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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32096 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Wireheading is a staple of science fiction . Technology does not answer the harder problem of status. What if there was a drug that made everyone thin and ripped? But part of the value of being ripped or thin or smart is that it's scarce. If everyone has those attributes, they lose some their value. Part of the value of a magic weight loss pill is that there will always be some obese people . There is already an epidemic of men dropping out of society, delaying family formation and such...do we want to make it worse?

Technology does not answer the harder problem of status. What if there was a drug that made everyone thin and ripped? But part of the value of being ripped or thin or smart is that it's scarce. If everyone has those attributes, they lose some their value.

I think this argument is fundamentally flawed. You could just as easily say that technology does not answer the problem of having your teeth fall out by 30. Part of the value of having good dentistry is that most people's teeth fall out by the time they're 30... if everyone has good teeth, what's the point?

To have a more charitable take, I think that as we develop technologically status will be awarded based on different lines. As I have pointed out in this post, one possible way we could allocate status once everyone is thin/ripped/healthy/immortal would be based on mental states and experience. Those who have a greater command over their own mental state, or explore and describe new mental states, could accrue higher status and the status competition could continue apace on that basis.

That being said, why do we need status competition? At the end of the day if we have AGI and our society is extremely materially wealthy, does status competition even make sense? Or do you think it's inevitable wherever we have humans?

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