I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.
What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?
this is my pet concern as well and it’s always struck me as being bit darwinist. i cope by telling myself that instead of environmental evolutionary pressures, it’ll be social and cultural pressures instead. so long as those pressures are grounded in material reality and are able effectively act on the population at large, we won’t evolutionarily overfit and get stuck in some local minimum. all the more reason to prefer socialism over liberalism.
The inherent (and problematic) implication in this concern is that there’s a ‘good’ way to evolve and a ‘bad’ way. While technology and medicine massively relieves biological pressures, some genetics diseases can be entirely managed, and more people are surviving to procreate, what we’ll see in the medium-long term is a major uptick in genetic diversity, some people will be massively reliant on technology, some won’t.
As we hopefully know by now, genetic diversity is a Good Thing ™. As it increases, so will we as a species have more disease resistance, be able to fill more niches, we’ll have a wider scope of bodies and brain patterns to have new and cool thoughts etc. I do think cultural and social pressures on sexual selection could be problematic, rather than a good thing, but that’ll entirely depend on how society goes.
Though honestly, I think it’s overwhelmingly certain that we’ll have the capability to alter human genetics on a large scale before any of modern evolutionary pressures become relevant. If you accept that, then the whole discussion becomes rather moot.