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It seems that almost every technological development will cause us to become "weak as a species," for the simple reason that these developments remove difficulties we have faced in the past.

Cars and bicycles damaged our endurance. Shoes softened our soles. If these technologies disappeared overnight, yes we would be worse off as a species, but that says nothing about the benefits of these technologies.

If these technologies improve our mental effectiveness, even if only within a specific type of sensory stimulation, it's likely that we would adapt our sensory perceptions to deliver these "optimized states," possibly through new technology, for an overall net gain in efficacy.




“If men learn this ... they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written” - Plato on literacy, ca. 350 BCE.


He was right to some extent.


He was absolutely right. It's just that the benefits of written language massively outweigh the small loss in memory performance we experience.

If your computer's OS and all your files were stored on a 64gb ramdisk, it would be fast, yes, but not very useful.




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