From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 04:19:58 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Jared Diamond:
>
>>"Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial
>>stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose
>>between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose
>>the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny."
>
> It also set us on the path towards culture, superhuman intelligence and
> the stars. While I am no fan of technological determinism, to some
> extent the "choice" of farming leads to a competitive situation of
> expanding population, brainpower and civilization that rewards expanding
> our ecological niche and likely transforming our species.
Just because humanity *did in fact* follow the path of agriculture to
science, this doesn't mean that humanity *must* have followed this path.
Now it seems to me there's a very strong argument that even if a band of
hunter-gatherers invents literacy and some kind of social process with
Bayes-structure (science is one example), agriculture would soon follow
since it seems like a very obvious technology. Nonetheless, agriculture
is not really necessary in the sense that hunter-gatherers who were
somehow absolutely forbidden from developing agriculture might have gotten
quite a long distance, albeit more slowly, before they finally reached a
bottleneck where they could go no farther without only a few people
creating the food that everyone else eats.
So while agriculture was a mistake that did in fact create powerful
benefits, we must ask whether those benefits could have been obtained
without the mistake. In terms of correlations the answer is no; it would
have been extremely difficult to set up a case where one event happened
but not the other. Causally the answer may be yes; the mistake may be
inexorably correlated but not really *necessary*.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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