Other than the issues raised below, I'd like to point out that the help doesn't need to be full time to make a massive difference. Just having a cleaner in once a week or someone to cook every evening helps!
India is a... large country. Without specifying which part you intend to visit, you might receive the equivalent of a recommendation to visit the best restaurant in Portugal while you're actually in Amsterdam! I used to live there, though by the eastern side where you're unlikely to visit. Nonetheless, I will happily vet or suggest places if you know your itinerary.
The phenomenon you observed as far more to do with the tiny plot sizes in most of rural India than it had to do with the cost of labor.
Many/most farmers have farms sized such that they are, if not as bad as mere subsistence, unable to justify the efficiency gains of mechanization. This is not true in other parts of India, like the western states of Punjab and Haryana, where farms are larger and just about every farmer has a tractor. There are some cooperatives where multiple smallholders coordinate to share larger machines like combine harvesters which none but the very largest farmers can justify purchasing for personal use.
Optimal economic policy (in terms of total yield and efficiency) is heavily in favor of consolidating plots to allow economies of scale. This is politically untenable in much of India, hence your observation. However, it isn't a universal state of affairs, and many other fruits of industrialization are better adopted.
1So I looked it up and apparently the guideline is actually a 2 hours fast for clear liquids! 2 hours![7] The hospital staff, however, hardened their hearts. Nurses said to ask the surgeons. The surgeons said to ask the anestheologists. It wasn't until 7am that the anestheologists said, yep, you can drink a (small) glass of water.
Ah, this takes me back to my medical officer days. No junior doctor ever got into trouble for telling a patient to fast a bit too long, and many do for having a heart and letting them cut it short. It is also likely the least consequential thing we can bother the anesthetists about, and it's not going to kill anyone to wait longer (usually).
Knowing the local demographic and behavioral tendencies on LW, I think it might worth noting that ozempic/semaglutide and other GLP drugs can cause delayed gastric emptying. As a consequence, even the standard fasting duration might not be adequate to fully empty your stomach. If you're scared of getting aspiration pneumonia, it's worth mentioning this to your surgeon or the anesthetist. The knowledge hasn't quite percolated all the way up the chain, so you can't just assume they're aware.
Here's how I parsed this:
- We're in a future not particularly long after a hard takeoff Singularity (changes to the environment described as quite sudden rather than gradual).
- This is a multipolar AI scenario, given that the Origami Men claim to have purchased these humans from another entity that owned them.
- The Origami Men (or the entity operating them) is severely misaligned but not to an omnicidal degree. It appears to value (bad) proxies for human wellbeing, such as ensuring that they have jobs, pets, residences and food. They either do not understand or do not care that their implementation is... subpar. We might as well call it the Uncanny Valley of Care.
- They seem to have some more subtle store of value, in the sense that they desire to only rear humans who do not actively breach containment, or who do not spread memes about breaking out ("contagion"). The general impetus behind the cull or reclamation is not clear to me, do they initially just pick people at random? Or does the narrator finding something "beautiful" in the people chose correlate to an unknown preference? They will take you if you get too close to the border of the dome, but general discontent is not policed. Nor is attempts at violence against the Origami Men, though that appears entirely futile.
- "Provenance"? Do they only value pre-Singularity specimens? That would explain lack of any evidence of artificially boosting human numbers or encouraging reproduction.
>I was surprised to find out that I could not find a single neurotransmitter that is not shared between humans and mice (let me know if you can find one, though).
As far as I can tell, this is true. The closest I could find is a single subtype of receptor that a frameshift mutation in a primate ancestor made nonfunctional.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021925818352189
I suspect you'd have to go even further back in terms of divergent ancestry to find actual differences in the neurotransmitter substances themselves. There are definitely differences in receptors and affinities, but the actual chemicals? From a quick search, you'd have to go all the way to ctenophores, which are so different that some have posited they evolved nervous systems independently.
1I presume it would be an overview of histone molecule. DNA is often kept compacted by wrapping around one, like a rope coiled around a baseball.
I find it very hard to believe that a civilization with as much utter dominion over physics, chemistry and biology as the Culture would find this a particularly difficult challenge.
The crudest option would be something like wiping memories, or synthesizing drugs that re-induce a sense of wonder or curiosity about the world (similar to MDMA). The Culture is practically obsessed with psychoactive substances, most citizens have internal drug glands.
At the very least, people should be strongly encouraged to have a mind upload put into cold storage, pending ascendance to the Sublime. That has no downsides I can see, since a brain emulation that isn't actively running is no subjectively different from death. It should be standard practice, not a rarity.
Even if treated purely as a speculation about the "human" psyche, the Culture almost certainly has all the tools required to address the issue, if they even consider it an issue. That is the crux of my dissatisfaction, it's as insane as a post-scarcity civilization deciding not to treat heart disease or cancer.
Even if such ennui is "natural" (and I don't see how a phenomenon that only shows up after 5-6x standard lifespan, assuming parity with baseline humans can ever be considered natural), it should still be considered a problem in need of solving. And the Culture can solve just about every plausibly solvable problem in the universe!
Think of it this way, if a mid-life crisis reliably convinced a >10% fraction of the population to kill themselves at the age of 40, with the rest living happily to 80+, we'd be throwing tens of billions at a pharmacological cure. It's even worse, relatively and absolutely, for the Culture, as their humans can easily live nigh-indefinitely.
Even if you are highly committed to some kind of worship of minimalism or parsimony, despite infinite resources, or believe that people have the right to self-termination, then at least try and convince them to make mind backups that can be put into long-term storage. That is subjectively equivalent to death without the same... finality.
This doesn't have to be coercive, but the Culture demonstrates the ability to produce incredibly amounts of propaganda on demand. As far as I'm concerned, if the majority of the population is killing itself after a mere ~0.000..% of their theoretical life expectancy, my civilization is suffering from a condition that ours standard depression or cancer to shame. And they can trivially solve it, they have incredibly powerful tools that can edit brains/minds to arbitrary precision. They just... don't.
>It would, for instance, never look at the big map and hypothesize continental drift.
Millions of humans must have looked at relatively accurate maps of the globe without hypothesizing continental drift. A large number must have also possessed sufficient background knowledge of volcanism, tectonic activity etc to have had the potential to connect the dots.
Even the concept of evolution experienced centuries or millenia of time between widespread understanding and application of selective breeding, without people before Darwin/Wallace making the seemingly obvious connection that the selection pressure on phenotype and genotype could work out in the wild. Human history is littered with a lot of low hanging fruit, as well as discoveries that seem unlikely to have been made without multiple intermediate discoveries.
I believe it was Gwern who suggested that future architectures or training programs might have LLMs "dream" and attempt to draw connections between separate domains of their training data. In the absence of such efforts, I doubt we can make categorical claims that LLMs are incapable of coming up with truly novel hypotheses or paradigms. And even if they did, would we recognize it? Would they be capable of, or even allowed to follow up on them?
Edit: Even in something as restricted as artistic "style", Gwern raised the very important question of whether a truly innovative leap by an image model would be recognized as such (assuming it would if a human artist made it) or dismissed as weird/erroneous. The old deep dream was visually distinct from previous human output, yet I can't recall anyone endorsing it as an AI-invented style.