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Lumifer comments on Superintelligence Reading Group - Section 1: Past Developments and Present Capabilities - Less Wrong
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Without the benefit of hindsight, which past technologies would you have expected to make a big difference to human productivity? For an example, if you think that humans' tendency to share information through language is hugely important to their success, then you might expect the printing press to help a lot, or the internet.
Relatedly, if you hadn't already been told, would you have expected agriculture to be a bigger deal than almost anything else?
That's an impossible question -- we have no capability to generate clones of ourselves with no knowledge of history. The only thing you can get as answers are post-factum stories.
An answerable version would be "which past technologies at that time they appeared did people expect to be a big deal or no big deal?" But that answer requires a lot of research, I think.