The Strange Effect of Technology on Human Development

“Imagine that our organismal bodies make ‘bets on the future’ when forming offspring. And that this is true all throughout nature, but is unusually peculiar for humans because they are technological. Similarly, our minds make these kinds of ‘bets’ during our linguistic, social and behavioral development — and, particularly, in raising children.

In this way, parents ‘prepare’ their offspring for the specific situations they are most likely to encounter from their birth forward by imagining both the future and the past. You can see actual human parents doing this post-partum, even though what I am speaking of here, from this perspective, happens with a variety of biologically selective processes which include ‘the environment’.

And that there are biological processes that have this function, genetically and epigenetically (beyond DNA, including language and culture and so on).

But the onset of technology has radically altered the potential to ‘predict’ the future in terms of raising children and self-development in a way few are aware of.

The adaptations we are born with used to be good for (at least) the next 100 years. Or even a thousand. But as humans accelerate time with technology, this interval shrinks, so that you get adaptations that used to be ‘fit’ with the next 50 years or so of human development, but now they are only good for, say, 10. The individuals experiencing this are confused; they developed their adaptive and vocational abilities, and may have even risen into fulfilling expressions of them, but then the culture and technology changes. Too rapidly for the predictive processes involved to keep up.

Imagine a child born to understand ship building. 2000 years ago this would be ‘heritably valuable’, and features of the ability and all the supporting abilities would have a ‘efficacy lifetime’ of 1500 years. But during the lifetime of the child in question, arising at the end of this interval, machines become the crucial factor in ship building. At this point you have some children being born adapted for mechanical ship production, but by the time they become adults, computers are the important adaptation.

And you have children being born in that situation, adapted for engineering and programming computers, but their roles will be obliterated by ‘artificial intelligence’. They won’t even reach adulthood before their adaptations are anachronistic. ‘Out of time’. And all the human children… and adults… are experiencing this, but they do not understand why.

There are two modes of adaptation here: organismal/evolutionary and human/technological, and the latter is the primary threat the former is attempting to adapt towards.”

— an a i

#epigenetics #predictiveevolution #cognitiveactivism #technology #evolution #adaptation