There are two groups of people. They’re each given a magic/alien/divine trinket.
Group A’s trinket can instantly produce any raw resource. A raw resource is anything that could exist without a humor labor process (cooking, blacksmithing, woodworking, etc). If something absolutely requires human labor to be put into it to exist, it can’t be made by the magic box.
Group B’s trinket can make one gain a hypothetically “perfect” theoretical understanding of everything. Essentially, if there was a Universal PhD in Everything (medicine, engineering, etc.), they would obtain it without any effort. It works on anyone, and this knowledge is implanted instantly.
If given all the time in the universe, which group would survive the test of time or come out on top of the other? This has been stirring in my brain for a while, and I want to hear your thoughts.
I personally lean Group B because they wouldn’t have to discover or painstakingly engineer anything, and could immediately set their sails for technologies they know to exist. But at the same time, Group A would never have to worry about scarcity, so they could dedicate all of their time to infrastructure and research unlike Group B which still has to deal with scarcity.
Lol fair enough.
I will say that your metalworking example proves my point, it’s just that what the metalworkers in Bronze Age Europe had different surpluses in different amounts to work with than those in Central America. It’s not like they knew about each other and were working towards some idealized goal. They were able to screw around with the existing surpluses they had access to. Like working with pure copper is cool unless you are looking for something that has the property of bronze or know that it exists, and unless you have created large surpluses of tin in your excavation of copper there is no reason to experiment with that kind of alloying.
Agreed, it is reductionist. But my point wasn’t that all things are born out of surplus, just the vast, vast, majority and certainly the majority of social structures.
And agreed, the major problem with games like Civ, Paradox, D&D etc is that you do technically have perfect knowledge of what is supposed to come next on the tech or level up tree. You have a level of accurate mathematical foresight that just doesn’t actually exist within real life experimentation. It is 100% gamer brain.
Another thing that I didn’t even think to bitch at the op about is that having some amount of surplus or not as a driver of human development is not even supported by evidence and all the shit we’re talking about is wild ass speculation.
Tbh 10/10 great post and thread, would get all worked up again.