The Blade, the Flame, and the Word

We've been cyborgs for as long as we've been human, and it could so very easily consume us.

Arnold Folls

Sorry for the wait. Regular posting commencing: now.

Cyborgs have gripped the human imagination in both fascination and horror since the concept was first articulated. People have made prosthetic replacements for lost body parts out of wood and metal for ages, but this is only ever done in extremisis, when a limb or other body part was lost following traumatic injury. Body modification is similarly ancient, although this has almost been for the purposes of adornment. Tattoos, piercings, scars, and various forms of skeletal binding exist, and have existed, in an incredible variety. Virtually every human culture we know of has established practices for the technological alteration of the human body. While some are more extreme in their practices than others, the practices themselves are universal.

Outright replacing biological functions with mechanical prostheses probably won’t be desirable to a lot of people any time soon. That says nothing, however, about augmentation, which does not necessarily involve the replacement of limbs or sensory organs. Things can be added to the human form, if done carefully enough, without taking anything away. Indeed this is already being done, with implanted RFID chips for instance. Others have experimented with nanoparticles that can be injected into the eye to provide infrared vision. Others still have placed magnets under their skin, in order to gain the ability to directly feel electromagnetic fields. Neuralink is an obvious example of an implantable technology that removes nothing (at least nothing physical), and is moreover not even externally visible – its early users don’t even risk being seen as freaks by those further down the adoption chain.

A very powerful objection against the practicality, to say nothing of the morality, of open-ended cybernetic augmentation of biological organisms is that living creatures are not machines. They very clearly are not. A living being, whether a single-celled organism, a blade of grass, or a human, is always self-directed; a machine is always the extension of some living creature’s will, and has no volition of its own. Organisms are not collections of parts as machines are, but dynamical flows of energy, matter, and information, like highly organized rivers perched on the edge of chaos. A living creature cannot be entirely disassembled, put back together, and reactivated, or at least this is a trick no one has ever accomplished; a machine almost invariably can. Organisms continuously grow and change over time; machines, while subject to the depredations of entropy as everything else, do not grow on their own. Organisms repair themselves; machines do not. Organisms reproduce; machines must be built. Given all of this, how can it be desirable to replace anything organic with anything mechanical?

Mistaking one’s own body as a collection of mechanical parts is often associated with schizophrenic delusions. There’s also an obvious masochism to cyborgization. It’s not accidental that there’s a lot of overlap between the extreme body modification and S&M subcultures. It’s probably also not accidental that mental illness, leftist political sympathies, and the widespread usage of increasingly extreme body modification as a tribal marker, all overlap with one another. This opens obvious questions about the mental health of those who would desire to become a cyborg in the first place, to say nothing of their ultimate state of mind if they went all the way with it and really became a collection of parts. Would this be like a permanent schizoid break? And if it was, would that state of mind necessarily be insane? The cyborg might seem utterly crazed to us, but by its own standards be boringly normal.

Body modification has been used for a variety of social functions. A very obvious one is for in-group/out-group distinctions by adopting some more or less visible mark, which can be as simple and discrete as a single tattoo on the arm or back, as in the case of various criminal gangs, or as elaborate and striking as a mouthful of filed teeth inset with gold and jade, with bones piercing lips, noses, and earlobes, all of which have been stretched out, against a background of tattoos in vivid primary colours covering the entire head and face, all of which takes place on a skull that has been bound from youth to be as long and narrow as something from a Geiger painting. Both serve to enable the in-group to distinguish themselves from non-members at a distance, and vice versa. Within the group, they may also provide a means of signalling status or communicating other social distinctions.

While body modification may be as old as the species, the concept of the cyborg is something different entirely. The cyborg introduces technology into the body, or even replaces a part of the body entirely, not as a superficial fashion accessory (although it may do that as well), and not to replace functions lost to accident or violence (which it can also do), but to extend its capabilities beyond those of its previous body, or even to add new capabilities entirely. An example of the former would be deliberately replacing one’s limbs in order to gain the ability to run at a hundred kilometres per hour and punch through concrete walls. In this case the cyborg simply does that which it could do before, only better. An example of the latter would be a neuralink that connects one’s thoughts directly to the Internet, and vice versa. Nothing remotely like that has ever been done before in the history of the phylum of the Chordata. The consequences of connecting central nervous systems together across the planet with direct electronic links is something entirely new.

Once the door has been opened to the technological alteration of the human animal for the purpose, not of decorating or fixing, but of improving it, the rapid progress of technology conceivably results in a sort of mutational acceleration. Very quickly, humans could change into something that is not recognizably human at all, even in a bad light and from a distance. Experiments with monkeys have already indicated that primate brains can adapt to control an additional robotic limb. It’s an open question just how many limbs a brain can get used to operating, but there’s no reason that the answer should be five and no more. Imagine some vaguely insectile metallic thing with three dozen clacking limbs and no recognizable human face. Few would consider such a creature human at first. Finding out that nestled within it is a human nervous system bristling with chips and wires probably wouldn’t be very reassuring, either.

But what would that nervous system itself think?

Alexey Virus

One of the horrors of this sort of future development is that it seems very difficult to prevent. Humans are curious, meddlesome tool-users. We like to fiddle with things. When we figure out how to do something, it’s hard to keep us from doing it; when a technical development is possible, it will probably happen. The very possibility introduces a sort of inevitability. Once the biological animal body has been reduced (conceptually if not in actuality) to pure technology, the replacement of humans as they radiate into a thousand different interplanetary ecological niches seems quite impossible to forestall. Even if the process of converting humanity into smart industrial machinery isn’t coercive, economics and fashion would no doubt combine to complete the update in an evolutionary eyeblink.

One’s horror might increase when one considers the current model of Homo sapiens, more or less unchanged for the past few hundred thousand years, and compares it to other animal species. Humans are remarkably weak creatures. We have neither claws nor sharp teeth, because as long as humans have been humans we’ve outsourced our flesh- and bone-crushing functions to blades manufactured from stone or metal. Our dentition is especially unimpressive, because we’ve had fire so long that our diet is inseparable from the universal human practice of cooking. Not only does fire help us soften food so our jaws don’t have to work so hard, it does some of the work of digesting the food for us by breaking cellulose bonds. The result is that our guts can be remarkably small in comparison to the range of foods that we eat.

In addition to our weak jawlines, tiny bellies, and weirdly blunt extremities, humans have a few other notable features. We’re mostly hairless, and quite unable to survive in almost any of the Earth’s environments absent protective clothing and heated enclosures. We’ve had clothing so long that we’ve become utterly dependent on it. We’re uncommonly slow, due to our adoption of a weird bipedal gait, which is absolutely necessary for our forelimbs to be able to carry and use tools as we walk, a function for which they are so well adapted that they’re useless for locomotion. Our heads are also weirdly large, to accommodate our hypertrophied brains, which are a non-negotiable cost given that, absent fire, cutting tools, clothing, and shelter, the organisms those brains are attached to would be dead in short order. The cost of our giant brains is far from negligible. They drink up something like a quarter of the body’s power supply. Being incredibly complicated, those brains also have the tendency to go haywire in fascinating and unpredictably catastrophic ways. Just look at the resources our society expends on dealing with mental illness, emotional disturbance, and spiritual afflictions of every variety. What other species does that?

Things get even more unsettling when we look inside our heads, and examine the structures within the hypertrophied brain itself, a great many of which exist solely for the purposes of manipulating technological artifacts. Our very ability to speak is one notable example. While many animals communicate their emotional status via vocalizations that can become quite intricate and specific, human language is the only known example in which thousands of distinct sounds take on specific symbolic meanings, which are then arranged according to grammatical rules such that recursively nested relational associations can be precisely described across both time and space. Some animals, such as dogs and apes, are able to learn to associate some relatively small number of individual sounds with their symbolic meanings, suggesting that the connection between sound and sense is likely universal in the social mammals, but there is little evidence that they are in any way sensitive to the grammar of human language.

The ability of the human brain to acquire language is a remarkable thing. During infancy, the human brain simply soaks in whatever language it hears, and within a few years the language has effortlessly burned its way into the neurons. Babies are born with the ability to learn language; no other animal is. However, if the conversational stimulus isn’t present, the ability is lost entirely. The language centres of children born into these unfortunate circumstances simply wither away. The human brain comes pre-equipped with dedicated circuitry meant specifically for the acquisition and utilization of a complex phonological system (which can be adapted to gestural and visual symbolic systems), the precise details of which are almost entirely arbitrary.

There are undoubtedly other ways in which our long coexistence with our own artifice has modified the basic structures of our brains. Parts of the human genome relating to the brain have been shown to have undergone rapid evolution over the ten thousand year period following the adoption of agriculture and settled, high-density living, and it certainly seems possible that certain behavioural selection pressures would have worked to reduce, for example, the amount of casual interpersonal violence.

When we peel back all the layers of technological sophistication that have accumulated between post-industrial society and the paleolithic, however, and reveal the human animal in its most primal form, we find an obligate engineer – already in possession of an expertly knapped flint blade, a camp fire, and language, and already possessed by them, his very existence presupposing their availability ... even if only in his imagination, for there is no doubt that there have been many humans through our species’ history who found themselves alone and naked in the wilderness, and had to make both blade and flame for themselves.

It seems to me that these three basic technologies are at the root of almost every technology we use. Nuclear reactors are not fires in any sense, but the basic principle – of finding a source of energy in the environment, and tapping it to destruction in order to extract useful work – is identical to the Flame. Our material technologies are all essentially ramifications of the Blade, either variations on the principle, or their production requiring edged tools of various kinds at all sorts of stages in the process¹. As to the internet, it is, like the book, simply an incredible elaboration of the Word.

Dave Massicotte

Pre-adapted as it is to technology, between the paleolithic up through the anthropocene the basic human form has remained unchanged in its essentials. Modified, yes: we’re a bit shorter, a bit frailer, a bit more docile, and if we’re honest, probably a bit dumber than our cavemen forebears. But the fundamental package has remained unaltered from the Dreamtime to the Information Age. There’s been a sort of detente between the human body and technology, at least on the time-scales of a human lifetime, such that we can look back at the bones and memories of our ancestors and see men and women that are instantly recognizable.

We can already feel that old, uneasy balance shifting beneath us, as technology surges off in directions our ancestors could never have imagined could exist, much less become so ubiquitous that their progeny would see such wonders as mundane. Our rapidly developing technologies have started to make a variety of human faculties superfluous, and we can see them withering almost in real time. Powered transportation has made pedestrian locomotion unnecessary; an epidemic of flabbiness is the consequence. Spellcheckers automatically correct our errors, and our ability to remember the spellings of words² immediately degrades. Calculators become commonplace, and everyone forgets how to do basic arithmetic. GPS has made it utterly unnecessary to maintain a mental map of an area, and very quickly we’re lost without our phones. One by one, our information technologies are replacing our cognitive faculties, and as our inborn abilities become redundant, our bodies simply lose them.

So far the effects of modern technology on the human organism have been at the phenotypic rather than genetic level: an atrophy from lack of use, rather than the permanent loss of abilities. We can still regain the weakened faculties that have been outsourced to technologies, and our society contains many influential subcultures dedicated to pursuits intended for precisely such purposes. The ability to directly alter the genome using technologies such as CRISPR could make that atrophy permanent in short order, however, should it become desirable to engineer a new type of human more highly adapted to advanced technologies³. We could very easily find ourselves at the biological point of no return ... although again, have we not been so since our very beginning?

Much of the current anxiety surrounding the cyborgization of the species is probably driven by the litany of bad experiences we’ve had with technology, particularly through the 20th century. We know now, in a way we didn’t grasp quite so viscerally before, the downsides technology can bring. Our bodies are poisoned in myriad ways by industrial chemicals introduced either deliberately, or via some form of pollution. There is not a human living in an industrial country that has not had their lives negatively affected by some awful intended or unintended consequence of technology, either due to direct effects on our own health, or the health of those we know and love, and usually both. On top of the transportation accidents, auto-immune diseases, psycho-emotional abnormalities, cancers, and iatrogenic deaths due to over-medication or botched or unnecessary surgeries, there’s evidence that industrial society is degrading the biology of everyone. Just comparing the people we see around us to photographs of our forebears a generation or a century ago, we can see how we’ve become so much softer, fatter, and weaker than they were. Longitudinal studies of testosterone levels and sperm quality in the males of industrialized societies both show precipitous declines. We’ve become less virile, and it’s happened in a shockingly short period of time.

Once again, however, this most recently visible biological degradation of the human species is but a step down a path the species has been on for some time. The bones of anatomically modern Homo sapiens retrieved from the upper paleolithic show them to be a larger, stronger, and more robust folk than our species has been for some time, to say nothing of our cousins the neanderthals, any one of whom could have thrown around linebackers like bowling pins. All were displaced by more gracile breeds of mankind, who overwhelmed their larger predecessors with sheer numbers and superior projectile weapons.

Something very similar happened with the spread of agriculture: despite being chronically malnourished and therefore individually smaller and weaker than the hunter-gatherers on their frontiers, the agriculturalists were far more numerous and so gradually displaced the hunter-gatherers from the most fertile areas. That process began to kick into high gear when the villages grew into cities and acquired warrior nobilities intent on conquest and empire. Scrawny as peasants might be⁴, in large enough numbers they could be herded into armies against which no tribal chieftain could possibly stand.

The sudden lurch towards a physically weaker, more effeminate sort of man during the 20th and 21st centuries is something that has happened many times before. The rise of agriculture brought malnutrition due to the lack of variation in the grain-heavy diet, which among other problems it caused also weakened immune systems, which combined with high-density living to give rise to pandemic infectious diseases. There’s a parallel between the price in physical health humans paid for agriculture, and the price we’ve paid for pioneering industry. We even did it for largely the same reasons: in both cases, the technological payoffs that came out of it were worth it ... and in both cases, once we made the pact with the new technology, and entered into the new way of life that came along with its adoption, there was no going back.

There’s no going back for us, either. Be honest. Do you want to give up your smartphone? Some of you might say yes, I’ll grant. But a lot of you wouldn’t. You like it too much. It’s too useful, so useful you already forget how you managed without it, so useful society has already reorganized itself at myriad levels around its ubiquity. But say you’re willing to do without a smartphone, which of course some people do. What about your computer? No more Internet? How many are really nostalgic for the days when all information came from books, newspapers, and television? I’ll bet not many. And of course we can go on almost indefinitely. Your car, your bicycle, your central heating and air conditioning. No matter how many of these you might say yes to, how many technologies you might personally be willing to shed, I very much doubt you’d be willing to get rid of them all. You certainly wouldn’t go so far as to abjure Blade, Flame, and Word.

Let’s say you did, though. Say you shed the three primal technologies, in an effort to rid yourself of all of the evils they bring. We’ll place you, naked, in a subtropical forest – the sort of place you might survive unclad year-round, for without the Blade, you won’t be dressing yourself. Without the Word – without, to be clear, both the meta-grammar built into the human brain, and the ability to assign specific meanings to thousands of distinct sound patterns – you are of course unable to speak, and while you can communicate your emotional state and probably some amount of situational information via body language⁵, this isn’t really much more than a dog can do. Of course, you have to eat, so you’ll be limited to whatever roots you can dig up, fruits you can pick, and whatever you can kill. Without the Blade I doubt you’ll be killing anything much larger than a rabbit, since you’ll be doing so with bare hands and your teeth. Without the Flame, you won’t be cooking your food either, so after you bite into the rodent’s neck to crush its spine, you might as well immediately commence eating its wiggling flesh raw.

In such a state, are you easily distinguished from an animal? Is there any meaningful difference at all? Obviously you’d still have some sort of subjectivity, but you’d be unable to communicate any but the most basic elements of it to anyone else, nor would you have the ability to receive anyone else’s descriptions of their own interior states. What sort of interior life would you develop, without any access to language at all? And again ... would it be distinct in any notable way from the interiority we might expect in any of the higher beasts?

Not only can we not survive without technology, but at the most basic level of what it is to be human, without technology we’re not even recognizably human. Yet at the same time, as we contemplate the dawning age of an unrecognizable Home mechanicus, it seems that it is our very technology, the very thing that makes us human, that will erase our humanity. The perversity of that contradiction adds to the horror that the figure of the cyborg elicits.

It isn’t necessarily inevitable that humans will be surgically, chemically, and biologically modified into something unrecognizable over the next century or two. That will only happen if technology continues to advance, or more specifically, if certain technologies continue to advance. That’s a broad category of technologies, however, and by pushing on them just a bit it’s not hard to conceptualize very interesting things that people could do. What does stable diffusion look like, when it has a high-cadence feedback loop with a human brain through a neuralink? What can a person do with that, if they had the same degree of control over it that you have over a limb? What does it mean to speak a language, when neuralink can talk directly to a language engine and translate your thoughts in real time into any language you please? And note that things like stable diffusion and language engines and every other sort of statistical learning program are built to improve with feedback, which they would be getting a lot of. These would be casual superpowers, imprinted in a semiconductor-and-software neocortex.

Charles Chen Ge

Technology alone isn’t enough to guarantee that the next century will see our species essentially disappearing into a biomechanical Cambrian Explosion on an interplanetary scale. Culture, of course, plays a large role. One can easily imagine cultures in which strong taboos are placed upon open, obvious modification or replacement of one’s bodily parts for the purpose of functional improvement, in much the same way that Christian cultures tend to frown upon tattooing or piercing the skin as a blasphemous desecration of God’s creation, perhaps relegating such practices to the criminal underworld. However, if there are indeed obvious benefits to cybernetic modification of human tissue, as almost by definition there would be as that is the point of it, cultures that discourage the practice would be forced to compete without these unnatural advantages against those who have embraced them. Furthermore, while there are cultures that have discouraged body modification, there are also a great many who embraced it with enthusiasm. If surviving neolithic cultures are anything to go by, body modification has if anything been the human norm deep into our prehistory. Given that, it is as easy to imagine a culture that embraces cybernetic modification as it is one that rejects it. It’s not at all hard to imagine a situation some centuries hence, in which there are terrestrial backwaters in which mostly unmodified humans still gather, living much like the Amish in relation to the cyborgs that have settled the solar system.

It’s possible, of course, that the necessary technology for all of this to happen, for the species to be confronted with this terminal evolutionary radiation, will simply never develop, or will be much slower to develop than expected. There will be unexpected difficulties in the development of augmentation prosthetics. It’s likely that it will never actually quite live up to our dreams, as proves to be the case with almost any technology we translate from our imaginations to reality. One should always keep in mind that when the future finally arrives, it tends to become banal quite rapidly, and the world, though changed, is not nearly as changed as we’d expected. Perhaps these factors might intertwine with cultural influences to slow the development of the first truly cyborg society for some hundreds or even thousands of years. Perhaps they’ll prevent it entirely, although it’s truly hard to see why. If not, thousands of years are mere moments on geological timescales. Over the millions of years our species might persist, we would only have to make the choice to disappear into our technology once.

I’m not really trying to describe a Singularity here, whether Technological, Human, or otherwise. The classic Technological Singularity is an endless exponential improvement in software and hardware that ultimately leads to a general purpose AI a million times smarter than a human, which then proceeds to solve the universe. I have no expectation that anything like that is even possible; at least, I don’t think humans can do that, or not anytime soon. Performing a biological function more effectively than a biological organ evolved for that function turns out to be a very difficult thing to do, if you try to do it in exactly the way biology does. Doing the function the way a machine would do it is much easier, and frequently narrowly superior in useful ways. Our airplanes don’t fly like birds, but birds don’t break the sound barrier. Machine learning will develop in the same fashion. They will be engines, not people made of software, or gods. Just like airplanes, the technology will develop fast, experience a number of breakthroughs, mature, and plateau. Machine learning will probably be boring and banal by mid-century. With this latest expression of the Word mastered, perhaps we’ll find some new ramification of the Blade or the Flame to catch our technological imagination next.

I also don’t mean a Tech Singularity in the Chris Langan sense, which is a kind of economic black hole forming inside the techno-oligarchic financial parasite class that centralizes all wealth, control, and power in ever fewer hands. Such an abomination is certainly a possibility, and there’s no question that various trends on our planet, as well as the stated intentions and behaviour of the ownership and managerial classes themselves, indicate that the world is being intentionally pushed in that direction. With all that said, I don’t really like Langan’s division of the two sociospiritual attractor states as Technological versus Human Singularities. Humans and technology are inextricably intertwined. You can’t have one without the other. Both attractor states involve humans and technology in large amounts, and differ mainly in terms of how the humans are organized, and probably to a lesser degree (at least at first) in terms of what technologies are in use. I like to think of them⁶ as Castle Centralistein versus Distribuland.

No, the argument here, if there is an argument, is much more general than that. No Singularity of any kind is necessary for humans to take up the practice of modifying their bodies, for humans have been doing so practically as long as they have existed, and indeed belong to a species for which entanglement with technology was synonymous from its inception. Nor is a Singularity necessary for technologies to be developed that add to or extend human capabilities, since that is what technology fundamentally exists to do. All that needs to happen for the cyborg dawn is for the concept of body modification for functional rather than aesthetic purposes to catch on with one human subculture. While the hierarchical structure of Castle Centralistein might try to make such modification of the species mandatory, and would undoubtedly use it in order to further the control of the vampires squatting at its dark heart, there’s absolutely nothing stopping one or more likely several weird subcultures in the Distribuland scenario from hacking their physical structure for their own purposes. Either way, come back in a few thousand years, and cyborgs will have become commonplace, and probably the default; Homo sapiens an anachronistic curiosity, or simply extinct.

Only two alternatives to cyborgization seem to present themselves from an evolutionary standpoint. One is to embrace stasis: a mass adoption of an ideology that locks technology into ancestral norms, and prevents any further advances. Technology changed only very slowly on human timescales through most of our history. It is not impossible that the species might place a moratorium on further technical development. Whether it could maintain such a taboo for millions of years is another question. I’m doubtful.

The other alternative is to attempt a middle way, eschewing direct involvement of technology with human flesh while still pursuing advancement along various ends. In this case, as technology proves capable of handling ever more biological functions, it seems likely that the body’s ability to perform those functions would wither, as has been the historical pattern whenever a new technology matures. That future could see either the devolution of humans into hooting wirehead monkeys tickling touchscreens, or simply mutation into something with a wildly different cognitive architecture which would probably strike us as an idiot-savant riven by psychoses. Whether the long-term results of such a process taken to its logical extremes are any different from the classical cyborg seems a matter of hair-splitting semantics.

Hence the anxiety and fascination surrounding the cyborg, which ultimately comes down to the simultaneously terrifying and thrilling possibility that our technosphere may decide not to wait for our organisms to wither through evolutionary mechanisms, and start altering the body on mechanical engineering timescales instead. The nightmare version of the cyborg is probably best expressed by the Borg of Star Trek, which combine the the relentlessness of a junkyard zombie apocalypse with the overwhelming advantages granted by ultra-high technology harnessed by a hive mind of trillions of neurally networked beings. The seductive dream is maybe best expressed by Ghost in the Shell, in which ubiquitous cyborg enhancement throughout what seems to be a highly functional and even attractive civilization is simply a fact of life taken for granted by anyone, with the central protagonist Major Kusanagi being entirely robotic save for her brain and loving everything about it, most especially the superpowers it grants her and her team of cyborgs and AI robots, which enable them to protect innocent people from threats such as malfunctioning AIs. The Borg assimilate you whether you want to or not. In GitS, humans have become cyborgs because they lost parts due to injuries, or for practical or even aesthetic reasons. Cyberbrains, for example, are ubiquitous in GitS, presumably because they are useful, and while their vulnerability to malicious hacking is a recurring plot point there’s no indication that their use has been forced on anyone.

What makes the Borg so terrifying is that they seem unstoppable. The best you can do is escape. Temporarily. Every time they’re encountered, the refrain is the same: you will be assimilated. Whether today or in a thousand years it is all the same to them. Every species in the Galaxy will ultimately become Borg, not because the Borg wish it, but because it is efficient and therefore inevitable. This plays on the uneasy feeling we have that technobiological change is not something we can prevent. It will happen whether we like it or not, in the end we ourselves will not be able to avoid using and ultimately becoming reliant upon it, and in the long run the species will pay with yet another part of our bodies or, what’s worse now that infotech is here, our minds, and perhaps even our souls. The Borg are a metaphor for the relentless horror of technological evolution just as more traditional zombies are a metaphor for unstoppable biological death.

Just as with the Borg, whether it happens this century via widespread, intentional cyborgization, or in a hundred thousand years due to evolutionary pressure adapting our species to the ubiquitous presence of mature robotic and information technologies, the end result is the same: a species whittled down to little more than a brain, and probably an oddly sized and proportioned brain at that, unable to survive without an extensive technical infrastructure. That infrastructure would very likely give those cyborgs remarkable abilities in comparison to our own, so they might be happy with that state of affairs, although their satisfaction will be irrelevant as they’ll be as trapped in their condition as we are by our own technosphere, no more able to become fully biologically human, than we are to return to the paleolithic.

However, it could be that another technology will serve as a countervailing force to prevent the rapid biological deterioration of the species, one that builds on something that is absolutely essential not just to humans, but to all life, but which has only very recently been added alongside Blade, Flame, and Word to our repertoire of fundamental technologies: the technology of the Blood.

Alexey Virus

1. This is why I consider Blade primary and clothing, an almost but not quite equally primordial technology, not: the blade is required both to kill the gazelle, and to skin the carcass to wear its fur against the chill

2. Or the strokes required to draw an ideogram, for the same phenomenon is seen in Eastern Asia.

3. Although to be fair, gene editing could also, in principle, reverse such changes just as readily.

4. The basic nutritional condition of the peasant, by the way, remained quite grim up until very recently in historical time. The Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor had very large populations that ate essentially nothing but grain, a diet which they maintained for thousands of years, with little change through most of the Iron Age. Throughout this entire period, only the nobility could access the rich, varied, animal-based diet that was the human default through our hundreds of thousands of years of prehistory. It was only in the last century or so, with the agricultural productivity enabled by industrial technology, and the ability to preserve and transport vast quantities of food over huge distances, that what we would consider a good diet became generally available to the average citizen. Notably, however, the typical American diet is based to a ridiculous degree on corn and soybean derivatives, and while this is in no way good for them it can be argued that this 21st century peasant food at least spares its victims the monotony of another day of unflavoured porridge that was his ancestor’s daily lot. Diets reminiscent of those enjoyed by the nobility of old or the hunter-gatherers of the Ice Age are available to any willing and able to pay, but it’s interesting that this dietary choice remains in general a middle and upper class marker, and not only for economic reasons.

5. It’s actually incredible how much you can get across by gesturing like a monkey. Anyone who’s ever travelled somewhere in which no one speaks their own language, and vice versa, discovers this very quickly.

6. As of five seconds ago when I thought of these.