Comment by Robin Hanson

But if not, then this end of innovation suggests our descendants will become extremely well adapted in a biological sense to the stable components of their environment. Their behavior will be nearly locally optimal, at least for the purpose of ensuring the continuation of similar behaviors. In most places, population will rise to levels consistent with a competitive evolutionary equilibrium, with living standards near adaptive subsistence levels. Such consumption levels have characterized almost all animals in Earth history, almost all humans before 200 years ago, and a billion humans today. [...] If the speed of light limits the speed of future communication, if the pace of local cultural change is not ridiculously slow, and if there isn’t strong universal coordination, then the physical scale of the universe should ensure that future cultures must also fragment into many local cultures. [...] Our distant forager ancestors were well adapted to their very slowly changing world, and were quite culturally and militarily fragmented over the planet. Our distant descendants are thus likely to be more similar to our distant ancestors in these ways. Our current “dreamtime” era is cosmologically unusual; it is a brief period of a rapidly growing highly integrated global culture, with many important behaviors that are quite far from biologically adaptive. We can’t be sure in what future era the patterns of history might “turn the corner” to return to the patterns of our distant past and distant future. But we should weakly expect that without global coordination the next great era will begin to move in that direction, with a larger population of creatures that are smaller, use less energy, and have low living standards, behavior better adapted to their environment, a slower subjectively perceived rate of innovation and growth, and more fragmented cultures and societies.