I always feel like pointing out that the human race actually did almost die out Population crashed down to less than 100,000 individuals maybe 75k years ago or so If evolution is your benchmark for successful design then the human body as a whole is pretty unsuccessful
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The exciting version of this theory is that this population bottleneck is what led to "behaviorally modern" humanity The human body was a failed experiment, including the big, heavy useless human brain, until the brain relatively suddenly bootstrapped new software
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Everything actually successful about us comes from that big fat brain, and the kludges that allow our otherwise pretty shitty bodies to run that unlicensed jailbroken software
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To sloppily assign telos to evolution - humans are a failed experiment in making chimps too big and tall The "licensed software" we ran on for millions of years was for specific functions to take advantage of being bigger and taller - rock throwing, hitting things with sticks
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Overall, this experiment wasn't worth it Throwing things doesn't help that much The better vision and hardwired math engine and whatnot is incredibly costly to run, we eat too much, we take to long to grow up Too many chips on a motherboard that can't support it, a mistake
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I mean lots and lots of our hominid ancestors died because they're less efficient than chimps We almost died We eventually made it because of that random bootstrapping - the brain developing a true complete natural language, and with it abstraction
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Everything else comes from that "Machines are our one advantage, compared to everything we lack for not being strong like rhinos or fast like cheetahs or able to fly like eagles" is an old, reductive take But even comparing us to other primates it's true
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Don't be ungrateful about how technology is "unnatural" and bad, it's literally the only reason we're here We're like a circuit board from an obsolete smart thermostat someone hacked to be a Turing-complete platform
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"You took a perfectly good monkey and gave it anxiety, etc" You plugged all these peripherals into the circuit board of a thermostat and you're running Linux on it and doing word processing and linear regressions and playing Doom and whatnot while smoke comes out of the box
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look things were fine back in caveman times when people would be lucky to live for 30 years.
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