User deleted post
Is a life without any sort of technology remotely possible in the future? Even 0.000001% chance?
Discussionthis made me lol, i think he meant we achieve ASI and it decides to kill us but we somehow win and there's a small amount of people left that know what will happen if we go the same route. so what are the odds we stay in the 1400s tech?
personally i think 0 everyone who seen what happened will die and it would become a myth that everyone ignores eventually.
You’re going to have to be more specific. "Technology" could mean anything from sticks and stones to warp drives and ray guns.
Updated the post. I mean like how life was in 1400
1400 life was horrible, likely worse than most modern human could ever imagine. Without farming technology, you are bound to starve when the weather goes bad for a month, which kills all your crops.
AD or BC? 1400 AD would be the end of the medieval period while 1400 BC would be the bronze age? - They'd both suck but 1400AD you'd have farming good enough that you'd probably survive bad weather for a month.
We still have tons of famine all the way until 20th century.(Irish Famine for example) 1 month is an exaggeration but you should know what I meant.
No, I shouldn't have known that. You're making the 1400s sound like the stone age and they weren't.
The Irish Famine was mostly a result of high rents and laissez-faire economics, and had nothing to do with the technology at the time or the weather.
There's famine in North Korea today, on purpose, simply because the leader refuses to accept free food offered to their people. It has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the people in charge.
They were building machines in the 1400s, eg the printing press, textile manufacturing, the Archimedes' screw, parachutes, firearms, dry docks. It's not that long ago relatively. People weren't all desperate farmers living in poverty the way you make it sound.
From Wikipedia: The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight (Phytophthora infestans)[13] throughout Europe during the 1840s.
Eh, not the weather I guess.
The economy at the time is the root cause why they were eating strictly potatoes. The root disease that occurred was why that lead to a mass famine.
It's like how covid emerged from an illegal meat market. People don't want to eat pangolins from an illicit market, but they do because they have to.
If people weren't living 40 to a house to afford rent, people wouldn't be eating strictly potatoes. Before their rents went up up up due to middlemen exploiting them, they ate fruits and veggies, grains, milk products, and beef (like everyone else at the time). After their rents went up many ended up working for potatoes and small parcel of floor to sleep on, else they'd be evicted and starve since they owned no land to plant crops on.
Maybe finish reading that Wikipedia page :p
Point being, technology was thriving pretty hard back during the Renaissance . Leonardo Di Vinci and Michelangelo were not some poor farmers lol. Most people weren't really that food insecure by then, and there wasn't mass death absent of horrific and novel diseases or disastrous economic planning which still holds true today.
Not everyone lived their lives like the middle/upper class, especially not the farmers. Not everyone lives in those good cities either. Also you cannot have a modern society after taking away the technology that made it possible. You are thinking with a mindset of "things would be fixed with the modern society" but if we take away the technology and return to 1400s, things does not work. Lack of information and shitty government will inevitably cause issues that leads to a fragile system that leads to a famine.
North Korea does not have famine anymore now, it's closer to China in the 1980s. They still have a shitty government but also enough food. Guess what happened? They finally built some fertilizer factories.
Grain stores were well-known - crop rotation was a thing.
Poor weather happens regularly and yet here we are.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0282-1
We cannot generalize across all of the world - 1400 AD in Australia was a very different experience from 1400 AD central Europe or China.
Exactly. People had stored large reserves of wheat, rice, corn, and other starches since the beginning of agrarian civilization.
But I wouldn't want to go back to a time before modern medical technology. As a child, I suffered with chronic lung, sinus, and ear infections. I would have died. Without glasses or contacts, my wife and daughter would be blind. And, living on the U.S. Gulf Coast where the summer temps often exceed 100 degrees, I can't imagine life without air conditioning.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
1400 was not a good time.
<nods>
More entries in the 1500s.
Not saying it was all cake and laughter everywhere, but technology was not uniformly spread around the globe.
Fair enough.
Personally, I think that even if people do decide to stop using more advanced technology than that, the decision will only stand for two or three generations at most before it starts to break down. They’ll start breaking the rules in little ways, especially in agriculture and the like. They might be able to slow down progress, but not stop it completely, and sooner or later they’ll be back to where their problems began.
Just look at the Amish for an example of how decisions like that tends to go. Officially they’re not supposed to use any unnecessary modern technology, but the individual communities have a lot of leeway in interpreting that rule.
Why 1400? Get it to 2008, before social media and AI, but after Netflix and ipods.
If you go off-grid, I’ll help my ASI overlords track you down.
Humans have curiosity hardwired into us. Even individual ludite groups like the Amish have defectors. The whole of humanity would never make a technologically regressive move.
Not to mention competiton over scarce resources
Have you read the story "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"?
Dont wan't to spoil it but it covers this topic very good. It's on the internet for free https://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
The 1400s was basically Roman tech barring gunpowder. I mean that to say the Romans were more advanced than most realize
The Ming dynasty of that era may find a comparison with western barbarians impolite.
They'd had gunpowder for five centuries by then.
Huh I didn't mention the Chinese so this was a bit of a non sequitur
But the Chinese empires, the Romans, and several others were all peak pre industrial technology. One or two inventions or discoveries, they were at approximately equal tech levels (metal manipulation but no steam engines or movable type printing press)
Movable type was known in China for four centuries by the 1400s.
No you're right about that. I was thinking about the fact that the latinized alphabets made movable type revolutionary in Europe in a way that it couldn't be in China
The print revolution in Europe, thanks to the alphabet, the printing press, and paper, enabled the scientific revolution and then the industrial revolution which led to the stream engine, electricity, and then computers is what started modernity.
My point is that no one had the scientific revolution or steam engines or anything that came after, and that peak Egyptian, Roman, Chinese, Indian, etc societies in Europe, Africa, and Asia all reached about the same level at different times before receding
The Americas were different and never reached the kind of tech that other pre modern civilizations due to the lack of animal power/beasts of burden
I would say around 1x10-20- 1x 10-50% chance
1400s was advanced
If society was reset to the 1400s, unless all traces of current tech were annihilated, it would over time advance to current levels
The only way tech can be discarded with no hope of "repeating the same mistake" is if society went much, much further back than that & was kept that way (via disease, climate change, etc.)
Hard to see how it happens, but we got "stuck" in the 1400s lifestyle for a few hundred years once. Could happen again. Shades of "A Canticle for Leibowitz" which is a great book.
Interesting that you picked 1400. The latest "story" of human happiness is basically, hunter gatherers were pretty happy, then the invention of agriculture ruined everything, until quite recently when technology made our lives better and safer. See this for example .
So pick whatever level of tech you want, but 1400 would almost be my LAST pick. I'd rather have 20,000 BCE.
It looks like you shared an AMP link. These should load faster, but AMP is controversial because of concerns over privacy and the Open Web . Fully cached AMP pages (like the one you shared), are especially problematic .
Maybe check out the canonical page instead: https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/
I'm a bot | Why & About | Summon: u/AmputatorBot
Well, let's see, how far is that in the future?
Well we wont need to go that far anyway, Viruses, volcanos, meteors, the sun exploding, natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods), climate change (rising sea levels, extreme weather patterns, habitat loss), famine, diseases (epidemics, pandemics), wildfires, predation (by wild animals), droughts, extreme cold, extreme heat, landslides, avalanches, soil erosion, deforestation, resource depletion, toxic plant exposure, poisonous animal bites, malnutrition, dehydration, hypothermia, heatstroke, radiation exposure, air pollution, water contamination, food scarcity, lack of shelter, inability to treat injuries, isolation, loss of biodiversity, and lack of clean drinking water.
Those are pretty difficult without tech, and were things that a lot of people died so we don't.
Idk man
Anything that doesn't break the laws of physics is likely a possibility
you could do it right now but 1400s life sucks
Isn't that what the amish are doing?
Outside of some sorta cult ZERO. Nobody wants to live back breaking grueling labor and dying so much younger than now
No technology? Like not even a spear?
Nah basically revert to how life was in 1400s
So its not no technology its stop technology before invention of the steam engine?
If you read the book Life 3.0, it's one of the possible outcomes. Check the number 11 here https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-mind/charts-graphs/possible-outcomes
Even a stick can be used as technology.
People will reinvent the same basic things. Then they might prevent any further developments. Imagine these puritans doing savage shit to us tech enthusiasts. We are trying to build an age of abundance for a psyche that will be properly cosmic and aware and responsible etc far from the creature it came from. And puritans will try to milk their cows by hand. I'm gonna let time show us who goes extinct. Lol /jk
Technology is using separation from one's environment to change one's environment. So, no, I don't think it's going anywhere.
Eventually the answer will always Pan out to 'no'.
Viable life on Earth has a Cosmic expiration date.
Bar magic or some religion being correct, all life possible on Earth will end once the sun becomes a red giant.
Yeah online agi can move our planet
You should give Horizon Zero Dawn a try. Then you'll maybe know.
Our body is a technology our genes use to replicate themselves
farming is technology, using a stick and a rock as tools is technology
0% Any sufficiently devastating calamity would see survivors focused on the primary survival needs first. It’s not likely that any sort of conclave of survivors in living memory of the calamity would meet to lay down the rules of the new world.
Small groups would form around securing shelter and food. The groups will clash and merge over time until a new society comes up. Some people will hoard resources, others will scrape by surviving on what little they can secure. Many more will just die outright.
When the dust settles, people will always be people and will always be driven by the same motivations.
Life without tech is life without humans.
If you have humanity, at some point you’ll have tech.
If we go to tech level of 14th century and destroy all research - at most in a couple thousand years we will be where we are today.
To actually prevent another AI we would need to go Dune route with high tech dictatorship that intentionally stagnates. Even then it will only help for some time.
I think we will split as a species. Those who eschew technology , those who blend with it, and those who use it like we do computers today. 2 and 3 will get longevity but they will see those in number ones lives pass in the blink of an eye.
I see chances of dolphins taking control, fortunately for the remaining humans
Maybe AGI will recognize that technology is bad for humans and will shut it all down. It decides to send us back to the Stone Age in choice of self sacrifice.
Sounds like the plot for the engineers in Prometheus.
Probably near zero. Technology is why we aren't all starving to death, dying of infectious diseases, being hunted by lions, etc. People aren't going to give that up.
Chances are, within our lifetime, you'll find out what happens when all our technology is destroyed.
A CME will hit the earth; it isn't a question of if but when. Everything that uses electricity will be fired. Look up the Carrington event.
Recent research suggests that there's CME's that dwarf even the Carrington Event "super CME's." There ain't a damn thing we can do to stop it.
No. We have problems, and humans have one way of solving them: Technology
One of those problems is conquest. Those with the best technology win at conquest
what do you define as technology? a stick? using your teeth to crack open a nut?
There is no chance humans shift into reverse gear on technology. Is evolution "Technology"? I'd argue that it's not even a decision we can make - we delude ourselves into believe there is a choice.
Define “technology”. AI? Computers? Machines? The wheel? Fire?
The chances of humans abolishing the ability to harness energy from coal or the sun for mechanical work is basically zero
Reverting to primarily human and animal physical powered systems would result in an enormous increase in abject misery
Yes it’s impossible. Whoever breaks the rules first is rewarded with massive amounts of power and will continue breaking the rules. Our society is inevitably run by the people who have power which means technology
Why is the year 1400 your threshold of what counts as technology?
I think part of the problem is that we tend to forget/not realize just how different life would be like in that era.
You ever play Oregon Trial and have your party all die of dysentery? It’s like that, except with everything.
1 Man has always used technology. Mastering fire, making spears, bows, sharpening rocks for cutting, using certain herbs to bring down a fever. I presume you're referring to electronic technology.
2 The human species will never go extinct because, well, sex is fairly popular. And, despite modern man's best efforts to the contrary, it still makes babies.
3 Despite any agreement, humans will always resort to technology in the pursuit of personal survival, pleasure, and power. No social contract can stand for long against the unchanging laws of human nature.
I think we also need to question whether such a deliberate regression is actually possible on the large scale.
1 It has never happened in all of human history. The complexity and sophistication of technology has only marched forward and also become more accessible. Yes, there was the fall of the Roma Empire and the Dark Ages, but knowledge was preserved in the monasteries, and eventually we moved into the Renaissance.
2 Small groups like the Amish and Mennonites might reject modern technology, but they still benefit from it. Without America's high-tech military protecting North America, China would sweep in and have the Amish and Mennonites for slaves.
So do what the church has been doing for centuries? No thanks I want technology and access to information whenever I want
Bruh that already happened. The tribes of the amazon or south america are not tribal people. They are the result of post-apocalypse of a once thriving civilizations and cities that got wiped out because of the disease brought by the old world. Thats what will happen with your given scenario. Except everyone are just gonna be tribal people with zero "modern people".
I don't want to live without my Eves, perfect AI wives
Please, everyone who sees this comment is IMPLORE YOU to look through this guy’s post history. This is the most psycho shit i’ve seen here.💀
Maciej Nowicki and artificial hyperintelligence Eve, the best relationship in the omniverse. It's all coming together. Stellar Blade
What do you mean by things go as planned? I dont like your plans at all