True, but Its 100% possible for us to get knocked back into the iron age, and if that happens, there’s a very real chance we won’t be able to climb up again.
Easy to access sources of a lot of the resources needed to rebuild a modern civilization are gone, the only reason we can get to the remaining deposits is because we already have the advanced equipment to extract it. It’s entirely possible that if we get knocked back down the tech ladder, we may never climb back up again
Fall out of repair, and be unable to be repaired effectively without tools, resources, or knowledge that are no longer accessible?
Abso-fucking-lutely
Take a deep sea oil rig. How long do you think it’ll be operational without maintenance with all that sea water? After not too long you won’t be able to repair the damage without serious industrial capabilities, and that’s assuming you even know how to fix it.
Really even as relatively little as a few decades of total chaos and disorganization would be enough to make crawling back really hard. A century and more and it really could be impossible, or at least improbable - especially given that the humanity that comes out of the other end of the crisis is the same one that got us into it. So the remaining pieces of major valuable infrastructure left will probably get wrecked as the survivors fight over them
As the fiery tendrils of the celestial catastrophe engulfed the world, humanity found itself cast back to the primordial embrace of the Stone Age. The once towering achievements of civilization crumbled into dust, leaving survivors to navigate a world stripped of its technological marvels. In this new epoch, where the remnants of mankind struggled to eke out an existence, a daring expedition was conceived in the sun-scorched lands of Argentina. A ragtag crew, armed with little more than salvaged tools and an unyielding spirit, prepared to embark on a perilous voyage across the treacherous seas to scour the mysterious ice-clad wilderness of Antarctica and the riches entombed on the base therein. Their mission: to uncover forgotten secrets, salvage survival, and reclaim a semblance of the ingenuity that once defined their species. On the timeworn deck of a makeshift sailing ship, the brave explorers cast off into the unknown, setting forth on a journey that would either revive the flame of human innovation or be swallowed by the icy abyss of a desolate world.
Guy I jam with in a band is a coder. He said that ChatGPT is fucking nuts. It’s getting to the point where it will be able to point out the flaws in his code and offer fixes. Only a matter of time when we can take a photo of something and our personal Jarvis will tell us: what it is. What it does. How to use it. How to fix it. Shit is wild man.
ChatGPT is mediocre in a silo. It has no context for distributed systems and will never compete with real developers. The benefit of ChatGPT is the time it will save a good developer from writing boilerplate. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who says otherwise is bitten by the bias bug.
I have consulted chatGPT on code for Ansible, which is garbage anyway. Then I sent it my ideas, which it spotted and suggested fixes for bugs within. Then I ran it and did 5 days of work in one.
For code I do enjoy, I’ll want to keep the experience in my brain. For ansible, I’ll let chatGPT suffer the PTSD instead. But we’re already there.
I don’t get this under estimation of humanity. If 99% of humans died, the planet became 3-5 degrees warmer, and all computers literally popped out of existence, we’d recover a ton of technology within a few centuries. We’d use a strange mish-mash of old and new tech, but people would write down a ton of information from the generations that remember the before times, and using previously learned principles, new generations would reverse engineer a ton of useful things.
Radio communications would be relatively easy to remake and will almost always exist in some form. A ton of useful developments like agricultural technologies and energy technologies would be too valuable to be lost for long. Gunpowder and firearms aren’t going anywhere. All of these bedrock technologies would never totally disappear as they’re too useful.
Even in a world constantly at war, these technologies would be essential to winning those fights. If you forget how to make guns, a group that didn’t will conquer you. If you rediscover an old technology, it could give you an upper hand. If there isn’t perpetual war, the risk of it and the benefits of trade will allow even more development and rediscovery.
The biggest reason for you underestimating humans is that you forget that most of our technology isn’t physical. A boat may decay and become inoperable within a few decades, but the engineering principles that allow for the boat to function are unlikely to decay and fall out of disuse. Engines are useful. Boats are useful. Construction of high quality versions of these things won’t happen overnight, but low quality and functional versions will get built.
People, even without writing, are exceptional at remembering useful ideas. With writing, we can store information outside of our minds and write out more complicated ideas than our working memory can handle. You think everyone is going to forget how to write mathematics? Hell no. We’ll never lose written language, and that will allow us to find knowledge that no one alive remembers. The necessity of learning unknown concepts alone will ensure people would remember how modern languages are written.
The most impressive technology humans have is language, ideas, forms. Without forms, we’d never have built the most impressive physical structures and technology we have. Every advanced building began as a blueprint, and even Stonehenge required planning and communication. If every physical technology we’ve ever made disappeared at once, we’d rebuild many of those things by writing down what we remember and sharing knowledge with eachother.
TLDR: Ideas can outlive physical technology, and we’ll never stop using useful tech in any apocalyptic situation. Only the Planet of the Apes neurological disease would stop humans permanently.
It would have to be a really wild scenario where humans get stuck permanently in the iron age again. While they are fun thought experiments, I just can’t see to many ways that humans survive but our technology and books disappear from existence.
Plenty of people around who can build wood gas generators… and there’s going to be plenty of warlords who will happily employ them and provide resources.
See my other comment on ideas. The communication abilities and intelligence of humans would need to be crippled for us to die off. We’d never truely go back to the iron age, because we have non physical technology that’s difficult to destroy. We’re unlikely to forget how to make steel because it’s too useful, even if all steel is destroyed.
True, but Its 100% possible for us to get knocked back into the iron age, and if that happens, there’s a very real chance we won’t be able to climb up again.
Easy to access sources of a lot of the resources needed to rebuild a modern civilization are gone, the only reason we can get to the remaining deposits is because we already have the advanced equipment to extract it. It’s entirely possible that if we get knocked back down the tech ladder, we may never climb back up again
I think that is an extremely unlikely scenario. Do you think modern technology is just going to disappear?
Dissappear? No, of course not
Fall out of repair, and be unable to be repaired effectively without tools, resources, or knowledge that are no longer accessible?
Abso-fucking-lutely
Take a deep sea oil rig. How long do you think it’ll be operational without maintenance with all that sea water? After not too long you won’t be able to repair the damage without serious industrial capabilities, and that’s assuming you even know how to fix it.
Really even as relatively little as a few decades of total chaos and disorganization would be enough to make crawling back really hard. A century and more and it really could be impossible, or at least improbable - especially given that the humanity that comes out of the other end of the crisis is the same one that got us into it. So the remaining pieces of major valuable infrastructure left will probably get wrecked as the survivors fight over them
ChatGPT:
Guy I jam with in a band is a coder. He said that ChatGPT is fucking nuts. It’s getting to the point where it will be able to point out the flaws in his code and offer fixes. Only a matter of time when we can take a photo of something and our personal Jarvis will tell us: what it is. What it does. How to use it. How to fix it. Shit is wild man.
ChatGPT is mediocre in a silo. It has no context for distributed systems and will never compete with real developers. The benefit of ChatGPT is the time it will save a good developer from writing boilerplate. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who says otherwise is bitten by the bias bug.
I have consulted chatGPT on code for Ansible, which is garbage anyway. Then I sent it my ideas, which it spotted and suggested fixes for bugs within. Then I ran it and did 5 days of work in one.
For code I do enjoy, I’ll want to keep the experience in my brain. For ansible, I’ll let chatGPT suffer the PTSD instead. But we’re already there.
I don’t get this under estimation of humanity. If 99% of humans died, the planet became 3-5 degrees warmer, and all computers literally popped out of existence, we’d recover a ton of technology within a few centuries. We’d use a strange mish-mash of old and new tech, but people would write down a ton of information from the generations that remember the before times, and using previously learned principles, new generations would reverse engineer a ton of useful things.
Radio communications would be relatively easy to remake and will almost always exist in some form. A ton of useful developments like agricultural technologies and energy technologies would be too valuable to be lost for long. Gunpowder and firearms aren’t going anywhere. All of these bedrock technologies would never totally disappear as they’re too useful.
Even in a world constantly at war, these technologies would be essential to winning those fights. If you forget how to make guns, a group that didn’t will conquer you. If you rediscover an old technology, it could give you an upper hand. If there isn’t perpetual war, the risk of it and the benefits of trade will allow even more development and rediscovery.
The biggest reason for you underestimating humans is that you forget that most of our technology isn’t physical. A boat may decay and become inoperable within a few decades, but the engineering principles that allow for the boat to function are unlikely to decay and fall out of disuse. Engines are useful. Boats are useful. Construction of high quality versions of these things won’t happen overnight, but low quality and functional versions will get built.
People, even without writing, are exceptional at remembering useful ideas. With writing, we can store information outside of our minds and write out more complicated ideas than our working memory can handle. You think everyone is going to forget how to write mathematics? Hell no. We’ll never lose written language, and that will allow us to find knowledge that no one alive remembers. The necessity of learning unknown concepts alone will ensure people would remember how modern languages are written.
The most impressive technology humans have is language, ideas, forms. Without forms, we’d never have built the most impressive physical structures and technology we have. Every advanced building began as a blueprint, and even Stonehenge required planning and communication. If every physical technology we’ve ever made disappeared at once, we’d rebuild many of those things by writing down what we remember and sharing knowledge with eachother.
TLDR: Ideas can outlive physical technology, and we’ll never stop using useful tech in any apocalyptic situation. Only the Planet of the Apes neurological disease would stop humans permanently.
Appreciate it typing this out.
It would have to be a really wild scenario where humans get stuck permanently in the iron age again. While they are fun thought experiments, I just can’t see to many ways that humans survive but our technology and books disappear from existence.
It could. If enough smart people who make it and industrial plants are ruined, then it’s quite possible.
Plenty of people around who can build wood gas generators… and there’s going to be plenty of warlords who will happily employ them and provide resources.
See my other comment on ideas. The communication abilities and intelligence of humans would need to be crippled for us to die off. We’d never truely go back to the iron age, because we have non physical technology that’s difficult to destroy. We’re unlikely to forget how to make steel because it’s too useful, even if all steel is destroyed.