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cameroncowan 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?
I think people greatly under estimated animals of burden and the wheel. We can see that from cultures that didn't have the wheel like the Incas. Treating disease/medicine was really unrealized until the modern age, it was not as important to the ancients. I also think labor saving technology in 19th century was really unrealized. I don't think people realized how much less manual labor we would need within their own lifetimes. There are so many small things that had a huge impact like the mould-board plow that made farming in North America possible.