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Comment by Chaebixi | Hacker News Reader

Because, over the long term, it would reduce the selective pressure on the ability to gestate embryos in vivo, unnecessarily increasing dependence on technology.

We should try to avoid adding extinction to the list of consequences of the collapse of technological civilization.

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This is such a naive understanding of human history. The defining breaking point between the Homo genus and our ape ancestors is tool use 1-2 million years ago.

Those tools (and our subsequent use of fire) enabled us to dramatically reduce the size of our digestive tract. We get more energy from our food and spend less resources to digest it because of cooking, a technology.

We have thus evolved wherein we are not capable of surviving on an entirely non cooked diet that we would gather ourselves (the energy input to gather the food plus the energy to digest the raw food is too high -- cooking makes it feasible with our technologically adapted digestive tract).

Yet no one worries about us going extinct if we were to lose access to fire or cooking utensils -- because we can recreate them with ease.

Thus, the concern shouldn't be dependence on a technology but on the ease of us losing that technology. Nonetheless, I agree that this technology is much easier to lose than fire or cooking knowledge.

Providing eyeglasses reduces the selective pressure for good eyesight.

That's actually something I worry about. I'm blind without my glasses, seriously, debilitatingly blind. With them, of course, I have better-than-perfect (for some value of 'perfect') vision. Should I have children? Is it ethical to do so? I honestly don't know.

What is your specific visual condition, if you don't mind my asking. Most people who I'd characterize as "debilitatingly blind" are lucky if they get any benefit from conventional eyeglasses, let alone "better-than-perfect" vision. I have a significant visual impairment myself (myopia, aphakia, and nystagmus) but I wouldn't put myself in that category.

Astigmatism and severe myopia. They're easily correctable, but without glasses I can't see more than about three inches from my nose. At normal viewing distances I simply cannot even see things other people can see, like letters, small animals or children &c.

Without glasses I'd be severely crippled. I've conducted a few experiments trying to move around in public without them, and it's beyond frightening.

Thanks for sharing, and forgive my sounding skeptical. I lucked out because the aphakia and myopia sort of cancel each other out, I still need glasses but they're primarily for near-distance. If I hadn't undergone cataract surgery as an infant, I'd probably have similar challenges.

My view is anything we have technology to cure we shouldn't worry about.

The more problems we can treat with technology the smaller the genetic search space becomes. evolution can focus just on the things we can't easily solve.

Can we keep talking about natural selection when may soon be able to edit our DNA, however?

I think that's a fascinating concept for a hard-fiction author to go nuts with.

How could "technological civilization" collapse, at this point? We have extremely well-distributed records—spoken, written, digital, and more—of all of our technology and how to use it. "We forgot how" worlds are just impossible at this point, unless we all get a disease that renders us incapable of tool-usage, reading, and speech. (At which point we're not human anyway.)

Although I agree that this is unlikely, until we are multi planetary, with at least four worlds/stations, this is not the case.

To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Because that's the only case where humans not being capable of non-technologically-assisted reproduction would matter.

† See the book The Knowledge, and then consider a world where you have access to not only that, but also hard copies of the US Patent filing database, and 6 billion people to parallelize the bootstrapping process across. (And even that ignores the amount of "skipping ahead" that just the existing knowledge already loaded into people's heads would enable.)

Unless we all got amnesia at once, and all lost the ability to read (and those who can, to read braille), we'd be back to civilization before the generation was over—and back to simple longevity-extending practices like freezing sperm and ova long before that.

Technology onset: Grey-goo type scenario

Human onset: massive cultural shift to demonize knowledge.

It's happened before. It didn't wipe all technology away, but it slowed progress to a stand-still.

Do you think it'd be possible to choose to "demonize knowledge", in a world where we know that the only way to reproduce requires technology? I would expect our biological imperative to reproduce would get the better of that attempted social more quite quickly.

> To restate that: what precise type of disaster would destroy "technological civilization"—presumably, all traces of it, because it's pretty easy to bootstrap back up†—but not the human species itself? Because that's the only case where humans not being capable of non-technologically-assisted reproduction would matter.

In this case, any disaster that prevents the regular maintenance and operation of something like an advanced hospital for at least a few decades. This includes various types of war, energy crises, or the classic SF theme of a society stagnating to point where it can no longer build certain necessary technologies but only operate them.

There's also the related threat to societies/nations that require technology to reproduce. If they get in a war with rivals that can reproduce unassisted, they have extra weak points that can be attacked.

> † See the book The Knowledge, and then consider a world where you have access to not only that, but also hard copies of the US Patent filing database, and 6 billion people to parallelize the bootstrapping process across.

Any scenario where you have to reconstruct knowledge like that will likely be accompanied by strife that will prevent the reconstruction for a time (of decades or more).

Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?

One good solid exchange of nuclear weapons would do it. Once the manufacturing chains are broken and international commerce is halted, the collapse of civilization would occur pretty quickly. Even among the survivors bent on preserving knowledge, most digital records are on ephemeral media and the components of most electronic devices have a rated operating lifespan of only a decade or less.

Though somewhat dated, James Burke covers this quite well in the first episode of his classic "Connections" documentary. If anything, the situation is far worse now.

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