I clarify:
Let’s say scientists can’t come up with solutions to global problems, AI gets out of control and turns almost everyone into paperclips during wars, and in the 2040s or 2050s, the surviving people (about a few tens of millions around the world or even less) gradually return to the level of intelligence of their distant ancestors?
As we can see from what is happening in the world today my answer is nothing. We will do nothing and just accept our fate.
mad max world is probably likely, or a 4400 type of civilization, where the rich are in thier bougie clean enclaves, while everyone is the devastate mad max style living.
Oh shit, sorry honey- I have to go hunting and fishing again all week.
I can cook over a wood fire and teach others the same. I can do carpentry with un-powered hand tools to an acceptable level. I am a pretty decent archer. Hopefully I could find a group of survivors who valued those skills over my delicious flesh.
I wish you good luck!
Let’s say scientists can’t come up with solutions to global problems
We already have the solution, the French made it in the 1800. We just lack the will to use them again.
Which one?
No I assume they mean the problem of people being stupid assholes.
In the 18th century, so the 1700s.
I take unbridge with the line
Level of intelligence of their distant ancestors
All evidence so far points to humans being at the same intelligence levels as they are now since basically when we first became Anatomically Modern Humans.
We were not less intelligent, we just had less information and less data.
You can be a Supergenius the likes of which only seen in comic books, but if you don’t have the right data and information, you’re no different to anyone else.
As you have well noticed, I did not take into account that human evolution did not advance much intellectually and computationally, it was rather a matter of the variety of information that sharpened the human mind, to put it simply. Unfortunately, it is difficult to take all this into account.
We didn’t advance in intelligence, at all, as that’s “the capacity for, with information and tools, find a way to put them to use”. And the human mind is as sharp as it’s always been.
We had less information, and because of that no knowledge of how to make better tools, but if you gave someone from 5000 years ago the information and tools, they would be intelligent enough to figure out how to use them without instruction.
There are also issues of societal specialization leading to the ability of individuals to specialize in gaining knowledge, instead of 100% of the population working 99% of the time on survival.
But my brain and Og the Caveman are basically the same.
Yeah exactly!
A fun example of that, there’s been time and again where prototypes of things we now think of as modern were made thousands of years before. But they didn’t have the prerequisite tools and information to make it anything more than a prototype.
Like “Hero’s Engine”, a thousand of years old toy that’s a fully working Bronze Steam Engine, but it’s basically like 10cm in size. But cause they weren’t good enough at metallurgy yet, they knew it could work bigger but didn’t have any methods to make it bigger (copper and bronze can’t handle the strain that anything bigger than that would make, and that’s all they knew how to use at the time)
I would be in the roughly 8 billion dead for sure.
Yeah if 10’s million survive that’s only 0.1%. Almost all of us are dead in this scenario.
I mean…the short is answer is “die” almost certainly from unclean water, for at least 60% of the general western population.
Yeah that’s always been my assumption. My retirement plan is essentially to just be eaten by cannibals within about 24 hours of everything going full Mad Max.
die
Well given the extinction of more than a half million essential crop species and the previously universal knowledge of farming that occurred in the last century. Expect to die alongside billions of others.
Our distant ancestors had just as much capacity for learning as we do, they just used it in different ways because that was what the nature of their daily lives demanded. Where we can recognize dozens of brands by their logo alone, they recognized plants by their leaves, useful stones, and scat. Our accumulated knowledge we pass on doesn’t make any one of us any “smarter”. Some of us alive today are not rocket scientists but have the capacity to be, just as there were people thousands of years ago that had that capacity but not the thousands of years of science and engineering that was needed to build on to take that last step and achieve it.
Solitary living is a luxury made easier by the abundance of technology we have, going it alone in a Stone Age state would be very, very difficult, then and now. Folks who understand things like tool making, agriculture, medicinal plant identification, bushcraft, animal husbandry, hunting/fishing/trap making, and clothing making would have a leg up. Those who have all that and the ability to form small cooperative groups would stand an even greater chance of success. I’d also throw out that despite the rise of digital storage, we have a lot, a lot of printed material in the world. Even if we forget how to read, there’s pictures and illustrations. Kids aren’t raised in isolation, knowledge (even diluted knowledge) gets passed on, and we wouldn’t forget where we once were, and the ruins of civilization would be all around. You’d almost need some sort of sci-fi level disease to wipe all of our minds to get us back to true Stone Age levels of living and prevent us from understanding how scavenged tools could be used. We might forget how to forge steel but we’d keep scavenging it for blades rather than revert to stone.
So many depressed people on Lemmy, everyone just going with dying huh?
I mean I am excited to finally flex my creativity, see if there is anything I can figure out how to do with all our crap and the new world. Maybe some kind of silly The Grinch level home full of housing code violations and crazy contraptions made of garbage while I cross breed pea/beans.
It would be cool if when I die people thought of me as some weird hermit alchemist and as they wander through my house finding tools of the old world uncover a lost truth and then some YA type shit happens as a result.
Dying is easy, we all do it eventually, the question is, if you do anything before you get to the same finish line.
I’d become a craftsperson that’s for sure, whatever I end up doing will probably be creative manual labor of some kind - pottery for example, but not limited to. It depends on the situation wherever I’m at in the hypothetical moment.
Also, as a side hustle I’d be running something like a DnD table. I’d be on a personal quest to reconstruct the rules, I’ll be pretty much asking everyone I meet if they played, what they remember and if they’d be interested in joining my group. I believe with no Internet, tv, or radio, ttrpg would become extremely popular.
I don’t see us regressing before 1820. Will just be back to your horses, carriages, and living off the land.
That still requires metal and there’s no surface deposits to support it
There’s plenty in landfills to be “mined”
Afaik that can only be recycled with pretty energy intensive arc furnaces or regular fossil fuel combustion. No accessible fossil fuel limits you to fallout style scrap-tech, which is probably not sustainable for a long term 17-18th century civilization.
Damn, you expressed my words for me.
The only possible answer is that I would eek out an existence foraging for twigs and berries as a neolithic hunter gatherer. However, in my case I would only do that for several months before I died from a chronic health condition I manage with medication, so there’s that.
I don’t know if it’s really possible for us to go back to the stone age. There’s so much steel and iron lying around. I don’t really know much about metallurgy but I’m pretty sure I could figure out how to flatten some rebar into a blade if it was all I had to do all day.
We also have domesticated breeds of livestock and know how to raise crops.
So, at worst it would be some kind of modern iron age, neolithic isn’t really possible.
It depends on the region and country, but yes, matalurgy can be resumed over time and quickly in 5-20 years, again depending on the country and region.
In the novel Star’s Reach, in a post-collapse society, one of the main characters is a ‘miner.’ Their mining guild basically tears apart old concrete buildings, by hand, with sledge hammers to extract the old rebar from them.
