No matter how fake advanced robots might feel, I predict that they’d still do a satisfactory job at that, greatly diminishing the urge to compete in status against real people.
Maybe average people would be satisfied with this, but are they the ones who will really decide?
I think that dominance over real people feels better than dominance over advanced robots, and in some sense “dominance” means ability to decide what other people do, to make them frustrated. In some sense this is a zero-sum game; if average people would be allowed to feel like alphas of their robotic groups, then the people who now have power over people would feel their power weakening. How much power do you really have over someone who can ignore you completely? If Joe is a president of the world or whatever, but all my material needs are fulfilled and I have my pack of robots, I can ignore Joe completely; and if everyone does, then Joe will no longer feel like president. So I would expect that Joe and his friends would make some laws that prevent me from escaping their power.
Generally, if someone is winning in some social ladder, they want to make it the ladder for everyone. For example if someone is great in chess, they will not only express superiority over other chessplayers, but also superiority of chessplayers over non-chessplayers, thus virtually making everyone part of their ladder. It is a social instinct—your leadership in a group is threatened not only by people winning over you, but also by people leaving your group. So the people who are high in the “people-dominating-over-people ladder” will seek ways to prevent others from leaving; and almost by definition they will succeed.
Yeah, sure, that’s why we’ll still need either really strong tradition or a system that maintains strict social control (“the Leviathan”) - whether said tradition or said system manifests itself as a government, a singleton like AGI, or something we can’t yet imagine. Even if there are no external scarce resources left for people to struggle over, they will still inevitably struggle over dominiance and status for its own sake.
And, like Konkvistador has recently pointed out, if you want to repress that struggle, you are to chose a proportion of “brainwashing” (tradition, or more intrusive influence) or “violence” (formal rigid system). With maximum brainwashing, you’d need no violence. With maximum violence, you’d need no brainwashing (but unlimited violence in human hands probably spells guaranteed disaster, especially if said violence can deliver economic control to its enforcer; IMO, that’s what Moldbug is in denial about when proposing his “patchwork” of absolute sovereigns; like any other “free” market, they could stop competing in niceness for citizens and unite under a treaty to enslave them).
Now, maximum brainwashing sounds even worse to most of us − 1984 springs to mind—but I’d say that, with research and a way to make the brainwasher incorruptible, it could maybe turn out pretty nice, maybe even like Banks’ Culture, where everyone is practically brainwashed from birth via a constructed language.
Of course, many people would say that the sanest option is a combination of the two. But, again, if we’ll somehow find a way to make one of the two nice and ethical, but not the other, then we might have to chose to maximize the one to eliminate the other.
So that’s the stick; if it works reliably, people might be made to stay content with the carrot (fake zero-sum social games).
UPD: if you downvoted the above primarily for me mentioning that argument against the Patchwork thing—whether you find it weak or just out-of-place and needlessly political/etc: please downvote this comment but remove your downvote from the parent.
(Everyone else, please don’t vote on this comment.)
Maybe average people would be satisfied with this, but are they the ones who will really decide?
I think that dominance over real people feels better than dominance over advanced robots, and in some sense “dominance” means ability to decide what other people do, to make them frustrated. In some sense this is a zero-sum game; if average people would be allowed to feel like alphas of their robotic groups, then the people who now have power over people would feel their power weakening. How much power do you really have over someone who can ignore you completely? If Joe is a president of the world or whatever, but all my material needs are fulfilled and I have my pack of robots, I can ignore Joe completely; and if everyone does, then Joe will no longer feel like president. So I would expect that Joe and his friends would make some laws that prevent me from escaping their power.
Generally, if someone is winning in some social ladder, they want to make it the ladder for everyone. For example if someone is great in chess, they will not only express superiority over other chessplayers, but also superiority of chessplayers over non-chessplayers, thus virtually making everyone part of their ladder. It is a social instinct—your leadership in a group is threatened not only by people winning over you, but also by people leaving your group. So the people who are high in the “people-dominating-over-people ladder” will seek ways to prevent others from leaving; and almost by definition they will succeed.
Yeah, sure, that’s why we’ll still need either really strong tradition or a system that maintains strict social control (“the Leviathan”) - whether said tradition or said system manifests itself as a government, a singleton like AGI, or something we can’t yet imagine. Even if there are no external scarce resources left for people to struggle over, they will still inevitably struggle over dominiance and status for its own sake.
And, like Konkvistador has recently pointed out, if you want to repress that struggle, you are to chose a proportion of “brainwashing” (tradition, or more intrusive influence) or “violence” (formal rigid system). With maximum brainwashing, you’d need no violence. With maximum violence, you’d need no brainwashing (but unlimited violence in human hands probably spells guaranteed disaster, especially if said violence can deliver economic control to its enforcer; IMO, that’s what Moldbug is in denial about when proposing his “patchwork” of absolute sovereigns; like any other “free” market, they could stop competing in niceness for citizens and unite under a treaty to enslave them).
Now, maximum brainwashing sounds even worse to most of us − 1984 springs to mind—but I’d say that, with research and a way to make the brainwasher incorruptible, it could maybe turn out pretty nice, maybe even like Banks’ Culture, where everyone is practically brainwashed from birth via a constructed language.
Of course, many people would say that the sanest option is a combination of the two. But, again, if we’ll somehow find a way to make one of the two nice and ethical, but not the other, then we might have to chose to maximize the one to eliminate the other.
So that’s the stick; if it works reliably, people might be made to stay content with the carrot (fake zero-sum social games).
UPD: if you downvoted the above primarily for me mentioning that argument against the Patchwork thing—whether you find it weak or just out-of-place and needlessly political/etc: please downvote this comment but remove your downvote from the parent.
(Everyone else, please don’t vote on this comment.)