There is a natural abstraction of “human status” that covers play, work, love, friends, community and more.
Humans seek “human status” as an intrinsic motivation/reward/value, such that humans will seek status even at the cost of other goals and of generalized empowerment.
In humans, “human status” often functions as a long-term target (I think more satisficing than optimizing).
This proves that evolution is capable of creating intelligent agents that target abstract concepts as goals in ways that survive a massive training/deployment shift.
This is a small piece of evidence against one of many reasons that we are all going to die.
The top-voted objection is that this abstraction includes “human status” that commenters see as fake: internet forums, obscure hobbies, video games, and music fandom. I don’t find this compelling, it’s just pointing out that the drive is for “human status”, not “real world status”, “high class status”, “rationalist status”, or some other thing.
My best objection is that the order is reversed. Humans have genes that cause us to have various behaviors and seek various things, and then the natural abstraction of “human status” is something that we use to learn and describe what humans end up doing. If humans had ended up doing a slightly different thing, based on different genetics, and that resulted in different behaviors, then those behaviors would be what we called “human status”. There is another natural abstraction concept of “generic status” that abstracts all status-like concepts in all animals on Earth, and humans don’t target that. When I learned that grooming is a marker of status in some primates, that didn’t cause me to spend more time seeking opportunities to be groomed.
It would be more accurate to say that the natural abstraction of “human status” co-evolved with the genetics of humans, rather than them happening in either order. We see this with the natural abstraction of “Claude” co-evolving with the weights that make up various Claude models. I gave this +4 in the review. It would have been extremely valuable to post this twenty years ago, but today it seems obvious that we can grow artificial intelligent agents that target natural abstractions in the environment, including the Anthropic trick of making and targeting a natural abstraction at the same time.
I think it’s true and valuable to say:
There is a natural abstraction of “human status” that covers play, work, love, friends, community and more.
Humans seek “human status” as an intrinsic motivation/reward/value, such that humans will seek status even at the cost of other goals and of generalized empowerment.
In humans, “human status” often functions as a long-term target (I think more satisficing than optimizing).
This proves that evolution is capable of creating intelligent agents that target abstract concepts as goals in ways that survive a massive training/deployment shift.
This is a small piece of evidence against one of many reasons that we are all going to die.
The top-voted objection is that this abstraction includes “human status” that commenters see as fake: internet forums, obscure hobbies, video games, and music fandom. I don’t find this compelling, it’s just pointing out that the drive is for “human status”, not “real world status”, “high class status”, “rationalist status”, or some other thing.
My best objection is that the order is reversed. Humans have genes that cause us to have various behaviors and seek various things, and then the natural abstraction of “human status” is something that we use to learn and describe what humans end up doing. If humans had ended up doing a slightly different thing, based on different genetics, and that resulted in different behaviors, then those behaviors would be what we called “human status”. There is another natural abstraction concept of “generic status” that abstracts all status-like concepts in all animals on Earth, and humans don’t target that. When I learned that grooming is a marker of status in some primates, that didn’t cause me to spend more time seeking opportunities to be groomed.
It would be more accurate to say that the natural abstraction of “human status” co-evolved with the genetics of humans, rather than them happening in either order. We see this with the natural abstraction of “Claude” co-evolving with the weights that make up various Claude models. I gave this +4 in the review. It would have been extremely valuable to post this twenty years ago, but today it seems obvious that we can grow artificial intelligent agents that target natural abstractions in the environment, including the Anthropic trick of making and targeting a natural abstraction at the same time.