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Comment by oldmanjay | Hacker News Reader

Given that humanity's track seems to be toward ever greater diversity, it's hard to imagine we'd become a one-dimensional archetype species.

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In what was is human diversity increasing? Broadcast television has been causing the decline of regional accents and increasing cultural homogenization for decades. Many obscure languages are dying out in favor of consolidation at the regional or national level.

In the past, humans were naturally diverse simply because there were so many distinct communities that hardly ever interacted with each other. Nowadays you might be exposed to many times more diversity than the average medieval peasant ever was but there's nothing contradictory about that happening as the total amount of diversity in the world continues to decrease.

You'll have a hard time convincing me that a world with several orders of magnitude more humans is somehow less diverse than the times with fewer humans unless you somehow remove the ability to process arithmetic from my brain.

Wait, how does more humans = more diversity? I would think any abstract measure of diversity would be based on average differences, or standard deviations away from the mean. Obviously, the absolute extremes are greater with more people, but it seems entirely logical to say diversity has decreased as the number of people increase.

Easy. The more populated world is the one that has a global telecommunications network, whose homogenizing influence far outweighs higher-order effects like population.

Hardly. Increasing connection is shifting us closer to a single world-culture every day, which has advantages and disadvantages. All the world's most powerful people wear Western-style suits and speak English.

This was my initial thought as well. But on further thought, it doesn't seem to be true. I think, with technology and inter-connectivity, we are getting exposed to diverse points of view more than ever before. It might eventually lead to one culture, but then that would be because we all learned from all the options and settled on the best combination.

Oh, each human being is definitely exposed to more diversity, but that doesn't mean the world is getting more diverse. Now, I can be English and interact with people who are French, German, American, Chinese and so on; previously, I could have spent my whole life only interacting with Anglo-Saxons, but not know about the Bretons, Picts, Gaels, Geats, Swedes, Goths, Navajo, Hopi, Anasazi and so on nearby and around the world.

Perhaps we'll settle on one culture as we choose the best one. I more imagine we'll end up with one culture in an endless echo chamber, forever unable to sense our own biases.

> It might eventually lead to one culture, but then that would be because we all learned from all the options and settled on the best combination.

Isn't that the whole point of the Borg?

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