Some dark stuff here. Nano, drones, DEWs. What can be weaponized, probably already has been. My way of tying it all together, a persistent percentage of any population being genetically predisposed to be high in Cluster B behavior traits (check the Ponerology Substack) ... and since before the stone age, is not very optimistic. If anything, the data supports the mind-set of Ted Kaczynski, if not his methods.

Chomsky, back when he had some of his marbles, opened his 2010 Chapel Hill speech 'Human Intelligence and the Environment' with a debate about the Fermi paradox between Carl Sagan and evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. While Mayr conceded the statistical probability of intelligent life elsewhere, he proposed that the evolutionary record does not support the assumption that any such life will have human-like intelligence ... and went so far as to suggest that human intelligence may yet prove to be little more than a fatal mutation of a social primate.

Can't get much more black-pilled than that ... maybe Schopenhauer musing that life itself is a mistake.

I agree that written language (influences being Wittgenstein's Ladder and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems) is probably closely correlated with the success of Cluster B's. Metaphorically ... eating the apple of 'knowledge' (consciousness? self-awareness?) contains the seeds of our collective self-destruction.

'Who owes debt' is a transactional way of thinking, not the empathy-driven relationships capable of families or communities smaller than Dunbar's number. Just guessing, but 'intelligence' as we normally define it, is heavily skewed towards the destructive nature of dark-triad types and their attraction to concentrations of power, and empathy does not scale. Para-social skills do. But empathy? Does anyone remember that old Three Dog Night song ... 'Easy to be Hard'?

Yes, the Incas and Aztecs.

I am not saying anything new here. History is written in blood and only the parochial conceit of collective moral progress tends to distance ourselves from the dark side of our collective gene pool.

Will end with a bleak passage ...

"Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost. We modern Americans should not be too quick to brand them as failures, when their society survived in Greenland for longer than our English-speaking society has survived so far in North America. Ultimately, though, the chiefs found themselves without followers. The last right that they obtained for themselves was the privilege of being the last to starve."

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition (p. 276). (Function). Kindle Edition.