Fascinating insight with the chimpanzee. I believe this connects to the argument that is sometimes made: an ASI takeover is unlikely because how widely distributed the physical levers of power are in the real world. Ok… but chimpanzees don’t have access to massively scaleable industrial weapon technology, such as nuclear, biological etc. They don’t live in an increasingly electronically connected world. They don’t rely on an electricity grid, among others, for their many daily needs. Also they live in groups or troops—not tribes, but that was more for the pedantic kick of it.
Thinking back on it: that was actually an interesting slip of the tongue with the chimp tribe vs. troop. Tribes are highly, highly human social structures. What the slip of the tongue reveals is that pop culture has generally assimilated them with less sophisticated, lower IQ, more primitive people. Hence we now find our chimps in a tribe. But if you think about it, there is a specific group, at the heart of our Western, sophisticated, industrial and capitalist world, that distinguishes itself through two essential features: i) it is high IQ, and ii) it is unique among the groups of that world in precisely that it has retained much of its ancient tribal structure as a form of social organisation.
Fascinating insight with the chimpanzee. I believe this connects to the argument that is sometimes made: an ASI takeover is unlikely because how widely distributed the physical levers of power are in the real world. Ok… but chimpanzees don’t have access to massively scaleable industrial weapon technology, such as nuclear, biological etc. They don’t live in an increasingly electronically connected world. They don’t rely on an electricity grid, among others, for their many daily needs. Also they live in groups or troops—not tribes, but that was more for the pedantic kick of it.
Thinking back on it: that was actually an interesting slip of the tongue with the chimp tribe vs. troop. Tribes are highly, highly human social structures. What the slip of the tongue reveals is that pop culture has generally assimilated them with less sophisticated, lower IQ, more primitive people. Hence we now find our chimps in a tribe. But if you think about it, there is a specific group, at the heart of our Western, sophisticated, industrial and capitalist world, that distinguishes itself through two essential features: i) it is high IQ, and ii) it is unique among the groups of that world in precisely that it has retained much of its ancient tribal structure as a form of social organisation.