I'm not sure we would be any more advanced. Anyone to whom binary conversion is relevant has sufficient intelligence to not need the convenience of base 8. For practical needs, convenient representation of repeated doubling and halving are of limited use. Much more relevant to the daily needs of actual people for most of history was the ability to reckon measurements using common objects such as the human body, hence the bewildering diversity of different measurement systems across different peoples, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_weights_and_measures. The base of the number system was a non-factor.
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