Barnabás Börcsök

…on the Interplay of Society and Technological Advancements

Listening to Lex Fridman’s recent talk with David Buss on his podcast , at one point they were discussing how cavemen couldn’t hoard their bounty (a.k.a. the meat of the beast they just slayed) in times of old, as opposed to nowadays’ cash economies. This led them to “store the meat in the bodies of their friends”. Let’s say, 4 out of 5 times, you failed to slay a beast to keep you from starving. On the flip side, 1 out of 5 times you had a huge abundance of valuable meat that you simply couldn’t store, and it made sense to share it with your fellows, lest it go bad. Playing with this idea gives us an interesting lens through which we can observe the profound effect of even the simplest of inventions on society, like salting meat to preserve it.

The intricate and chaotic interplay of technological advancements and societal change is something I find my thoughts coming back to. Inventions like the wheel, money, or the internet (and everything built upon these) profoundly redefined how we interact with each other, how we grasp the world around us, and maybe most importantly, the very internal discussions and perceptions we have with and of ourselves.