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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

But humans are still limited. Until we accelerate our evolution, we'll be stuck at the speed of glaciers in terms of our potential.

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Memetics is much more potent than genetics. We're about to achieve much more than people could 2000 years ago, not because humans have genetically evolved to be that much smarter, but because we have memetically evolved much more sophisticated social structures. Genetics is still important, and augmenting individual intelligence should still be pursued, but memetics is in the driver seat now.

Could you expand on what you mean by this? What kind of new social structures are enabling progress in this way?

New forms of government, larger and more complicated corporations, public schooling, labor unions, global shipping routes, universities, remote work, wikipedia, internet forums, open-source software development, stock markets, etc etc.

None of these required a genetic change in the individuals involved, just a "memetic" change in the way the individuals acted, communicated, and thought.

horizontal transfer via memetics is not guaranteed to be a productive or stabilizing force in the long term, it could be convincingly argued many of our nastiest problems today derive from immaturity in handling novel forms of information flow and hybrid agency enabled by modern social and physical technology

the task, imo, is to remove memetic agency from the driver's seat and put ourselves back in it, or if we want a chauffeur at least to make sure it's taking us into a viable future

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