Almost none of the things I listed could or have existed without cities, historically, anthropologically.

Civilization brings technologies and living standard improvements, and the price that is paid for these is a symmetrically increasing body of rules and norms... which definitionally restrict autonomy.

Yeah, true, total freedom and autonomy is terrifying and dangerous.

But it is true and total freedom.

I am not complaining that a public library has segregated bathrooms and that this is objectively worse in every way possible than being pounced by a leopard while trying to shit in the jungle.

You are shifting the conversation to 'what is generally better'... when the original issue was 'civilization requires following rules that restrict freedom and autonomy.'

I am not an anarcho primitivist, I do not think 'return to the wild' is any kind of a good idea.

But, when I say that civilization roughly is domestication, is captivity... it is pertinent to fully compare and contrast all the actual differences, so that you can actually see, understand, and appreciate them.

...

Maybe a more simple example would work.

Your pet cat probably can't actually hunt for shit.

It has been domesticated, learned how to scream when its food bowl isn't full, not how to actually hunt that well.

Ok, now, humans, also, even pretending we haven't largely destroyed the biosphere for the sake of an easier comparison...

We generally also can't hunt for shit, because what we do when we are hungry is drive to the grocery store.

But, 100k years ago, no such thing as a grocery store existed, you more or less needed to be part of a small band capable of hunting and gathering and cooking their own food.

This is a rather straightforward example of how civilization roughly is equivalent (from the point of view of a wild animal, or pre-civilized human) to us domesticating ourselves.

We've lost some skills, gained others.

Its a trade off.

...

Obviously civilization is far more complex than just domestication, but domestication is a pretty fundamental part of civilization.

Why did we domesticate dogs and cats?

Well, it was mutually beneficial.

We got uh... well I guess Gods and rodent control from cats, we got loyal hunting partners that are also goofy and doofy from dogs... and they got a lot closer to the grocery store paradigm, pretty quickly.

I am guessing you live in a home of some kind, probably?

Congrats, you are domesticated, don't piss off your HOA, don't forget to pay your mortgage, rent, don't annoy the neighbors, don't start an industrial machine workshop in your backyard, check your local ordinances before you set up a rain catcher, etc.

I mean, your two types of freedom discourse is largely correct, but this is missing the point I am making.

My original point is that civilization essentially is a form of self-domestication.

Then comes someone to attempt to disprove this by basically turning this into a discussion of comparative freedoms and standards of living.

Sure, ok but thats a non sequitur, its talking around my point, my claim, instead of actually challenging it.

Yep, we generally have more freedom from starvation, disease, etc.

The trade off is that we have more requirements of other kinds and less freedoms of other kinds.

This has nothing to do with the fact of domestication, it has to do with determining whether or not it is good or desireable.

At no point have I said anything like 'it was better before we invented cities and civilization and industrial technology.'

That would be a different claim, where what you point out would be relevant, but its not the claim I've made.

Also, captivity does not return nothing, strictly necessarily speaking within the original domain specific comparison of animal captivity, also the history of civilization very much includes the history of slavery, and yep, your definition of domestication agrees with what I am saying, have said.

You and underpantsweevil have both assumed I am making some kind of moral, ethical, 'should be' type claim.

Nope, I am not, I am just pointing out that civilized society is way different than 100k BCE society, and that if you time teleported a person from that era to our modern era, they'd likely describe the experience of integrating into our society as similar to being made into a pet, or perhaps highly ritualistic social role from their society, that they would feel like they were acting or performing in a world of millions of rules, and expected to do so all the time.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Terry Pratchett

Over and over, no matter the specific focus of a study, the authors would reiterate that no matter the quality of the information produced by the decision support system, decision makers were more likely to go with solutions supported by people the decision makers considered to be peers, even when the hard data showed that the opposite course was more justified.

In short, CEOs and similar almost always care more about the opinions of other CEOs than being true to the scientific ideal.

Extremely ironically, what this means is that the actual prime candidate for a job to replace with AI...

Is CEOs, C Suite.

They are the most expensive employees, after all.

Maybe not replace them with LLMs as we currently have them, beyond possibly being used to generate a narrative, human readable explanation of their decision making process and policies...

Where the actual decision making and policy determinations would themselves be decided by basically a much more specialized algorithm, that is made out of code a human can actually read.

Like, we've already got Zoom entirely seriously trying to get AI-LLMs that train themselves on your work emails and chats, then make an avatar emulation of 'you', then send that to digital meetings, then output the chat log 'results' of this 'meeting'.

So, there you go.

C Suite doesn't really do anything beyond networking and corpo politics, this can simulate that, minus the off the record corruption, which shouldn't be a problem, right?

... Its always been about power and social status.

If otherwise, they'd all be developing something along the lines of what I just described, putting themselves out of a job, and retiring on their already massive wealth.

No, they don't do that.

They are addicted to being superior, to being able to ruin people.

They're dangerous petty narcissistic sociopaths.