I’ll explain where this question came from below as its a little convoluted but basically my question concerns how newly contacted people react when introduced to modern civilisation, either directly by being taken and shown or through being taught about it. Has there been any study, research of just anecdotal evidence of what such a person or contacted people have thought or felt about modern western society and technology, or is it just so far outside their experience its hard to know where to begin?
As for the explanation I was idly daydreaming on my commute to work today about an ancient warrior being brought forward to the modern day, he asks to meet his modern equivalent and is introduced to a petite young woman, he is then taken around the corner and shown her weapon, a fully armed jet fighter. I imagine he would find the whole thing laughable or some sort of trick as it would be so far outside his own context he would have difficulty comprehending what he was being shown. But of course we don’t need time-travel for a similar scenario, just take a warrior from a newly contacted tribal people and do the same thing.
It also made me wonder if we were introduced to technology several thousands of years more advanced would we even recognise what it was?
Even the most primitive people can grasp sophisticated concepts…if brought to them one step at a time. Instead of going directly to a jet fighter, start with paper airplanes, then models, then toys, then small aircraft, etc.
This is how we all learned in school: from singing the ABC song to studying Milton.
(I suspect that culture shock would be more dismaying than techno shock. Okay, yeah, okay, you have cars and airplanes… And you just buy food in a store? All you want? Any time of day? You’ve never gone hungry? Wow!)
I suspect one difference is that many of us are aware of technology that we have little to no idea how it actually works. What really goes on inside a computer, an MRI machine, etc. So if someone said they had a machine that teleported things or did some other thing we didn’t understand, we’d likely think OK it’s just more advanced technology.
But the technology that a primitive hunter gatherer knows, spears, pottery, ropes, he probably understands how it works and has likely made it or seen it made himself. He might not well understand what a computer could possibly do.
On this part, there is a physical limit to what the chemical bonds between elements can do. Only so much tensile or compressive strength a material can have. Only so fast electrons (or photons) can move through circuits. Science isn’t going to invent magic. We now have much less room to grow left than ancient people did. We might have trouble recognizing some technology from 200 years in the future, but I doubt that people from 200 years in the future would have much trouble recognizing anything from 20,000 or 200,000 or 2,000,000 years in the future. (And someone well versed in science fiction today would probably be able to give a pretty good guess as to the majority of those future technologies.)
The “newly contacted people” want T-shirts and cheap consumer electronics like everybody else; why would you expect differently?
As for the effects of contact, as with many other colonial enterprises, all too often there is a certain level of violence as outsiders come to plunder the people’s resources and the locals return the favor: I am thinking of this feature.
The inhabitants of the nearby North Sentinel Island decided to solve the looming problem simply by killing all visitors to the island, a strategy which seems to have paid off for the time being as they are being left alone.
Darren I think we’ve butted heads a bunch on this, but there’s still “plenty of room left at the bottom”. That’s a line by Eric Drexler, credited with inventing the concept of nanotechnology.
What this means is that in one sense you are generally correct. If we could see the world in 1000 years, whatever beings live in it would still probably be limited by the things that you mention.
But in another sense, you’re wrong. The reason is that if you can build self replicating machinery that is rapid (like living cells), exact, and compact, you can deconstruct planets. You could build on a scale we can barely imagine. You could turn the Moon into a swarm of rocks by covering it with factories, having them mine ever deeper, and launch using mass drivers the waste and output products. The energy to do this would come from solar - at first from panels above the factories, later you’d start beaming power down from space with microwaves, making the vast arrays in space from the first round of products from those factories. *
At the end of the process there’d be no Moon, just a cloud of things you made from it and waste containers. (“waste” is the elements you don’t need at the moment, they are in labeled containers)
You could do the same thing to the Earth. And Mercury. Maybe Venus, though I don’t know how you get rid of the atmosphere that makes temperatures at the surface too hot for machinery to run (nowhere to get rid of the waste heat)
Maybe you could build a sun shade and block all light from hitting Venus, then let it cool.
Individually, you’re still correct. What you would see - you’d need a spacecraft to go around and even explore the creations of this civilization - would be machinery that is still not really any stronger than before. If there’s a planet left and hover-cars, they’d use chemical fuels you’d recognize and some variant on jet engines or propellers you’d recognize. (or powered beamed down by microwaves, that might look weird but the propellers would be the same)
If they loaned you a spacecraft, barring fundamental discoveries about the nature of the universe, it would still use propellant. Probably some variant of an electric thruster we already have invented. Maybe beamed power. (makes it lighter)
If you took a microscope to their computers, you’d see something that look like logic gates, just shrunk as far as it will go (we’re getting close now)…but fully 3-dimensional instead of 2d.
*I have a feeling you’re going to argue with me on this. All I can say is that you can agree that if you posit an arbitrary number of years into the future where tech is developed to the absolute limits, and you are gathering the energy to do this from a PV array bigger than the surface area of the Earth, do you agree that you could in fact make this transformation to the Moon?
I appreciate your enthusiasm for all things self-replicating, SamuelA, even if most people are sceptical on this message board. I’m very hopeful myself about the prospect for self-replication technology in the long run. After all we are self-replicating systems ourselves, and we have created many self-replicating systems already- our economy and industry are a mesh of self-replicating systems that constantly recreate themselves.
But refining all that activity down into easily managed packages that can act autonomously is a goal for the relatively distant future- I doubt that anyone alive today will see autonomous replicators, or factories on the Moon, or Venus sunshades. If you present these possibilities as long term goals rather than something that is ‘just around the corner’ you might be able to persuade more people.
One good rule of thumb is that people tend to over-estimate the near-term effects and benefits of new technology, but they underestimate the long-term consequences.
I was excited about nanotechnology, too. In 1989. But now I believe that the vast majority of the breathless, hyperbolic promises are as big a steaming pile of horseshit as antigravity and FTL.
Ok. So I can see where you are coming from. If you read the trade papers in the late 1960s/early 1970s about the prospects of AI, you’d be pretty excited, right? You’d be expecting sentient computers, derived from mainframe technology, any day now, right? They’d be flawless decision makers, able to deduce the correct course of action from a series of logical inferences.
But it took until now before we even sorta have some of what they were promising, working just barely in prototypes in the lab, and computers are still not conscious or able to carry on a conversation.
But you agree that at this point, eventual general AI definitely going to happen, right? You’d be an idiot if you didn’t see the trend going there at a decent clip.
It just took an extra 30 years beyond how it might have looked.
Drexlerian factories are a similar colossal task. To build one is not something you can make meaningful progress on without investing immense resources and, ironically, you might need a form of AI to do the design work needed. It took computers that are millions of times faster than the machines available to AI researchers in the 1970s, with millions of times more memory, and data sets that are larger in size than the sum of every book every published, with illustrations, in the 1970s.
But the fundamentals are there. Maybe it’ll be an extra 30 years. Maybe 300 or 3000. But it will happen. This is because they are compatible with physical laws.
FTL and antigravity are incompatible with our current understanding of the laws of physics. Thus the timeline to reach them is “never, unless some new discovery is made”.
A person from a primitive, previously uncontacted tribe has the same mental capabilities as you or I, they just lack some of the background training and information to* sort of *understand why technology does what it does. But he doesn’t need to know any of that and neither do you.
A child does not need to understand the electro-magnetic spectrum, GPS satellites, cell towers, how a battery stores electricity, or anything else to quickly learn how to use a cell phone, happens every day. Will the child be so bothered by the background technology that it must know how it all works? Nope, it just wants to know the basics of how to operate it. How to get it to do what the child wants done.
Most modern people no longer have any idea how their car or even the washing machine really works beyond the basics. They just know how to operate them. Hunter-gatherer guy could be taught how to drive a car in little more time than it takes to teach a teenager. He doesn’t need to understand the internal combustion engine.
And if you were thrust 1000 years into the future you wouldn’t need to know how anything does what it does, just how to get it to do what you want from it. And you will find the people 1000 years in the future are little different than you are. Great leaps in brain power? No. Changes is social structure, culture shock, sure, but you would experience those changes whether you went 1000 forward or backward.
There are no “uncontacted people” on planet Earth.
Are there people who live in the jungle and are pretty hostile to strangers? Yeah, there are. But these people aren’t “uncontacted”. They know all about people from the outside world, and the main thing they know is that they hate people from the outside world.
Maybe they don’t understand how an airplane or a computer works, but neither do 99% of American citizens. A computer is a magic box that shows pictures and makes noises, that’s what most people understand. An airplane is a magic box that flies through the sky, that’s what most people understand. A horticulturalist from the Amazon rainforest can understand how they work the same way everyone else understands. The main difference is that modern Americans grow up around thousands of modern machines that they don’t understand, and so they’re used to the idea of not understanding them, and don’t expect to understand them.
I’m a GIS programmer. Even when working with regular programmers and DB designers, we have quite a bridge to cross. And don’t every put me in a position to be a sys admin network person.
We can talk though.
I suspect in the OP’s scenario, it would look like magic. A bic lighter or pad of paper would be magic.
Was it Heinlein or Clarke who said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”?
I don’t believe we’ll have AI in the foreseeable future. What we will have is systems whose responses are so good, we won’t be sure if they are sentient or not. How do then prove it? (Recall that an incredibly simple system like Eliza was able to fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, 30-plus years ago. Computers win at chess, and now at Go, but are they “intelligent”? The debate will become more esoteric.
Similarly, even with the real limitations of materials, there is as mentioned plenty of potential. Who knows - maybe we’ll master tech to the point of creating Mister Fusion appliances, and the next big debate will be global warming - not CO2 but waste heat from industrial processes and personal tech on a scale that threatens local climates. Too many people with their flying cars using prodigious amounts of H->He fusion, not to mention air conditioning, flying campers, and cryogenic immortality chambers. There’ll be room for your whole body, not just your head.
10 billion people living a lifestyle currently the super-rich can only dream of… how many kilowatt-hours will that take?
While it was a while back, there was a 20th Century “first contact” with a previously-undiscovered culture living in New Guinea, the Dani. The Dani were the prototypical “stone age” undiscovered tribe. They went around nearly naked, and their technology hadn’t progressed past stone tools.
During WWII a transport plane crashed in the inaccessible central valley where they lived. The survivors were ultimately rescued by paratroopers. The attitudes towards the Dani were a mix of respect and condescension. The Dani had a much more sophisticated culture than the Americans assumed, but they also practiced ritual warfare, belying the “Shangri-La” name that the American gave the valley.
The Dani thought the Americans were their gods returning, and the prophecy said that their return would mark a significant change to their way of life. in this, the prophecy was correct. Now they have one of the highest rates of AIDS anywhere in the region. And they wear tee shirts with sports teams and consumer products on them.
Even in this case there had been some contact with the Dani previously, in 1938. Perhaps the Dani in this valley were not aware of his previous contact. It is very difficult to find a culture that had no contact of some kind during the 20th Century.
The Dani living around the plane crash had not heard of, and had not been a party to, the previous contact. Which is good, as otherwise, the locals would have likely killed them, being owed a death from the killing of a Dani in 1938. Of course, the survivors and paratroopers had no way of knowing this. They just got lucky.
