As Texan’s Say, “This Is All Hat And No Cattle”

It is one thing to express an opinion but another to attempt to pass it off as knowledge or fact. What you have is merely a fanciful scenario that exists with little of either. This is a disservice to the people you seek fo.llow you and elevate your reputation

1. Technology, broadly speaking, predated humanity and is increasingly found in a number of animals.
2. Your frame of reference to “understand what is capable now and how we got here,” is wrong both generally and in purely anthropocentric terms. (Macroscopic Evolutionary Paradigm)
3. The key human technology was language, which allow for the exchange of scenarios that is at the root fof humanity’s success technologically and otherwise. But, scenario building itself is apparently an innate biological characteristic.
4. In saying, “Steam power led to…mass production…Next came cars and the telephone,” you missed the single biggest development after steam power — public sanitation — another technology. Any graph of civilization changes dramatically with that event.
5. You assert, without an iota of evidence, that, “Artificial intelligence isn’t the future because it will replace humanity; it is the future because it endows us with the capability to parse more information.” There a global artificial general intelligence (AGI) arms-race and obsolete and dysfunctional medieval political and electoral systems, creates a fertile soil for hubris to precipitate a bad outcome. (Doc Says — Our Emotions, Institutions and Technological Capabilities Are Mismatched, Why You Should Fear Artificial Intelligence-AI)
6. Asserting that you understand evolution (on any scale) and can forecast what will happen constitutes, at a minimum, intellectual malpractice, and smacks of selling snake-oil (>^ Why the Future Ain’t What it Once Was)
7. Late astronomer Carl Sagan said that the probability of other intelligent life in the universe must be close to a 100 percent. But, the probability of any civilization surviving its technological epoch — like the one we are now living in — would be exceedingly rare; perhaps a 0.001 percent chance. In other words, 99.999 percent of all technological civilizations in the universe would go extinct. While such a high probability of civilizational extinctions might strike you as hyperbole, it is the same percentage of species that have already gone extinct on earth.
8. Visionary author K. Eric Drexler described the convergence of human and technological evolution succinctly:

From past to future…life moved forward in a long, slow advance, paced by genetic evolution. Minds with language picked up the pace….The invention of the methods of science and technology further accelerated advances by forcing [knowledge] to evolve faster. Growing wealth, education, and population…continued this [trend]….The automation of engineering will speed the pace….In parallel, molecular technology will [mature]….[Then] artificial intelligence systems will bring still swifter automated engineering.…The rate of technological advance will then quicken to a great upward leap: in a brief time, many areas of technology will advance to the limits set by natural law [and halt]….Beyond it, if we survive, lies a world [of technologies]…able to make whatever they are told to make, without need for human labor. [Emphasis added.] [Drexler, 1987, Engines of Creation. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday]

9. Humans are the host for the evolutionary emergence of technological species. This is a continuation of cosmic evolution. This evolution seems driven to maximize the evolvability of every major evolving system, and thereby maximize the evolvability of the cosmos itself (Kevin Kelly calls this the “infinite game.”) Therefore, we know where technology comes from and where it is going — it will become autonomous and evolve to explore and populate the cosmos.

Doc Huston