Published on May 7, 2025 6:56 PM GMT
(Note: I don't think "social status games" are bad, although I think it's usually not healthy/helpful to focus on them as "social status games qua games." i.e. I have some motivation to be good at telling fun stories at parties, or write music that people will like, or throw interesting events. There's also things like "being a good listening" / "helpful advice-giver." Some of this is motivated intrinsic joy of the activity, but some is motivated by wanting to feel respected/cool. This seems fine in healthy doses)
A thought I had while reading We probably won't just play status games with each other after AGI (which I expected to say "we'll do other things than play status games" but AFAICT said "we'll play status games with AIs too").
A response I first had was "but, the AI will be so massively better than us at everything, it'd just be lame to be competing with them."
But, thinking about it a bit more: probably eventually, many/most people are uploads, and they are also running on optimized artificial brains. Bio humans may have access to various augmentations, either biological enhancement or tools like in The Gentle Romance.
I'm not sure about bio humans, but, probably there will eventually be less distinction between uploads and various types of AIs. There will be superintelligences with jupiter brains. There may be some uploads with jupiter brains too. Uploads will probably compete socially with AIs.
In martial arts, we have a concept of "weight class", to make fights "fair" and and interesting. I guess we actually sort of already have this for social status games – people tend to compete in arenas with similar socioeconomic status and background. (There's also a "locality" aspect, partially eroded by the internet, where you tend to be competing with people in your same geographic area. On the internet, there's still something like "scenes", like you might be trying to make cool Filk Songs in the filk community)
Somewhere out there are Old Money dynasties and tech billionaires jockeying for position. But, it's not super relevant to me. There's a sort of automatic self-sorting (although sometimes jarring, when like a young programmer suddenly is a billionaire CEO and then finds themselves in a different social arena they don't understand but affects their career so they kinda have to engage even if they don't want to)
In some futures, there could be humans and AI competing for who can tell the best joke or run the most interesting events or make cool art. There could be epic-level "designed to scale" AI systems that are competing with the equivalent of Jupiter Brain'd Taylor Swift. There might be superintelligences in charge of the solar system or galaxy, and might be augmented posthumans who either have a direct role there, or who monitor/sanity check the AI)
But, then there might be local groups, with a mix of humans and AIs that weren't designed to scale-and-takeover things, just interact. Each with access to the same plugins and
"Will the AIs be conscious or appreciate the game". I dunno. Right now I particularly hope AIs aren't conscious because we have no way of really communicating with them or interacting with them nicely as moral patients. Later on, I may specifically hope that they're sentient so that if they end up winning the universe, and least there's somebody home to appreciate it."
Does this cinematic universe "hang together" worldbuilding wise?". I dunno, haven't thought about it too hard. My mainline scenario is "FOOM Doom" and my secondary mainline scenario is "dystopian moloch leading to disneyland with no children."
But, "compute weight class for social games" feels like an interesting idea.
Discuss
