History in reverse, what we knew we have lost.

# 4092

Graeber's Dawn of Everything can be paraphrased - (with David Wengrow It goes like this: the standard view of humans is that we started small in group size and narrow in mind. From here we grew in many ways and complex society slowly organized itself leading to empires led by elite specially educated priests and leading a deeply uneducated humanity. Humanity slowly grew in many dimensions until here we are, a technocratic complex deep minded society. The driving force has been the increased complexity of technologies matched by an increasingly sophisticated general population, the source of advanced workers.

Adam Smith was clear that the division of labor reduces intelligence by narrowing the experience of workers. Tragic, and ignored.

The alternative view that emerges from The Dawn of Everything is, as the title suggests, that early humans were very inventive, creating weaving, p[lottery, irrigation, and galactic calendar rs, earning the habits of hundreds of species, thousands of materials, cave painting, musical instruments and expert at reading the terrain. In the new view, humans are moving from more skills to less (we can push buttons but not carve wood). The human enterprise, with every larger numbers, is working with less knowledge. Moderns don't know much. The result is that humanity is moving from a broad (hunter-gatherer) understanding of the world to an increasingly narrow focus.

We like to think that we are so smart but the general population has lost the skills of things like the precession of the equinoxes and the use of the events in the night sky to regulate planting. The stonework of the pyramids and many other sites around the world surpasses the skills we have now. Modern education teaches an ensemble of knowledge easily dealt with by AI and the problem with AI is it is good, and going to get better, at Lego-like knowledge manipulation, but missing any sense of human presence. The human loss of relationship building fits into the trend of mechanization of everything. So instead of increasing knowledge and skill as humanity is expanding, we are actually narrowing ourselves. The reverse of what we have been led to believe. We do not have a population that has the physical stamina nor elementary skills needed for surviving [planetary destruction.

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