While Smallsteps was eating her night snack, she asked me what I found interesting, with the ulterior motive of asking a question she has been pondering, which is how people have evolved from being primitive to what we are today. We talked a bit about nature and nurture (with the latter being a new term for her) and intelligence and the general "you are what you eat" concept that affects our development. We also talked about survival of the fittest and how it isn't just the healthiest or strongest, but also the wisest that have the best chance of survival and of course, procreation.
But it was interesting as we were discussing the shift from tribal communities that provided for each other to farming, and no longer having to rely on each other Smallsteps found that sad. But as I started talking about swapping goods and the trouble with things not being one-for-one in value, she quickly realised that this is where money came in to play a part, and although we didn't go down that road today, it is another point of sadness for what humanity has done with it.
What we did discuss was how once we settled down, the traditional tribal roles started to evolve, but more than that, job roles exploded in number and type. A tribe always on the move had hunters, gatherers, makers, shaman, etc. But a farm starts to specialise, and then there are specialised farms that require specialised skills, and then there are the markets of trade and sellers and buyers, and the many specialised services and the list just kept on growing.
Perhaps the reason that we have been able to advance so rapidly as a species, is not because we are necessarily smarter, but because we are able to put the intelligence we have into specialised roles that complement and compound against each other. And while this has created many issues, it has also been pretty great, because it means that a massive range of skill could be leveraged and people were not automatically thrown into a very narrow set of options. Musicians and artists became careers, rather than hobbies.
But I was thinking on this and was wondering what happens now with automation taking over, because we are going to lose the majority of roles that have been created and even the creative ones, like music and art are being replaced by AI generated versions. For a time there might be some new types of roles created, but for how long before human interaction is again obsolete in those?
And this goes back to my previous (and many others) article about meaning from activity and how once we become irrelevant, we tend to spiral. Forget about the economic implications of the economy fundamentally failing as it stands, because we need to think about how we are to survive as a species when nothing we do really matters to anyone else, and maybe not even to ourselves. This world is too small and resources to few for it all just to be a playground for our whims, and even if it wasn't, I do not believe we would adjust well as individuals or society.
Like how my daughter found it sad that people no longer need to rely on each other like in tribal times, we are entering into a phase where we will be reliant on machines to keep everything going, from the back office to the front, from the first action of the supply chain to the last - it will become more and more automated and we will have no choice but to accept terms, because we as individuals can no longer fill any of the roles. And collectively, we will be even more useless.
It seems to me that this technological drive has fractured the very conditions that have kept us evolving as a species. And while the technology created in the future will keep advancing, that no longer means that we as a species are advancing it. Instead, we become a beta species, unable to support or direct itself, continually degrading until our value is the same as soil.
There are a lot of jobs that most people don't want to do, but what happens when there are no jobs anyone can do? And the problems will occur well before the final human job disappears, because the economic world we have created and the conditions we value and rely upon, are not built to withstand the pressure of even a quarter of the global population to be completely unproductive, let alone a half or more. Maybe the evolution of the human species is a circle, where we have gone from primitive to advanced, but once we become too advanced, we slide back to our primal roots.
I suspect the back nine will play much faster than the front.
Taraz
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