Watch now | In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the fascinating parallels between human behavior in cities and animal behavior in zoos.
You maybe on to something here since as opposed to zoo animals, pets and livestock have grown exponentially alone with humans... Actually, the might still be growing exponentially whereas we ourselves have dropped below replacement rate.
(OMG, here's a possible sci-fi topic, perhaps for AI playthrough. What if a solution to population collapse turns into AI adopting is as pets, but then somehow the AI loses interest in reproducing while maximizing our reproduction and spread throughout the galaxy, causing all the AI along with the required tech to go extinct just as the terraforming completes. Somehow this is tragic and delightful at the same time, with potential/eventually wars being horrific but limited due to distance and stars slowly drifting towards and away from each other.)
Okay, but that aside, what makes pets and livestock want to keep breeding? Is it that they are still engaged with community and have agency in the well being for themselves and others?
Shortly after writing the above comment, SubStack suggested the following article which is a decent example of what I described, albeit focused on medicine rather than demographics/culture:
My biggest take away was the leveraging of thousands of years of natural experimentation along with the necessary refocus on how to capture/separate/liberate the benefits of the symbiotic relationship from the parasitic base conditions. Obviously technology can provide precursors, but that still loses the agency inherent to our truly sympathetic microbiome.
(I should mention that it had never suggested anything like this before, and so by elimination I'm taking it as the algorithm/AI directly responding to what I said/suggested.)
... There may also be some better data and wider ranges with scientific data regarding human-animal exploration and environmental competition, e.g. lab/test animals, tag/tracking, hunting, pest/preditor control, human incursion, invasive species, etc. There is a whole history of humans struggling/succeeding at first in killing creatures/populations, and then later in trying to save/restore species/ecosystems.
At a minimum, I wonder if, and to what result/extent, any of the tools, techniques, technologies, practices, procedures, lessons learned, etc. from these other fields may have been transposed/commandeered to address population collapse?
My sense is that this has been commonly done with plants in agriculture, and microbes in medicine (including veterinary and agriculture), so duplicating/overlaying transformations for similar configuration/situation may be something that higher order AI should be able to survey, catalog, and cross prioritize (i.e. rank across a matrix of factors such that the weights for each factor can be easily adjusted as the confidence in your knowledge of their significance moves from ballpark guesses to refined/statistical fact).
Quite likely and certainly something to account for. Nevertheless, we've done this to ourselves as well, perhaps to different degrees across different populations, yet the result seems largely the same, both now and historically.
Furthermore, and building off your insight, or seems like this might be factored out by looking at differences in outcomes between similar cases of recent capture/domestication like is done with exotic pets and historically with barbarian nomads after conquest, and subsequent victory/defeat (or even capture/slavery).
I grant that these are all cases of strangers in a strange new land/culture, but nowadays aren't we all, or at least most in the city and suburbs?
At a minimum, the cases of persisting, initially foreign minority groups suggests that at some point generic/cultural evolution kicks in. And since both are in play, this seems useful at least as a range of model cases, or case studies, with which to help filter and refine later theories, e.g. what traits and/or social technologies harden/weaken, or even doom/inoculate a population and what precursors/circumstances may be required?
You maybe on to something here since as opposed to zoo animals, pets and livestock have grown exponentially alone with humans... Actually, the might still be growing exponentially whereas we ourselves have dropped below replacement rate.
(OMG, here's a possible sci-fi topic, perhaps for AI playthrough. What if a solution to population collapse turns into AI adopting is as pets, but then somehow the AI loses interest in reproducing while maximizing our reproduction and spread throughout the galaxy, causing all the AI along with the required tech to go extinct just as the terraforming completes. Somehow this is tragic and delightful at the same time, with potential/eventually wars being horrific but limited due to distance and stars slowly drifting towards and away from each other.)
Okay, but that aside, what makes pets and livestock want to keep breeding? Is it that they are still engaged with community and have agency in the well being for themselves and others?
Hahaa—but good point. We'd reckon domesticated animals breed well in captivity because they've evolved to live in captivity. Zoo animals have not.
Shortly after writing the above comment, SubStack suggested the following article which is a decent example of what I described, albeit focused on medicine rather than demographics/culture:
https://open.substack.com/pub/freethinkmedia/p/we-purged-worms-from-our-bodies-and?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=45ygps
My biggest take away was the leveraging of thousands of years of natural experimentation along with the necessary refocus on how to capture/separate/liberate the benefits of the symbiotic relationship from the parasitic base conditions. Obviously technology can provide precursors, but that still loses the agency inherent to our truly sympathetic microbiome.
(I should mention that it had never suggested anything like this before, and so by elimination I'm taking it as the algorithm/AI directly responding to what I said/suggested.)
... There may also be some better data and wider ranges with scientific data regarding human-animal exploration and environmental competition, e.g. lab/test animals, tag/tracking, hunting, pest/preditor control, human incursion, invasive species, etc. There is a whole history of humans struggling/succeeding at first in killing creatures/populations, and then later in trying to save/restore species/ecosystems.
At a minimum, I wonder if, and to what result/extent, any of the tools, techniques, technologies, practices, procedures, lessons learned, etc. from these other fields may have been transposed/commandeered to address population collapse?
My sense is that this has been commonly done with plants in agriculture, and microbes in medicine (including veterinary and agriculture), so duplicating/overlaying transformations for similar configuration/situation may be something that higher order AI should be able to survey, catalog, and cross prioritize (i.e. rank across a matrix of factors such that the weights for each factor can be easily adjusted as the confidence in your knowledge of their significance moves from ballpark guesses to refined/statistical fact).
Quite likely and certainly something to account for. Nevertheless, we've done this to ourselves as well, perhaps to different degrees across different populations, yet the result seems largely the same, both now and historically.
Furthermore, and building off your insight, or seems like this might be factored out by looking at differences in outcomes between similar cases of recent capture/domestication like is done with exotic pets and historically with barbarian nomads after conquest, and subsequent victory/defeat (or even capture/slavery).
I grant that these are all cases of strangers in a strange new land/culture, but nowadays aren't we all, or at least most in the city and suburbs?
At a minimum, the cases of persisting, initially foreign minority groups suggests that at some point generic/cultural evolution kicks in. And since both are in play, this seems useful at least as a range of model cases, or case studies, with which to help filter and refine later theories, e.g. what traits and/or social technologies harden/weaken, or even doom/inoculate a population and what precursors/circumstances may be required?
Interesting!
Are you both Jews?
Nope, though I (Simone) am likely matrilineally Jewish.
Oh you don't know if your mom's Jewish lol?