Exactly.
The car is just a better version of the horse and buggy. There are no massive sociological changes that came from the invention of the automobile.
Human social behavior is completely scale invariant.
Society is just the relationship I have with my brother, replicated millions of times with no higher order effects, weird feedback loops, weird non-linear effects.
IMO the problem is that complex systems is not a field that is taken seriously yet. It got off to a bad start years back with that shitty James Gleick Chaos book.
We just don't have enough people thinking about this as a SIR model on a social graph to spark the conversation. We literally lack the critical mass of people understanding the language. Without the language the thoughts don't exist.
I am sure a 100 years from now people will look back at us as completely insane to be letting social contagions spread around to children as random graphs on a network.
"Wow, it's almost like this text was written by a robot! Who knew it could be so advanced?"
"I guess we'll just have to wait and see if it can take over the world any time soon!"
"Indeed, AI's ability to make mistakes is what makes it so useful in generative fields like art and poetry, while its lack of mistakes is what makes it essential for tasks like driving."
Human social behavior is completely scale invariant.
Society is just the relationship I have with my brother, replicated millions of times with no higher order effects, weird feedback loops, weird non-linear effects.
I am not buying that alarmist nonsense either.