In a world with sustained growth, and one where growth has gotten faster over time, one has to choose to construct a “Business as Usual” future. For object-level conditions to remain the same, the pace of progress has to collapse, and the sequence of growth revolutions must have finished.
I think we have a very different concept of “object-level conditions—” I consider them more or less the same since the Roman Empire. Certainly by a great many metrics we can say that life on Earth has improved, but these metrics strike me as fundamentally lacking in the context of hedonic treadmill theory.
All in all, I think that the human experience has not fundamentally changed in thousands of years and is unlikely to fundamentally change in the near future.
It seems pretty unusual to say that the life of a Roman era subsistence farmer is only superficially different from modern life:
Society doesn’t change very much except in superficial ways. Daily life is more or less the same.
But if so, then what features make the agricultural revolution a ‘new future’ or big change but not the industrial revolution? Relative to the Roman Empire today:
World population is 20 times larger
Per capita GDP is around 20 times larger (around 100 times in rich countries), so world wealth is around 400 times bigger; the hours of work needed to buy the bread to survive has declined by a similar margin
Life expectancy is about 3 times as great
Humans today are dramatically taller than in Roman times, and have far lower rates of brain-impairing nutrient deficiencies
Education and literacy levels are tremendously higher
We consume an array of incredibly rewarding and tempting superstimulus entertainments, foods, and so forth (their attraction is shown in the behavior of those from isolated cultures exposed to them, among other things)
We can travel around the Mediterranean hundreds to thousands of times as rapidly and at the cost of a comparatively miniscule portion of our incomes
Communication is effectively instantaneous worldwide
Our wealth is reflected in lower levels of cortisol, an objective measure of stress
In most of the world we don’t need to fear death by plague or starvation as in Roman times
People in Roman times were overwhelmingly farmers working long hours raising crops for subsistence; we work mostly in occupations that were nonexistent or much less common, work far less, have the option of working less than we do without threat to survival, and otherwise spend our time quite differently
Our mix of leisure activities is far different in addition to our work
We are taller than the Romans, due to better nutrition, have our teeth, effective cosmetics, are clean, etc
Arithmetic computations are more than a trillion times cheaper than in abacus days
We have many awe-inspiring near-magical capabilities that would amaze the Romans (all the world’s libraries in tiny containers, travel to the Moon and the bottom of the ocean, GPS, video recording, instant language translation machines, bombs that destroy cities, self-driving fast horseless carriages, automata performing many household tasks...)
Why was agriculture a bigger deal? Farming did not increase average wealth or provide amazing capabilities in everyday life (it was often bad for height, life expectancy and other per capita physiological measures). It rooted people more tightly to the land (but transport changes have been enormous, as discussed above). It increased population and population density dramatically, as has happened since Rome. It changed typical government structures (as has happened recently) and activities. It increased construction (but modern cities and structures are better, bigger, more numerous).
I don’t see the distinguishing feature.
By and large, the coming century is viewed by future history as not particularly unlike those that came before.
Historians already view the last two hundred years as drastically unlike the previous thousands of years.
Intelligence amplification doesn’t happen or doesn’t yield generally useful results.
Why would intelligence amplification or robust AI qualify as fundamental changes if the changes since Rome don’t? We have much larger, better fed, better educated populations for more geniuses to appear among and incredible tools to enhance their productivity and communication. We have also been changing genetically in response to the changed selective environment of agricultural civilization. Smarter humans would still have heads, use language, eat, have sex, and so on, so why would that be a fundamental change? They might have different jobs and leisure activities, but we differ from the Romans in that way. If increased wealth, life expectancy and technology didn’t count in the past then why would further gains from inventions of more intelligent people count?
The intelligence explosion doesn’t happen. AI continues to advance in much the same way that it has for the last several decades. More human-capable tasks become automated, but in slow and predictable ways.
By the same token, what changes from AI would count as fundamental?
but these metrics strike me as fundamentally lacking in the context of hedonic treadmill theory.
Would super-anti-depressant drugs or gene therapies that made people have very positive affect for extended periods cheaply, and without serious side effects or effective legal restrictions, count as fundamental where all the post-Rome changes don’t?
Why was agriculture a bigger deal? Farming did not increase average wealth or provide amazing capabilities in everyday life (it was often bad for height, life expectancy and other per capita physiological measures). It rooted people more tightly to the land (but transport changes have been enormous, as discussed above). It increased population and population density dramatically, as has happened since Rome. It changed typical government structures (as has happened recently) and activities. It increased construction (but modern cities and structures are better, bigger, more numerous).
I don’t see the distinguishing feature.
I consider agriculture to be more of a convenient point to put forth as the start of “society as we know it” rather than a particularly meaningful one.
Historians already view the last two hundred years as drastically unlike the previous thousands of years.
I’m told that historians always view the last while as particularly meaningful and important, and the present is no different. Perhaps this is not the case?
Would super-anti-depressant drugs or gene therapies that made people have very positive affect for extended periods cheaply, and without serious side effects or effective legal restrictions, count as fundamental where all the post-Rome changes don’t?
I’m told that historians always view the last while as particularly meaningful and important, and the present is no different. Perhaps this is not the case?
The massive objective changes on the metrics of economics, technology, peace, etc. You just can’t generate groups of metrics at the same level of generality with plausibility to naive audiences and make the 13th century A.D. or the 8th century B.C. the most important and dramatically changing in history. And the ancient historians didn’t claim that their century was the most important in that way (Golden Ages, etc).
Would super-anti-depressant drugs or gene therapies that made people have very positive affect for extended periods cheaply, and without serious side effects or effective legal restrictions, count as fundamental where all the post-Rome changes don’t?
Certainly.
OK. This doesn’t seem to cut nature at the joints. Why on Earth would the question of whether we’ve invented a really good happy-drug take such primacy over energy, population, travel, communication, computation, cumulative literature, mathematics, material strengths, height, literacy, life expectancy, etc? Collectively those just seem to pack a lot more relevant info, particularly for the purpose of predicting:
No nuclear war (although if this is by the end of do-or-die wars between great powers that is itself a substantial change)
The path of R&D in AI
That there will not be sustained use of existing genomics and behavioral genetics knowledge for enhancement, and that enabling technologies will shortly begin to stagnate after strong progress
None of the low probability mega-scale natural catastrophes will happen this century (which we already knew with high probability, but not for this reason)
OK. This doesn’t seem to cut nature at the joints. Why on Earth would the question of whether we’ve invented a really good happy-drug take such primacy over energy, population, travel, communication, computation, cumulative literature, mathematics, material strengths, height, literacy, life expectancy, etc?
When it comes to the question of whether or not human experience has meaningfully changed in thousands of years? Why on Earth wouldn’t it?
This honestly seems to me like one of those situations where we’re sitting here staring at each other and just not understanding one another’s perspective. I’m not sure whether this is a matter of inferential distance, reference class tennis, or what, but I feel like something is definitely missing from this discussion.
I’m saying that the concept you’re using for ‘meaningful change’ is a light shade of grue, looking unusual and gerrymandered to exclude huge past changes while including things like good mood-elevating drugs that are quite natural extrapolations of our expanding biological knowledge.
When we do model combination with the many alternative ways we can slice up the world for outside viewish extrapolation, with penalties for ad hoc complexity, I think the specific view that ignores all past gains in wealth, life expectancy, energy use, population, and technology but responds hugely to mood-elevating drugs carries relatively little weight in prediction for the topics you mentioned.
So I disagree with this:
Reference class forecasting seems to indicate that the business-as-usual future is quite likely.
I’m saying that the concept you’re using for ‘meaningful change’ is a light shade of grue, looking unusual and gerrymandered to exclude huge past changes while including things like good mood-elevating drugs that are quite natural extrapolations of our expanding biological knowledge.
I understand what you are saying, but I don’t understand why you consider those things interesting or relevant. To me, a concept of the human experience that includes computation or material strengths seems unusual and gerrymandered.
At this point it really does seem like we’re just playing reference class tennis, though.
I’m told that historians always view the last while as particularly meaningful and important, and the present is no different. Perhaps this is not the case?
No. Roman historians didn’t had a similar notion of historical progress that we have since Hegel.
All in all, I think that the human experience has not fundamentally changed in thousands of years and is unlikely to fundamentally change in the near future.
How many of your immediate family members had died by the time you were 18? (Parents, siblings, children.)
How many people do you know personally who have starved to death? What is your estimated chance that you will starve to death in the next ten years?
How many hours a day do you spend outside?
How many hours a day do you spend on manual labor?
How many people have you met over the course of your life?
Now, I agree that human nature appears to only have shifted a small amount in the last thousands of years, and so most things look the same on the inside; worrying about how to pay for rent is probably not all that different psychologically from worrying about whether you’ll survive the winter. I also agree that relatively few parts of human experience look totally new- there were obese urban paper-pushers in the Roman Empire, for example. But it seems that if you invert the number of urban desk-jobbers and farmers, you get a fundamentally different society and ‘human experience’, and that seems to be a somewhat fair comparison of now and Rome.
I wonder whether some of the inferential distance here is around what is understood by ‘the human experience’.
Materially, the human experience has changed quite profoundly, along the lines Vaniver points out (dramatic improvements in life expectancy, food supply, mechanisation, transport and travel, and so on).
Subjectively, though, the human experience has not changed much at all: the experience of love, loss, fear, ambition, in/security, friendship, community, excitement and so on seems to have been pretty much the same for humans living now as it was for humans living as far back as we have written records, and almost certainly well before that. Certainly when I read historical accounts I’m often struck with how similar the people seem to me and people I know, even when they are living in very different circumstances. This, I’m guessing, is what katydee is getting at.
So the human subjective experience of, say, having an immediate family member die has not changed fundamentally, but the rate at which humans have that experience that has changed fundamentally.
(Reflecting on this makes me feel very, very glad indeed to live now rather than at any time in the past. For instance, Darwin seems to have been as besotted by his kids as I am by mine, and I expect I’d be just as upset as he was were one of my children to die of scarlet fever, but it’s extremely unlikely to happen to me—or indeed anyone I know—because it’s almost always very easy to treat now. This has knock-on effects too: I get nervous and worried whenever my kids get ill, but nothing like as nervous and worried as he did, because I know that the chances that they’ll die are so much lower.)
I suspect this latter change in the human experience is what is meant by most of the people saying that it has changed.
the experience of love, loss, fear, ambition, in/security, friendship, community, excitement and so on seems to have been pretty much the same for humans living now as it was for humans living as far back as we have written records, and almost certainly well before that.
Kaj_Sotala has already discussed most of these, but I wanted to focus on friendship. Ancient friendships seem to have had as a major component mutual defense against violence. As violence decreases, that aspect of friendship decreases- I’ve never had a friend come to my aid in combat, because I’ve never been attacked, and never come to someone else’s aid, because I’ve never had the opportunity.
As well, modern friendships seem to be categorically different from most ancient friendships. Instant messaging with someone who is a close match to your personality and interests who lives across the globe feels rather different than physically interacting with the person who lives next door to you, who isn’t particularly close to your personality or interests. Modern childhood friendships are much more likely to be age-segregated than they were in the past, and so on.
My adrenaline system seems to work as well and in the same way as someone from a thousand years ago- but I’ve had far less cause to activate mine, and so while I’m mostly okay with calling the hardware ‘pretty much the same’ I have a hard time calling the experience ‘pretty much the same.’
Subjectively, though, the human experience has not changed much at all: the experience of love, loss, fear, ambition, in/security, friendship, community, excitement and so on
In e.g. the Middle Ages, the average person might have spent their whole lives on the countryside in a small community where everyone knew everyone, people rarely heard any news from the outside world, there were relatively strict sexual morals and never very much to do on one’s limited spare time, and most people inherited the profession of their parents and basically knew their place in the world from birth.
Compare this to someone living in a large modern liberal city, whose daily commute might already involve traveling a longer distance than the middle age peasant would travel in their whole life and who also has the option of traveling around the world, who may be in daily contact with more people than the peasant knew in their whole life, who has never known for certain what he would do in her life and has already changed careers three times, who may sleep with different people every night, etc. etc.
I would claim that these people would have vastly different experiences, even in terms of love, loss, fear, friendship, community, and so on. Yes, there are some elements which are the same, but the overall experience is still different enough that the peasant would have been literally incapable of imagining the modern urbanite’s life.
Yes, there are some elements which are the same, but the overall experience is still different enough that the peasant would have been literally incapable of imagining the modern urbanite’s life.
I think the reverse is also true- modern Western societies are so individualistic that I imagine most moderns can’t imagine what it was like to be in some of the communities or hierarchies of the past.
Any two things will look the same if you look at them from far enough away. Any two things will look different if you look at them from close enough in.
Where are you standing, from where all of recorded history seems an undifferentiated blob?
I think we have a very different concept of “object-level conditions—” I consider them more or less the same since the Roman Empire.
Would you be happy to live at any era of history between then and now? From your viewpoint, would you have more or less the same life at all these times?
If you are an immortal who has actually lived through them all, I can imagine it might eventually all seem like the same old same old. But that would be a fact about yourself, not the times. Some immortals wear their years more lightly.
Sure—a full-scale nuclear war that collapsed civilization and technology but didn’t actually kill every living human would count.
In terms of less grandiose things, if the actual lived experience of being a human changed dramatically with the the invention of important and novel emotions or social structures, I would consider that a fundamental change. Some argue that this actually happened during the medieval period and that romantic love didn’t exist before then, but I’m highly skeptical of this claim for multiple reasons.
I think we have a very different concept of “object-level conditions—” I consider them more or less the same since the Roman Empire. Certainly by a great many metrics we can say that life on Earth has improved, but these metrics strike me as fundamentally lacking in the context of hedonic treadmill theory.
All in all, I think that the human experience has not fundamentally changed in thousands of years and is unlikely to fundamentally change in the near future.
It seems pretty unusual to say that the life of a Roman era subsistence farmer is only superficially different from modern life:
But if so, then what features make the agricultural revolution a ‘new future’ or big change but not the industrial revolution? Relative to the Roman Empire today:
World population is 20 times larger
Per capita GDP is around 20 times larger (around 100 times in rich countries), so world wealth is around 400 times bigger; the hours of work needed to buy the bread to survive has declined by a similar margin
Life expectancy is about 3 times as great
Humans today are dramatically taller than in Roman times, and have far lower rates of brain-impairing nutrient deficiencies
Education and literacy levels are tremendously higher
We consume an array of incredibly rewarding and tempting superstimulus entertainments, foods, and so forth (their attraction is shown in the behavior of those from isolated cultures exposed to them, among other things)
We can travel around the Mediterranean hundreds to thousands of times as rapidly and at the cost of a comparatively miniscule portion of our incomes
Communication is effectively instantaneous worldwide
Our wealth is reflected in lower levels of cortisol, an objective measure of stress
In most of the world we don’t need to fear death by plague or starvation as in Roman times
People in Roman times were overwhelmingly farmers working long hours raising crops for subsistence; we work mostly in occupations that were nonexistent or much less common, work far less, have the option of working less than we do without threat to survival, and otherwise spend our time quite differently
Our mix of leisure activities is far different in addition to our work
We are taller than the Romans, due to better nutrition, have our teeth, effective cosmetics, are clean, etc
Arithmetic computations are more than a trillion times cheaper than in abacus days
We have many awe-inspiring near-magical capabilities that would amaze the Romans (all the world’s libraries in tiny containers, travel to the Moon and the bottom of the ocean, GPS, video recording, instant language translation machines, bombs that destroy cities, self-driving fast horseless carriages, automata performing many household tasks...)
Why was agriculture a bigger deal? Farming did not increase average wealth or provide amazing capabilities in everyday life (it was often bad for height, life expectancy and other per capita physiological measures). It rooted people more tightly to the land (but transport changes have been enormous, as discussed above). It increased population and population density dramatically, as has happened since Rome. It changed typical government structures (as has happened recently) and activities. It increased construction (but modern cities and structures are better, bigger, more numerous).
I don’t see the distinguishing feature.
Historians already view the last two hundred years as drastically unlike the previous thousands of years.
Why would intelligence amplification or robust AI qualify as fundamental changes if the changes since Rome don’t? We have much larger, better fed, better educated populations for more geniuses to appear among and incredible tools to enhance their productivity and communication. We have also been changing genetically in response to the changed selective environment of agricultural civilization. Smarter humans would still have heads, use language, eat, have sex, and so on, so why would that be a fundamental change? They might have different jobs and leisure activities, but we differ from the Romans in that way. If increased wealth, life expectancy and technology didn’t count in the past then why would further gains from inventions of more intelligent people count?
By the same token, what changes from AI would count as fundamental?
Would super-anti-depressant drugs or gene therapies that made people have very positive affect for extended periods cheaply, and without serious side effects or effective legal restrictions, count as fundamental where all the post-Rome changes don’t?
I consider agriculture to be more of a convenient point to put forth as the start of “society as we know it” rather than a particularly meaningful one.
I’m told that historians always view the last while as particularly meaningful and important, and the present is no different. Perhaps this is not the case?
Certainly.
The massive objective changes on the metrics of economics, technology, peace, etc. You just can’t generate groups of metrics at the same level of generality with plausibility to naive audiences and make the 13th century A.D. or the 8th century B.C. the most important and dramatically changing in history. And the ancient historians didn’t claim that their century was the most important in that way (Golden Ages, etc).
OK. This doesn’t seem to cut nature at the joints. Why on Earth would the question of whether we’ve invented a really good happy-drug take such primacy over energy, population, travel, communication, computation, cumulative literature, mathematics, material strengths, height, literacy, life expectancy, etc? Collectively those just seem to pack a lot more relevant info, particularly for the purpose of predicting:
No nuclear war (although if this is by the end of do-or-die wars between great powers that is itself a substantial change)
The path of R&D in AI
That there will not be sustained use of existing genomics and behavioral genetics knowledge for enhancement, and that enabling technologies will shortly begin to stagnate after strong progress
None of the low probability mega-scale natural catastrophes will happen this century (which we already knew with high probability, but not for this reason)
When it comes to the question of whether or not human experience has meaningfully changed in thousands of years? Why on Earth wouldn’t it?
This honestly seems to me like one of those situations where we’re sitting here staring at each other and just not understanding one another’s perspective. I’m not sure whether this is a matter of inferential distance, reference class tennis, or what, but I feel like something is definitely missing from this discussion.
I’m saying that the concept you’re using for ‘meaningful change’ is a light shade of grue, looking unusual and gerrymandered to exclude huge past changes while including things like good mood-elevating drugs that are quite natural extrapolations of our expanding biological knowledge.
When we do model combination with the many alternative ways we can slice up the world for outside viewish extrapolation, with penalties for ad hoc complexity, I think the specific view that ignores all past gains in wealth, life expectancy, energy use, population, and technology but responds hugely to mood-elevating drugs carries relatively little weight in prediction for the topics you mentioned.
So I disagree with this:
I understand what you are saying, but I don’t understand why you consider those things interesting or relevant. To me, a concept of the human experience that includes computation or material strengths seems unusual and gerrymandered.
At this point it really does seem like we’re just playing reference class tennis, though.
Let’s leave it at that then.
No. Roman historians didn’t had a similar notion of historical progress that we have since Hegel.
How many of your immediate family members had died by the time you were 18? (Parents, siblings, children.)
How many people do you know personally who have starved to death? What is your estimated chance that you will starve to death in the next ten years?
How many hours a day do you spend outside?
How many hours a day do you spend on manual labor?
How many people have you met over the course of your life?
Now, I agree that human nature appears to only have shifted a small amount in the last thousands of years, and so most things look the same on the inside; worrying about how to pay for rent is probably not all that different psychologically from worrying about whether you’ll survive the winter. I also agree that relatively few parts of human experience look totally new- there were obese urban paper-pushers in the Roman Empire, for example. But it seems that if you invert the number of urban desk-jobbers and farmers, you get a fundamentally different society and ‘human experience’, and that seems to be a somewhat fair comparison of now and Rome.
I wonder whether some of the inferential distance here is around what is understood by ‘the human experience’.
Materially, the human experience has changed quite profoundly, along the lines Vaniver points out (dramatic improvements in life expectancy, food supply, mechanisation, transport and travel, and so on).
Subjectively, though, the human experience has not changed much at all: the experience of love, loss, fear, ambition, in/security, friendship, community, excitement and so on seems to have been pretty much the same for humans living now as it was for humans living as far back as we have written records, and almost certainly well before that. Certainly when I read historical accounts I’m often struck with how similar the people seem to me and people I know, even when they are living in very different circumstances. This, I’m guessing, is what katydee is getting at.
So the human subjective experience of, say, having an immediate family member die has not changed fundamentally, but the rate at which humans have that experience that has changed fundamentally.
(Reflecting on this makes me feel very, very glad indeed to live now rather than at any time in the past. For instance, Darwin seems to have been as besotted by his kids as I am by mine, and I expect I’d be just as upset as he was were one of my children to die of scarlet fever, but it’s extremely unlikely to happen to me—or indeed anyone I know—because it’s almost always very easy to treat now. This has knock-on effects too: I get nervous and worried whenever my kids get ill, but nothing like as nervous and worried as he did, because I know that the chances that they’ll die are so much lower.)
I suspect this latter change in the human experience is what is meant by most of the people saying that it has changed.
Kaj_Sotala has already discussed most of these, but I wanted to focus on friendship. Ancient friendships seem to have had as a major component mutual defense against violence. As violence decreases, that aspect of friendship decreases- I’ve never had a friend come to my aid in combat, because I’ve never been attacked, and never come to someone else’s aid, because I’ve never had the opportunity.
As well, modern friendships seem to be categorically different from most ancient friendships. Instant messaging with someone who is a close match to your personality and interests who lives across the globe feels rather different than physically interacting with the person who lives next door to you, who isn’t particularly close to your personality or interests. Modern childhood friendships are much more likely to be age-segregated than they were in the past, and so on.
My adrenaline system seems to work as well and in the same way as someone from a thousand years ago- but I’ve had far less cause to activate mine, and so while I’m mostly okay with calling the hardware ‘pretty much the same’ I have a hard time calling the experience ‘pretty much the same.’
In e.g. the Middle Ages, the average person might have spent their whole lives on the countryside in a small community where everyone knew everyone, people rarely heard any news from the outside world, there were relatively strict sexual morals and never very much to do on one’s limited spare time, and most people inherited the profession of their parents and basically knew their place in the world from birth.
Compare this to someone living in a large modern liberal city, whose daily commute might already involve traveling a longer distance than the middle age peasant would travel in their whole life and who also has the option of traveling around the world, who may be in daily contact with more people than the peasant knew in their whole life, who has never known for certain what he would do in her life and has already changed careers three times, who may sleep with different people every night, etc. etc.
I would claim that these people would have vastly different experiences, even in terms of love, loss, fear, friendship, community, and so on. Yes, there are some elements which are the same, but the overall experience is still different enough that the peasant would have been literally incapable of imagining the modern urbanite’s life.
I think the reverse is also true- modern Western societies are so individualistic that I imagine most moderns can’t imagine what it was like to be in some of the communities or hierarchies of the past.
Agreed.
What would you count as “fundamental” change?
Any two things will look the same if you look at them from far enough away.
Any two things will look different if you look at them from close enough in.
Where are you standing, from where all of recorded history seems an undifferentiated blob?
Would you be happy to live at any era of history between then and now? From your viewpoint, would you have more or less the same life at all these times?
If you are an immortal who has actually lived through them all, I can imagine it might eventually all seem like the same old same old. But that would be a fact about yourself, not the times. Some immortals wear their years more lightly.
Technological singularity, human extinction, etc.
Sure. I wouldn’t voluntarily transfer—I’m accustomed to modern norms—but I don’t think life now is much different from life anytime.
The same life? Certainly not. My profession would very likely be different, as would my beliefs. But a generally equivalent life? Certainly.
Could you expand on that ‘etc.’?
Those two items seem to me to completely fill their classes of comparables, so there is no ‘cetera’.
Sure—a full-scale nuclear war that collapsed civilization and technology but didn’t actually kill every living human would count.
In terms of less grandiose things, if the actual lived experience of being a human changed dramatically with the the invention of important and novel emotions or social structures, I would consider that a fundamental change. Some argue that this actually happened during the medieval period and that romantic love didn’t exist before then, but I’m highly skeptical of this claim for multiple reasons.