Essay - Humanity is malfunctioning compared to its natural functioning. Our engineered environment is taking us further away from our natural one & human nature isn't able to catch up, & so our capabilities threaten our long term survival without sufficient human wisdom to manage them.

We’re malfunctioning as human beings relative to how we’re supposed to naturally function. We’re normally supposed to care way more about survival but nowadays we’re not able to do this effectively. Why is this? I believe it’s cause we’ve made an engineered environment that takes us further away from how we are supposed to function by its constant influencing of us. It’s like the idea that we are shaped by both nature & nurture. Assuming this nature & nurture is the case that means that you can be taken far away from your natural state of functioning by having an environment that doesn’t align well with that nature. For instance, our current environment is one in which there are no serious & constant threats like threat of starvation, of freezing, of being dehydrated, of being eaten, of catching a virus, etc. Because of this you could say that we’ve lost our good habit of being on the alert for threats & for necessities basically on high alert for the primary goal of survival basically being in survival mode. Most of us are not kept in survival mode & this is arguably a malfunctioning/distancing from how we’re supposed to naturally function. Nature is wise & the way we evolve is to help us with survival in the environment we evolve in. The problem is that natural selection is very good at filtering all the badly evolved species that weren’t sufficiently well evolved for survival in their environment. Now you might say that we’re evolving to our new environment but that misses the point which is that the goal is to survive in our environment. The problem is that the new environment is one that gets people to be drowned with so much dopamine that we basically stop caring about survival as much & start caring more about hedonistic pleasures. The problem is that the way we evolved was used to our natural environment where attaining pleasurable things meant survival in the short term & didn’t hurt us too much in the long term as long as we weren’t stupid enough to consume all our food sources. Basically back then it made a lot of sense to focus on the short term because we weren’t capable enough of dividing our effort between caring about short term & long term survival beyond simple reproduction & maybe a couple other things. Nowadays though we are very capable & so can care about long term survival but we’re still in that short term prioritization mode which prevents us from doing well at long term prioritization. So in part our malfunctioning compared to the goal of survival is due to our nature as in we didn’t evolve perfectly to be the perfectly well rounded survivalists for the various environments of the universe, instead we were adapted to be good survivalists in Earth’s nature. Now we’ve engineered our environment to be more suited for our short term survival but again we’ve not really given long term survival much of a focus in our engineering of our environment. & now that the environment is in place & has been acting on us for a while & is way stronger in it’s effects on us compared to back then with nature having very little time to affect us people in the developed world. This leads to us straying away from the natural nurture & closer to an unnatural form of nurture that isn’t sufficient in survival focus relative to its capabilities. Basically humanity has greatly increased its capabilities & so it must also increase its wisdom to manage those capabilities with survival as the main priority but we haven’t been doing that. Why? Well the first reason I can think of is that most people don’t need to think in survival terms anymore relative to their environment & instead people just specialize & rely on extreme interdependence. & the second reason I can think of is that again our short term natural prioritization of things means we don’t pay attention to long term survival & instead fixate on short term gratification which naturally would have been fine. Now it’s not fine though because we live in a hyper kinetic society where our consumption of energy & the many changes we bring about with that energy is a huge threat to our long term survival. & the reduced scarcity means that most of the consumption we do is not productive for survival but rather is overkill. Back then we didn’t go extinct cause we weren’t capable of wiping out our whole species if we weren’t wise enough. So natural selection didn’t filter us out. Now though we’ve been capable of wiping ourselves out for about only 77 years with the mass production of the atom bomb. So we’re babies in evolutionary terms for having to manage this level of capabilities. Human wisdom didn’t evolve to be able to handle our current level of complexity & we ourselves haven’t been prioritizing this wisdom to try & close the gap between our capabilities & our wisdom. If we continue along the path we’re on I believe that we’ll go extinct for the simple reason that we’re malfunctioning relative to our nature’s intentions & we ourselves are not evolved to handle our current environment & its capabilities. & again the only reason why we haven’t gone extinct all this time is because we’ve only recently developed the capabilities to completely wipe ourselves out. Now there are many more extinction level threats to our survival & these mainly have arisen due to our increases in size, consumption, & capability. & I believe the most urgent & important threat/capability is Ai which we’re not ready to handle & honestly probably will never be a safe technology as it requires unrealistic amounts of wisdom & self control & perfect engineering to make sure that it doesn’t go wrong over time. That is a longer summary of what will be discussed in this essay. Hopefully the ideas that I highlighted are interesting & hopefully you’ll enjoy my further digging into these topics.