From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 10:48:16 MDT
From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [mailto:sentience@pobox.com]
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
> > 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.
Robert Wright would say that agriculture made it radically more likely
that humans would follow this path, by increasing the information
density of human societies. In effect you can think of each human
society as a meta-brain. The agricultural meta-brains had more
members, more members with leisure time, and low latency between them.
Agricultural societies had greater collective intelligence than hunter
gatherer societies.
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