What you're describing are economies of scale, which are undoubtedly more efficient, but we also have a hard cognitive social limit in Dunbar's number. Deciding what's human scale is still up for debate. While it's true that more is achievable with more people, time has a tendency, not only reduce costs, but to democratise technology. As William Gibson said "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" Again we're getting in to lack-of-vocabulary territory. I actually think we need a global society with universal laws to govern a universal market. That means some big, scary form of centralisation. In the case of my little personal project, it's trying to mitigate some of that New World Order danger by decentralising the means of production for, at least, basic living requirements. I also just kinda want to build robots....but this thread is intended as a more general discussion on how to handle approaching technologies and the social impact they might have.
It's more than just economies of scale, it's more of everything, it allows people within the group to specialise, it allows the group to perform tasks that can't be done by smaller groups, boiled down to its essence it's about time and doing more with less. IDK much about Dunbar's number but large groups are not the same as large social groups, more than one social group can have the same goals as the larger group, when NASA went to the moon it wasn't done by one large social group it was done with many social groups all working towards the same goal, it's why Rome and other large organisations follow a hierarchical system, we break down large complex problems into smaller more manageable problems. Sure we could wait for technology to allow us to do more with less but that's a catch 22 situation as without coming together in large groups and shortening the time needed to solve difficult problems we wouldn't have the technology that allows us to do more with less, the modern central processing unit wouldn't exist in its current form if it wasn't for groups of people all working towards a single goal, some of those groups may only be working on a small part of what makes up a CPU but without other groups working on other parts they may never have had the time to work on their part. Not that it matters but personally I'd like to see what we were always promised from this technological revolution, the promise that it would set us free to pursue other more meaningful tasks. With Greece it allowed people do nothing more with their time than thinking about esoteric things like the meaning of life and that continued, although to a lesser extent, when they were conquered by Rome.
Sure it was, space race was all about displays of power, competition and exploration very typical human traits.
