Or learning that the pre-agriculture era really was a sort of paradise, and that we should be trying harder to “undo technological advancement” and recreate its key properties.
Maybe the elision in your post was intentional, but to be clear, one obvious and extremely large downside of the past is that there were very few people in the past, like maybe <0.1% of the number of people alive today before the dawn of the agricultural revolution. Per unit time, they’d need to be >1000x happier, fulfilled, etc, to outweigh the happiness (and other moral goods) of humans alive today, assuming an additive/total view.
I loved the graph of cumulative human lives in this post, and I think it should probably be a much more common way of displaying historical data (it strikes me as closer to what we often want than the common practice of just putting everything on a log scale).
It’s interesting that there were about the same total number of foragers (40 billion people from 3 million years ago to 10,000 BC) as farmers (40 billion from 10,000 BC to the 1800s), and that there have already been almost 20 billion industrials/moderns since 1960. At current birth rates (about 140 million people each year), we will hit 40 billion industrials/moderns by 2160. Maybe that is a good estimate for how long we should imagine the current industrial/modern era to last, before it is superseded by some fundamentally new mode of civilization—perhaps AI, digital people, dystopian collapse, or one of the other scenarios Holden mentions.
I often think of the past as “countless people slaving away for centuries in misery”, and then think “wow, thank god I live in a brief window of technology and prosperity”. But when you weight by cumulative population instead of by time, you can see there is already 1 happy industrial (and more on the way) for every 2 miserable farmers, which makes the whole project of civilization seem a lot more worthwhile than “100 centuries of misery, then 2 centuries of happiness”.
Maybe the elision in your post was intentional, but to be clear, one obvious and extremely large downside of the past is that there were very few people in the past, like maybe <0.1% of the number of people alive today before the dawn of the agricultural revolution. Per unit time, they’d need to be >1000x happier, fulfilled, etc, to outweigh the happiness (and other moral goods) of humans alive today, assuming an additive/total view.
I loved the graph of cumulative human lives in this post, and I think it should probably be a much more common way of displaying historical data (it strikes me as closer to what we often want than the common practice of just putting everything on a log scale).
It’s interesting that there were about the same total number of foragers (40 billion people from 3 million years ago to 10,000 BC) as farmers (40 billion from 10,000 BC to the 1800s), and that there have already been almost 20 billion industrials/moderns since 1960. At current birth rates (about 140 million people each year), we will hit 40 billion industrials/moderns by 2160. Maybe that is a good estimate for how long we should imagine the current industrial/modern era to last, before it is superseded by some fundamentally new mode of civilization—perhaps AI, digital people, dystopian collapse, or one of the other scenarios Holden mentions.
I often think of the past as “countless people slaving away for centuries in misery”, and then think “wow, thank god I live in a brief window of technology and prosperity”. But when you weight by cumulative population instead of by time, you can see there is already 1 happy industrial (and more on the way) for every 2 miserable farmers, which makes the whole project of civilization seem a lot more worthwhile than “100 centuries of misery, then 2 centuries of happiness”.