I suspect that the need for social esteem is what drives humans in SOTA societies to use sycophantic AIs, AI girlfriends or boyfriends or other forms of superstimulating escapism like playing video games. As for “entities we can construct that would count as valid sources of status in the future”, they could be something like NPCs from video games and/or a valid way to let the user benchmark one’s actual skills (e.g. in chess) and to train oneself.
Another thought that I have is that mankind’s entire history could be viewed like training of Agent-3 and Agent-4 from the AI-2027 forecast to succeed at diverse challenging tasks requiring increasingly large-scale coordination and research taste. One might even try to draw a conclusion that the humans should value traits that used to lead collectives to success not at the cost of others, like optimizing for capabilities or longer-term hobbies instead of short-term hedons like interacting with the superstimulating sirens.
I suspect that the need for social esteem is what drives humans in SOTA societies to use sycophantic AIs, AI girlfriends or boyfriends or other forms of superstimulating escapism like playing video games. As for “entities we can construct that would count as valid sources of status in the future”, they could be something like NPCs from video games and/or a valid way to let the user benchmark one’s actual skills (e.g. in chess) and to train oneself.
Another thought that I have is that mankind’s entire history could be viewed like training of Agent-3 and Agent-4 from the AI-2027 forecast to succeed at diverse challenging tasks requiring increasingly large-scale coordination and research taste. One might even try to draw a conclusion that the humans should value traits that used to lead collectives to success not at the cost of others, like optimizing for capabilities or longer-term hobbies instead of short-term hedons like interacting with the superstimulating sirens.