The the first objection: To the extent that AGI participates in status games with humans, they will win. They’ll be better at it than we are. You could technically have a gang of toddlers play basketball with an NBA all star team, but I don’t think you can really say they’re competing with each other, or that they’re both playing the same game in the sense the people talking about status games mean it.
To the second objection: It is not at all clear to me whether any biological intelligence augmentation path puts humans on a level playing field with AI systems, except insofar as we’re talking about a limited subset of AI systems. At which point, how similar do they need to be before we deem the AIs to count as essentially human for this purpose, or the upgraded humans to not count as human? I don’t find the semantic questions all that interesting in themselves, but I also don’t think it would be interesting or enjoyable to play games with a fully digital version of a person with 1000x more compute than me.
If we want future humans to face games and challenges they find meaningful, that puts extra constraints on what kinds of entities we can have them competing against.
FWIW I am mostly uninterested in human status games now, and don’t anticipate that changing much in the future. I really don’t like this vision of the future of humanity. It’s not the worst, but I think we can do much better. We just have to be more creative in our understanding of what makes something meaningful.
I also think it is unlikely that AGIs will compete in human status games. Status games are not just about being the best: Deep Blue is not high status, sportsmen that take drugs to improve their performance are not high status.
Status games have rules and you only win if you do something impressive while competing within the rules, being an AGI is likely to be seen as an unfair advantage, and thus AIs will be banned from human status games, in the same way that current sports competitions are split by gender and weight.
Even if they are not banned given their abilities it will be expected that they do much better than humans, it will just be a normal thing, not a high status, impressive thing.
The the first objection: To the extent that AGI participates in status games with humans, they will win. They’ll be better at it than we are. You could technically have a gang of toddlers play basketball with an NBA all star team, but I don’t think you can really say they’re competing with each other, or that they’re both playing the same game in the sense the people talking about status games mean it.
To the second objection: It is not at all clear to me whether any biological intelligence augmentation path puts humans on a level playing field with AI systems, except insofar as we’re talking about a limited subset of AI systems. At which point, how similar do they need to be before we deem the AIs to count as essentially human for this purpose, or the upgraded humans to not count as human? I don’t find the semantic questions all that interesting in themselves, but I also don’t think it would be interesting or enjoyable to play games with a fully digital version of a person with 1000x more compute than me.
If we want future humans to face games and challenges they find meaningful, that puts extra constraints on what kinds of entities we can have them competing against.
FWIW I am mostly uninterested in human status games now, and don’t anticipate that changing much in the future. I really don’t like this vision of the future of humanity. It’s not the worst, but I think we can do much better. We just have to be more creative in our understanding of what makes something meaningful.
I also think it is unlikely that AGIs will compete in human status games. Status games are not just about being the best: Deep Blue is not high status, sportsmen that take drugs to improve their performance are not high status.
Status games have rules and you only win if you do something impressive while competing within the rules, being an AGI is likely to be seen as an unfair advantage, and thus AIs will be banned from human status games, in the same way that current sports competitions are split by gender and weight.
Even if they are not banned given their abilities it will be expected that they do much better than humans, it will just be a normal thing, not a high status, impressive thing.