Technology

I personally agree that this is a kind of a regulator.

Like what Tao Te Ching says. Humans shouldn't have too much of what they desire. Such a reality in some area fails them as an opportunity to learn. It's also a dead end - you can't have children with a robot. You can't grow children with a robot, or maybe you can, but it will not be sufficiently complex and it will have different criteria of success.

But this doesn't limit advanced civilization.

It's just that in these things we are trying to cheat. Advancement to AGI, if it ever happens, should be done in its own turn. We have means to solve a lot of purely technical problems, but we haven't yet. There's no reason to hurry with AGI.

The reason Europe has conquered the world was that European cultures had this respect to simplicity, born from Christian morality, but also respect to choice and logic. Remove any one of these three, and you lose that power.

Europeans had sometimes less sophisticated technologies in any particular area than, say, China or Safavid Persia or Ottomans or Southeast Asian nations or even at some point some African nations. But what they had was complete and comprehensive system, civilization as a whole. They always had the lower level of the building finished before going to the next one.

This was due to that Christian modesty combined with antique philosophy.

I also think we've diverted from that relatively recently - around the dotcom bubble crash, maybe. I think it had deeper implications than what people think, because the trust into said philosophy started eroding at that very point. Which created imbalance in favor of forces less affected, like Microsoft and others, who have eroded it further, and the "good" forces, like Sun or Compaq or Motorola or what not, have contributed more into it with their attempts to survive after the 90s than they would if they'd die with the crash immediately, because they showed the public something that looked like a loss in honest competition.