What if technology is our weakness?
Personally I think human technological expansion is a temporary aberation of nature. I think in the long term we'd do best to approximate the advice of the late Georgia Guidestones and allow the human population to reduce to a reasonable equilibrium point such as for example the prescribed (and arbitrary) 500 million and live more like other biological organisms of the Earth planet. What do you think and why? To be clear this is just an abstract philosophical discussion about the ideal way for humans to persist as a species in the natural world on their only available planet. In no way is misfortune wished to individuals of the human species all of whom were born into the world called Earth without their informed consent.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 35.1 ms ] threadIn any case, to stand here, in history, at this absolute climax of wealth inequality, government capture, and feudal existence being created and to surmise that "technology" is the problem and not "money" or just "distribution of new wealth" even is absolutely beyond me.
"In no way is misfortune wished." Well, whether you're hinting that your abstract philosophy demands these people be put to death or not, you can spare yourself the altar, these people already live with misfortune that I don't think someone with your apparent level of fortune can even properly calculate.
You think money, rather than technology? I think the problem is humans. And no, fewer of them won't fix them.
Also, the rarity of farming in the animal kingdom makes me worried about the sustainability even of multi-species domestication. A few ants cultivate trees or fungi or aphids, but they seem to specialize in just domesticating just one species at a time. This is telling us something important: I suspect domesticating too many species leads to vulnerabilities to so many parasites/bacteria/viruses/pests that pestilence and famine risk will eventually outweigh any benefits of domestication. If they didn't, ants would be farming lots of species!
In the real long term, then, humans will get one (or zero) domesticated species, and maybe some electricity if we can make self-sustaining solar power operations using common elements like aluminum and silicon from dirt, or sodium, chlorine, oxygen, and hydrogen from water, and that'll be it for technology, Everything else will be foraged animals and plants, in an ecosystem that keeps our population in check through predation.
As for the transition, it's going to suck. And I don't trust any governing body to "ramp down" the population smoothly without committing some major atrocities.
Anyway, the Georgia Guidestones are just one weirdo's hot takes. They vary from blandly unobjectionable ("avoid petty laws and useless officials"? yeah nobody supports "useless" and "petty" things) to dubious ("rule passion — faith — tradition"? I guess passion's fine, but faith and tradition lead a person in weird directions) to outright eugenicist ("guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity").
This is not how other biological organisms work. They are currently in equilibrium because when they aren't they wipe almost everything else out and then create a new equilibrium or collapse the population. Humans are following in this grand tradition of nature. It is destructive tradition and I think we should break with nature on this point.
There is a decent chance that industrial civilization is so disruptive it brings about its own destruction. We should be taking steps to not speed run our own extinction and the extinction of a good chunk of complex life on this planet, but it does not seem that at the present moment that we are willing to do what is necessary.
Still, there's a lot of cool technology out there, and a lot of room to use it better.