----- Original Message -----
From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2000 1:40 AM
Subject: Re: High Technology of the Past
> "Emlyn" <emlyn@one.net.au> writes:
>
> > > >Hunter gatherers apparently spent about 2 hours a day in work-like
> > (staying
> > > >alive related) activity, and from there it's gone downhill
> > >
> > > Emlyn, this is *ridiculous*.
> >
> > OK, I've got a book in front of me... "Macrosociology" (3rd ed), Stephen
K
> > Sanderson, 1995. Here's an OCRd passage (I think I've caught all the
> > boo-boos), beginning page 508:
>
>
> To quote from a review of Robert Wright, Non-Zero: The Logic of Human
> Destiny by J. Bradford DeLong
> http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/nonzero.html
>
> p. 73: "The seminal calculations of the !Kung workday--two
> or three hours, then party time--have been put to skeptical
> scrutiny and found wanting. The calculators forgot to include
> time spent processing the food, making spears, and so on. It
> now appears that these hunter-gatherers, at least, work
> roughly as hard as horticulturalists."
>
> I'm not sure the quote is from the reviewer or the book, but I think
> the lesson is clear: we should be wary of widely spread memes that fit
> in well with what seems to be likely but are not firmly supported. I
> found a lot of references to a short hunter-gatherer workday among
> civilisation-critical websites, but rather few references to any
> primary papers and a lot of hints that they were happily quoting each
> other to support their views.
>
> I looked through my copy of _Strategies for Survival_ by Michael
> A. Jochim, but I couldn't quite figure out how to convert his tables
> into workdays for the !Kung and other hunter-gatherers. My guess is
> that a more likely number than 2 hours is 4-5 hours per day, but that
> likely does not take for example transports into account (which can be
> a huge timewaster). There seems to be a strong increase in workday
> when you go from hunting to farming though.
>
2 hours does seem like very little; they must do something in all that
excess time, anyway.
One point about the !Kung is that they are modern day hunter gatherers, in a
world generally no longer suitable for the practice. The land they are on is
available because no-one else wants it; compared to the average hunter
gatherer of the past, they probably live a marginal and much more difficult
existence.
I'm not advocating the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, however! Not unless I can
take a gameboy... and my notebook... and all my other stuff with me. No,
stuff it.
This thread has merely been there to question the assumption that technology
has historically absolutely benefitted the peoples who have adopted it. This
situation is turning around today, I think, in the west, but that's an
anomaly (which we need to continue and spread).Maybe the ancient romans had
a similar situation? I have no idea.
Note of course that people's relative conditions were always improved by
technology (comparing to what it would have been like without it), the key
ingredient being population pressure; as population grew, you either ramped
up your tech, or died. No doubt from this viewpoint, the average individual
has always been assisted by rising tech, because that individual would have
a very low probability of existing at all without it (especially without
past rises in population which made that individual's current environment
possible).
I like to think that this is quite in keeping with transhumanism. Humans
have been in a race for survival and expansion over past millenia, and our
conditions seem generally to have deteriorated with growing numbers. The
hope is that we may finally be (or soon be) on top of our technology to a
point where it can do more than keep ever more of us alive in worse overall
circumstances; maybe it can start to raise absolute standards, in aggregate.
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