Every invention or discovery sped up our development. We wasted hundreds of thousands of years chasing prey and foraging for food with little to no time or energy to spare for anything else. Agriculture gave us excess time and energy to pursue other things than bare survival. Writing allowed us to better record and share ideas and knowledge. Mathematics allowed us to better understand the world. Fertilizer allowed us to boost our food production and population, which meant more brains to figure things out. Computers allowed us to almost instantly solve problems that would have taken centuries to do by hand, further speeding up our technological development. All of it has been exponential so far.
The hunter-gatherer cultures we see today actually seem to have a lot of free time. Seems like technological and cultural progress has different mechanics.
I’d say agriculture’s influence is that it’s a big incentive for people to stay in one place and develop relative dense communities, that density is what is actually speeding up progress.
Now if only our technology can speed up the biggest scientific problems of our day without politics getting in the way of progress.
Oh we’re speeding up the problems alright
Nooooo! Not like this :´(
Big AFAIK: The anatomically correct human first appeared roughly 300.000 years ago. In the next 200.000 years they almost certainly genocided all their relatives. After a couple of behavioural changes here and there they had a mutation about 50.000 years ago which changed their brains, improved their communication skills immensely and they finally and truly became what humans are today. But they still wandered around until they finally started growing shit in the ground about 13.000 years ago. But it took about 7.000 additional years for some nerd to start writing roughly 5.000 years ago.
So yeah. The milestones are happening in ever shorter intervals.
@grok draw me an exponential graph
Extrapolating from this, major milestones would happen faster and faster until 2023, where all remaining major milestones happened simultaneously with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4. For only $200/mo, you can experience this magical moment for yourself with unlimited access to our best ChatGPT models!
I wouldn’t say genocided per se. We have pretty significant percentages of non-homo sapien DNA. Which implies a decently high degree of inter-breeding.
My money is on a combination of inter-breeding leading to genetic extinction through dilution, resource competition (strained by changing environmental conditions), and of course inter-group conflict.
There’s good evidence that homo sapiens didn’t invent the shovel. That was technology almost certainly taken from another human species, which suggests a fairly integrated society. You could imagine different species of human all living together, it is certainly behaviour that has been observed in other primates so there is precedent.
Damn, imagine the levels of segregation, speciesm and genocide we would see if other human species had thrived and grown like us.
They genocided each other too.
The skeletal remains that we find of males at dig sites have vast amounts of damage to them, and we find significantly less women and girl skeletal remains. Aeons later and the heterogeneity of the Y chromosome is suspiciously low in contrast to that shown in mtDNA. That’s a lot of killing and raping
Wait, I am stupid. Does that mean that many men died, and only few procreated? And assuming the birth rates are the same, why wouldn’t there be women skeletons? After all, everyone dies, whether in a fist fight over who gets to have sex at 14 or of cancer at like 70?
Does that mean that many men died, and only few procreated?
Actively bludgeoned by another tribe and then thrown in a pit. These are young men, I should add
why wouldn’t there be women skeletons?
They are not killed, but captured and carried away as spoils of war to the conquering tribe
Technology grows exponentially. What doesn’t add up is OOP’s brainpower.
Technology grows exponentially.
There’s a compounding effect to advances in different fields. But I would posit it’s not exponential, but sigmoid.
Early in the study of a scientific field, discoveries are slow and difficult. But as the benefits of research are industrialized, you see a critical mass of research and human labor invested in applied sciences. You see a surge in development up until you hit a point of diminishing returns. Then the benefits of research diminish and the cost of maintaining the libraries of information and education grow beyond the perceived benefit of further academic work. Investments slow and labor product diminishes over time. Existing infrastructure cements itself as the norm and improvements become more expensive to impose. Finally, the advances in technology plateau for a period of time.
Eventually, you hit on another breakthrough and there’s a new surge in investment and novel infrastructure, until that well of new useful information is exhausted.
Periods of rapid and transformative growth may look meager and unimpressive in hindsight simply because you are standing on the shoulders of giants. But can anyone seriously argue that the steam engine (17th century) was less significant than the nuclear power plant (20th century), when a nuclear power plant has - at its core - a very high efficiency steam engine? We don’t seem to recognize 300 years of internal combustion as a period of relative technological stagnation.
Yup, it turns out it’s a lot easier to build on something than create something from scratch.
While that may be true for individual technologies; in aggregate across all technologies.
Technical growth seems exponential; maybe sometime in the future technical advancement itself will resemble the ‘S’ curve; but for now we are still growing our technical prowess extremely quickly.
Progress is exponential, anon.
That first spark is much harder to produce than the fire that follows.
Agriculture is a Hell of a drug.
Also cooking before you eat matters a lot
We did that to quite s large degree even before we were modern humans, 2-400kya
