I believe many of the remaining tribes are more or less aware of the outside world and choose to keep their lifestyle. For example I wouldn't be surprised if the famously isolationist North Sentinelese people have some idea of what has happened to nearby assimilated tribes and choose to have none of that.

The North Sentinelese tribe would literally have no idea of the outside world, they live on an island in the middle of a large sea.

On a far away spaceship a very advanced alien may be saying the same thing on their very advanced equivalent of hn.

Joke would be on humanity.

At least they can claim they are bound by the prime directive. I wonder what is the equivalent for anthropologists

> how they feel finding out the rest of the world has all this amazing stuff and cheap easy eats

I wonder how they feel finding out the rest of the world has some nasty infectious diseases and people there need to work their asses of for 30+ years to pay their mortgage and have a roof.

These tribes have no sickness and don't have to work hard for food or shelter? Sign me up.

Less infectious diseases like colds etc. that spread human-to-human seems likely given the isolation and lower population numbers. Where would the diseases come from?

Of course, if they don't have access to antibiotics, they have other much worse kinds of sickness to deal with, and even their relatively simple lifestyle will be hard to maintain without hard work...

So native Hawaiians.

As I understand it, when corporate start setting up pineapple and sugar plantations in Hawaii they found they could not get cheap labor from the Hawaiian people themselves. And why would they? Between fish and fruit they have all the food they need. A simple structure (on the preferred side of the island) is all you need for shelter.

So they brought in Chinese laborers.

A roof, walls, windows and net in the windows to keep mosquitoes away at night, and avoid malaria and similar mosquito transmited illness. I'd add Chagas-Mazza that is tranmited by other bug but it's probably endemic there.

Also, tap water or at least a well.

During tje first year, children get like 20 or 25 vaccines. Some of the ilness are very rare and they may not know them, but other are just severe diarhea caused by a common bacteria. And add antibiotics for other common problems.

The mortgage gives you a roof that far surpasses the comforts of what would be a royal palace for an uncontacted tribe. If you're ok with a lifestyle on the level that they get (with hard, dangerous work), you can have it quite easily in today's society.

Go far enough into a forest and you'll likely be left alone when you build a primitive hut, except that now an hour of work buys you a lighter, a knife of unachievable quality, a pack of pills that save you from dying from infection, or "firewood" (a propane cartridge) for days.

> If you're ok with a lifestyle on the level that they get (with hard, dangerous work), you can have it quite easily in today's society.

There are very few places left in the world where that is true.

Governments basically all hate stateless people. There's been a long history of forcing "civilization" on stateless people "for their own good", but really it's because they can't be easily controlled or taxed.

Sounds like a great plot for a story. Could also do a sci-fi one where aliens turn up, discover (e.g.) peanut butter, and end up enslaving the human race to mass produce it for them to take back home.

So basically what happened to South and Central America.

Hmm, fair point. Also the Congo, India, etc.

>cheap easy eats

and mostly unhealthy in comparison to self hunted / self-planted food.

Do you mostly eat self hunted and self planted food?

There's a big reason why the vast majority of people choose to buy their food.

Fish is probably the only wild animal/plant with masive consuption. (That is the closest to we all decide that nobody herd/cultivate, only hunter/gather.)

And then I began to wonder what if we could isolate a whole country from the effects of LLMs. I know, impossible, but what if. They get to keep the old internet and all. A fork in the road. Just no LLMs at all. I wonder, after a few decades, how it would turn out comparatively to the rest of the world.

Or what about no internet? No computers? Would that country really turn out that bad?

Hubris at the individual level is rather easy to discern. At the civilizational level, it's a bit harder.

Honestly, if no-internet was forced on society I think it would be a net good thing (ignore accidental pun).

Probably though TV was the beginning of the downward spiral.

The thing is this feeling always happens to be “stop things right at the point that I grew up in”. The Amish felt similarly in the 1800s which is why they cut their beards in a way so as not to be confused with Continental soldiers despite there no longer being Continental soldiers.

If everything else falls apart the Amish will be out in the middle of nowhere doing their thing. If you want to see what it looks like to stop the clock, go talk with them. They’ll happily have a chat with you if you buy some furniture from them.

Heck, my friend was Amish for most of his childhood. Then his parents pulled him out of it. Then he fell in with the wrong crowd and struggled with heroin addiction for several years before getting clean. And that’s a far, far smaller cultural shock than an uncontacted tribe. Sometimes he says he wishes he could go back.

There are definitely countries that'll be isolated from them. It's just most of those countries are also isolated from everything else. Eg. North Korea

Roughly speaking, consider Amish country

What amazing stuff? You feel happy on your phone and in front of the computer?

Snow is gently falling outside my windows. They're triple glazed, so I'm in a T-Shirt. The entire heating system was somehow accidentally switched off for nearly a week this winter, and yet the internal temperature only dropped a few degrees.

There's things I wish were different in the world I find myself living in, but there are also many developments that my parents found magical over the course of their lives.

Yes.

Yes, I enjoy it an awful lot. It's my element.

The argument here is that this is exactly how (mostly) European societies hell-bent on colonization have been justifying their actions for five hundred years, with different variations of "amazing stuff" (salvation, weapons, trade goods, technology, medicine...). It's almost universally led to these tribes being subjugated, enslaved, exploited or just murdered outright. Humanity has a terrible track-record on this topic, and we should learn from our mistakes and just leave them alone.

I wasn't judging the rightness or wrongness of it, or historical events, I just wondered how an individual would feel about the situation. Star Trek examines the feelings of aliens who find out about tech and then about the prime directive, but that's just speculation.

Here we go again..

If you know so much about European colonization then you might also know the topic of “contact with then” vs “avoid contact” is almost as old as the colonization itself.

I hope the irony of “our amazing stuff,we know better” and your statement of “just leave them alone” isn’t lost on you.

The point is to let them choose for themselves. If they want to contact us, that's perfectly fine. But it should be their choice to make, not ours.

An easier life isn't always a better life, at least for some like the Amish.