We don't even need to look at other species.
Humans have been just as smart as you and me, maybe even smarter according to cranial measurements, without inventing anything that significantly changed their way of life.
There could be loads of planets with prehistoric humans, having a fine time hunting with bows and picking fruit.
I think by the time we get to modern humans it would only be a matter of time for technology to develop to something like the current stage. The main evidence I can think of is the independent development of agriculture in about 4-5 regions, and the independent development of large complex civilizations in the Americas and Eurasia.
Humans are cultural learners, so this allowed cumulative cultural evolution from at least as far back as the transition from Olowan to Acheulean stone technologies with Homo erectus ~2-3 million years ago. By the time we get to Homo sapiens and Neanderthal this capacity for cultural learning seems much increased. Some paleoarchaeologists (e.g. Dietrich Stout) argue that technological development has been exponential as far back as H. erectus, just that the early stages of the exponential curve look flat for a long time.
I think it only takes a small tweak for everything to stall.
Suppose say, that people only trust a small group. Extended family and lifelong friends, for instance. People get very violent as soon as they disagree on something, immediately wanting to settle disputes by force.
Nobody can strike a deal to do anything with anyone outside their group, and you certainly can't make agreements with a guy in Seattle to deliver things to London. You can't mine coal hoping to sell it to an as yet unknown person. There's no point in fishing more fish than you and your friends can eat.
What happens in this world? Well, I think people will still be intelligent. They'll still think about social situations, especially when it comes to mating. There will still be stories, and humor.
But we're not advancing tech, and we're not changing economically.
Why do I say it's a small tweak? Well, we've all met people who seem to not be able to work with anyone. It's not unlikely that out in the stars, there's some planet with people who have everything we have, but they can't get things to work.
Mutation is random but selection is non-random. Multilevel selection could select against those scenarios you're talking about. Collaboration could be yet another thing that comes from convergent evolution.
Random walks only progress if they don't get trapped in a local minima. GP example is but one entirely contrived scenario. The point is that technological development depends on many factors and it's entirely plausible that some of them aren't strongly selected for.
This seems to be supported if you consider how long it took for humans to emerge and the fact that other fairly intelligent species exist alongside us but didn't follow the same path. If you suppose that technological development has a clear selection path then why isn't there any evidence of space fairing dinosaurs?
Humans only started planting grain about 12k years ago. Anatomically modern humans were gathering wild grain, but not planting grain, for about 100k years. Given this very long period of stagnation, I don't think humanities ascension was an inevitability.
I know about the Natufan culture gathering and processing grain with grindstones from about 20k years ago, but don't remember anything from 100k years ago. Were they using grindstones to process grain? I'd have thought grass grains wouldn't be a good food source otherwise.
In any case, the seeming stagnation is part of what I meant by the early part of an exponential curve looking flat: broadly it might look like not much is happening, but there are small changes all the time.
Lack of evidence is also a problem when looking that far back: we have little concrete evidence of what these people were doing with wood, fibres, and other perishable materials.
Having said that, archaeologists used to talk about a "cultural revolution" that happened 20-30k years ago. (Maybe they still talk about it, I just haven't looked at the research recently). This was the period of the famous Lascaux cave paintings and what looks like an explosion of greater complexity in tool assemblages. So it's possible there was some rare cognitive leap at that time, or again it could be that we lack the evidence that would show the more gradual progression.
We really are pretty lucky that the industrial revolution happened. Thank god for England running out of trees to heat homes with, and abundant surface coal on that island.
I don't think so, though. I think that unless there are limiting factors (no ores or some other necessary component) life would tend toward technology.
Curiosity as an evolutionary trait is quite an advantage, and I would think is necessary for intelligent omnivores. It's what helped us figure out what we could and couldn't eat, and taught us better techniques for living. Curiosity naturally leads to technological developments, I would argue.
All humanoids except our species are extinct, and it's not because we killed them.
It's not? Didn't most of them coexist with us until they didn't?
> life would tend toward technology
Based on what evidence? We only know if it happening once, after a very long delay.
I think it's a natural product of curiosity. And I think that intelligent life would only be so because of curiosity.
You want to figure things out or you're interested in seeing what happens when you fuck around with things.
So I think a technological progression is a natural progression for intelligent life.
Does that make sense? I feel like I'm not explaining myself well.
Lots of animals have been curious for hundreds of millions of years, but technology more advanced than breaking bits off rocks and sticks has only been around a couple thousand years. If you say it's a "natural progression", you also have to say there are serious barriers that most species will never pass.
Okay?
So the notion that "life would tend toward technology", charitably speaking, does not make any useful predictions. Based on all evidence available, including the dearth of extraterrestrial technosignatures, you can't rely on it happening in any particular situation or timeframe. At best it's speculation, more likely it's just false.
Correct, we disagree in what we think.