Some one else already commented on how human intelligence gave us a decisive strategic advantage over our natural predators and many environmental threats. I think this cartoon is my mental shorthand for that transition. The timescale is on the order of 10k-100k years, given human intelligence starting from the ancestral environment.
Empires and nations, in turn, conquered the world by taking it away from city-states and similarly smaller entities in ~1k-10k years. The continued existence of Singapore and the Sentinel Islanders doesn’t change the fact that a modern large nation could wipe them out in a handful of years, at most, if we really wanted to. We don’t because doing so is not useful, but the power exists.
Modern corporations don’t want to control the whole world. Like Fnargl, that’s not what they’re pointed at. But it only took a few decades for Walmart to displace a huge swath of the formerly-much-more-local retail market, and even fewer decades for Amazon to repeat a similar feat online, each starting from a good set of ideas and a much smaller resource base than even the smallest nations. And while corporations are militarily weak, they have more than enough economic power to shape the laws of at least some of the nations that host them in ways that let them accumulate more power over time.
So when I look at history, I see a series of major displacements of older systems by newer ones, on faster and faster timescales, using smaller and smaller fractions of our total resource base, all driven by our accumulation of better ideas and using those ideas to accumulate wealth and power. All of this has been done with brains no smarter, natively, than what we had 10k years ago—there hasn’t been time for biological evolution to do much, there. So why should that pattern suddenly stop being true when we introduce a new kind of entity with even better ideas than the best strategies humans have ever come up with? Especially when human minds have already demonstrated a long list of physically-possible scenarios that might, if enacted, kill everyone in a short span of time, or at least disrupt us enough to buy time to mop up the survivors?
Some one else already commented on how human intelligence gave us a decisive strategic advantage over our natural predators and many environmental threats. I think this cartoon is my mental shorthand for that transition. The timescale is on the order of 10k-100k years, given human intelligence starting from the ancestral environment.
Empires and nations, in turn, conquered the world by taking it away from city-states and similarly smaller entities in ~1k-10k years. The continued existence of Singapore and the Sentinel Islanders doesn’t change the fact that a modern large nation could wipe them out in a handful of years, at most, if we really wanted to. We don’t because doing so is not useful, but the power exists.
Modern corporations don’t want to control the whole world. Like Fnargl, that’s not what they’re pointed at. But it only took a few decades for Walmart to displace a huge swath of the formerly-much-more-local retail market, and even fewer decades for Amazon to repeat a similar feat online, each starting from a good set of ideas and a much smaller resource base than even the smallest nations. And while corporations are militarily weak, they have more than enough economic power to shape the laws of at least some of the nations that host them in ways that let them accumulate more power over time.
So when I look at history, I see a series of major displacements of older systems by newer ones, on faster and faster timescales, using smaller and smaller fractions of our total resource base, all driven by our accumulation of better ideas and using those ideas to accumulate wealth and power. All of this has been done with brains no smarter, natively, than what we had 10k years ago—there hasn’t been time for biological evolution to do much, there. So why should that pattern suddenly stop being true when we introduce a new kind of entity with even better ideas than the best strategies humans have ever come up with? Especially when human minds have already demonstrated a long list of physically-possible scenarios that might, if enacted, kill everyone in a short span of time, or at least disrupt us enough to buy time to mop up the survivors?