.
• Everybody will have to start living by more local means (people can no longer buy things from so far away), and the world will start to feel much bigger than it did around the late 20th and early 21st century.
• Bicycles and horses & carriages will become the new dominant forms of local transportation in some places.
• Electric vehicles will probably be used in wealthier places that could’ve afforded to buy EVs and have sufficient EV infrastructure.
• Gasoline-powered plane flights will no longer occur.
• Rail lines will become the only low-energy consumption method of transportation for long distance travel over land. High speed rail should be feasible, assuming that countries invest the necessary infrastructure and embrace nuclear energy.
• People will have to start using ships to travel between continents, similarly to the norm before WWII.
• Airships may also make a comeback if their technological challenges can be overcome.
• Greenhouse gas emissions will significantly decrease everywhere around the globe once the world’s entire affordable gas supply is used up, thus causing global temperatures to decelerate while still increasing.

Perhaps the world will modify the atmosphere to cool the Earth to an extent, but there are no guarantees. This also won’t decrease the ocean’s acidity, and it may not be enough to prevent the phytoplankton that the entire ocean ecosystem (and a substantial amount of humanity’s food supply) depend on.