[Serious] The Post-Technological World.

[Anomalocaris]

Ah, but will technology (as we know it) re-emerge?

I think in reality, it is highly likely technology will re-emerge if urban civilization survives.   Survival of urban civilization means likely survival of corporate memory.  After a few generation of the direct and indirect effects of the lack of technology being the universal human condition, the worst depredations of technology will been seen through a glowing mist as the heights of a golden age.   It will steer and channel intellectual pursuit towards the reattainmemt of some semblance of the golden age.  In such a case it seem probable technological age will re-emerge after a few centuries.

On the other hand, if hunting becomes the main means of subsistence, then that implies the essential collapse of urban civilization and dispersal of popukation.   In such a case corporate memory of the past technological age would be more susceptible to loss and such distortion as to make it either unrecognizable or so changed as to become impossible to work towards to.   In that case technological age may indeed require near complete rebuilding from scratch, which may take thousands to tens of thousands of years.

If we go back to hunting age, it also implies rolling back of metal tool technology.  In this situation, it seems reemergence if agriculture will be be favored on time span of hundreds to thousands of years.  Settled Agriculture may do nothing for health and quality of life, but it will permit all conquering concentration of numbers in time of conflict.  Over thousands of years agriculture and settled way of life will likely prevail through violence.

Once settled agricultural life becomes the norm, ascension through copper, bronze and Iron Age, and literacy will seem likely to follow.  

So collapse if technological age and reverting back to hunting will ultimately end in agriculture, it will just take longer, and with greater loss of corporate memory of our current age when our descendants get there, compared to if we directly went to agriculture.