Conflict, commerce, Europe / Asia / North Africa was a hub of activity. That lead to ever more efficient maths and writing for consolidation of commerce, agriculture and administration, conflicts driving technology, then the age of reason and science leading to exploration, colonisation and the industrial revolution.

I think it would be really difficult to speculate what would have happened to Feudal Japan if left to evolve on its own accord, the Asia Pacific civilisations, central american civilisations, north american indians, even Australia aborigines.

If you are well adapted and in control of your environment, unchallenged, what would be the point of progress? And is progress at all cost the be-all end-all anyway?

It's really, really difficult to completely suppress progress; you basically need thought police. So yeah, they would still have made a lot of progress, though whether they'd have done it to a modern level I'm not sure.

That said, their reverence for the "natural" state of things is effectively a direct resistance to change; as such I'd expect them to have made progress a lot more slowly than cultures in which human achievement was more valued than nature.

Quote:Original post by Antheus
Why does industrialization imply "advancement"?

Because it better equips a culture to mitigate existential risk.

Quote:If population growth is kept in check and environment remains relatively same, there is little need to change.

Assuming that the environment will remain "relatively same" is not a particularly safe assumption to make.

Quote:Original post by Antheus

Quote:Original post by superpig
Because it better equips a culture to mitigate existential risk.

Existence depends solely on rate of change.

Relative rate of change. Specifically: The rate of change relative to ability to adapt to change.

Quote:Does industrialization help with that?

Industrialization itself doesn't mitigate existential risk, but it's an absolute requirement for enabling a greater ability for us to adapt to change.

Quote:Most of today's population is painfully dependent on technology just to survive. Food, water, energy - all require disproportionate effort. Millions of people are needed to provide them. Disrupt that, and majority of human population dies and numbers fall back down to pre-industrialization era of self-sustenance.

Are you saying that you think pre-industrialized society was better at coping with existential risk than today's society?

There are two strategies for mitigating existential risk: decrease the rate of change, or increase the capacity to adapt. We don't have very much control over the rate of change - for example, we can't presently control when the sun will go supernova - but we do have control over increasing our capacity to adapt.

Division of labour - not having everyday people worry about how to farm or clean water or generate power - is a very effective way of increasing our capacity to adapt.

Quote:

Quote:Assuming that the environment will remain "relatively same" is not a particularly safe assumption to make.

But there is nothing that can be done about it. A meteor impact or nuclear winter would not be countered by industrialization (or similar advance).

There are some existential risks that we've not yet found an effective way to counter, sure. There are also many that we have, like smallpox. There is no reason why, given continued research and development, we won't be able to counter meteor impacts and nuclear winters as well. (Heck, there's already been at least one movie pitching a theory about how we'd deal with the meteor impact. That we've even got the vocabulary to describe such a theory is waaaaay beyond anything that pre-industrial people could do).

Quote:Colonization had precisely the same effect. The reason colonists prevailed was because they had disproportionately large impact on local environment. If changes were slower, they would have been either repelled, or some synergy would have evolved, simply out of need. If you can't beat them, join them type of thing.

Yes. Alternatively, if the native Indians could adapt faster, could better defend themselves, could bring more to the table to trade, etc, then the same result would have occurred.

Quote:If anything, today's society has drastically weakened its position. Any change threatens to collapse our way of life. Just destroying Wall Street would have dire consequences.

"Destroying Wall Street" is not "any" change. Things go wrong with our present technology all the time - you're a software developer, I'm sure you know this. And yet somehow, we survive these things going wrong. Wall Street may not have been destroyed, but it's not been very healthy for a little while, and yet most of us still have a roof over our heads and power in our outlets.

Quote:And all the tech and advances would be completely powerless to do anything about it.

On the contrary: our global communications technology was instrumental in stopping the Wall Street crisis from being as bad as it could have been. It's also been instrumental in helping those affected get support. If it weren't for our tech and advances, food would not be cheap and plentiful enough that they could afford it.

Quote:After all, doing very efficient logistics at global scale with sub-second response time databases doesn't really help when whole regions are starving due to their money not even being worth anything as fire fuel.

Sure it does: It frees up time and money that can be used instead to find ways to help those people.