No tech, no humans.
Modern tech is what saved us from the dour prophecies of the Malthusians.
A little bit of screentime sure does beat infant mortality, polio, hunger, and the global wars we used to have.
Agriculture and urbandwelling are only 10,000 years old. The railroad, telegraph, and electricity all are less than 200 years old.
Not enough time to evolve adaptation to it.
Maybe in a million years if we're still around we'll be well adapted to long distance instant communications, to travel faster than 10 mph, etc. But those of us who are fated to live now are stuck with dangerous technologies with scary tradeoffs.
> A little bit of screentime sure does beat infant mortality, polio, hunger, and the global wars we used to have.
Bizarre take. Don't you remember the 1990s? The technology to bring those boons was unrelated to, and preceded, the screentime boom. TV was popular of course, but it was the beer to the smartphone's gin. Quantity has a quality all its own. It was, from my own memory, far easier to be TV-less or nearly TV-less than it is to be offline today.
In fact, we've regressed a little in terms of war and disease lately, and I wonder if the cultural regression caused by addictive feeds on smartphones, which prioritize controversy above all else, has at least a little to do with it. I really don't think responding to covid in the USA would have been such a disaster if it had happened in say, 2005.
I agree with all this and yet it’s the sheer force of your prose that I can’t let go of
That's the key
Tech has been amazing for the past 100-150 millennia and couldn’t possibly be seen as detrimental in aggregate. We are in fact smarter and more connected too. The side effects are barely worth mentioning.