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Comment by angrydev | Hacker News Reader

Oh boy, I don’t know about this one. You are born into a body that is so complicated we will perhaps never understand how all of it works. Our society if anything wrangled so much of the chaos of the natural world. It’s hardly simple to live in a world where you are under constant threat from animals, and other humans.

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Technology has always existed. The people that lived in nature had no idea how it worked. To them, a plow was technology and I’m sure there were people complaining about it. We only understand nature now because of technology.

I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

I think we could have stopped somewhere between dying of smallpox at 40, and children scrolling themselves into eating disorders and suicide at 13 so Zuck can go for some moonshots.

Smallpox was eradicated in 1980.

80s would be a fine place to have stopped, you even get the Gameboy!

But I also feel obligated to point out... the last time smallpox killed as many people in the US as social media does was well before 1980. The final US death was in the 40s.

There's a lot of meat between "We beat smallpox!" and "I can click a button and expose myself to commentary from any of 3 billion people." in terms of technology.

The plow is very obviously life sustaining technology. Plows help make food, food is required to live. I find it extremely unlikely that there was any noteworthy amount of "complaining" about it at any point in history. Every technology exists on a spectrum of obviously good to obviously bad. Lots of things are not in the middle of that spectrum.

> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time

Luckily we don't have to choose either.

The plow probably isn't the best technology for the example because it is such a substantial improvement in farming capabilities, but something like weaving loom technology or grain milling technology might work better. Because while they reduce labor, it is perfectly feasible to live your entire life using simpler techniques. Hand mills and hand weaving take a lot of labor but aren't hard enough to make living in any particular enviroment too difficult to sustain well into old age. And I can imagine many people scoffing at that tech as unneccessary and dieing without ever feeling a need or desire to adopt it.

The nostalgic hunter gather hippies probably thought the plow was unnatural.

> I find it extremely unlikely that there was any noteworthy amount of "complaining" about it at any point in history.

"If plows had not been invented nobody would have to plow the fields!!!"

OK, if that logic sounds ridiculous to you, just realize that this is the whole basis of the argument about things getting complicated.

My reaction too, starting with the picture of dense vegetation at the top of the article!

get eaten alive by mosquitos and be slightly moist all the time!

Yes. It's a bit like we're very capable cells that are coming together to build ourselves a body. Why settle for an amoeba? (Other than as a stop along the way.)

Real world is always more complicated than any model of it we design.

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