Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.
Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.
Also, Nietzsche's Last Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
> The last man is the archetypal passive nihilist. He is tired of life, takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security. Therefore, the last man is unable to build and act upon a self-actualized ethos.
A lot of people ended up on Reddit because they learned that they could append site:Reddit.com to their searches to get better results. Reddit was never exceptionally well-managed or technically impressive, it was just accessible in search results in a way that platforms like Facebook and Twitter became increasingly hostile to in the mid-2010s.
We create new hobbies and niches because human scale arenas are important for us psychologically — so we branch culture to accommodate the necessary number of role performance arenas.
Everybody is playing status games, but we’re avoiding Calhoun-style behavioral sinks by not all playing the same game at the same table.
Lots of people don't find it worth it anymore. Most members of the public are the same and aren't free-thinkers, whatever that means to you. That's one reason-excuse I feel.
For many people it's shame. Feeling like you're mentally a child while everyone around you is an adult can't be a good feeling.
Who’s not in the simulation at this point?
On one hand you have slots/roulette/craps gambling where payout or loss is immediate. Next come candy crush style games where time invested per session is minimal but extant, but reward continues to stream with flashy graphics for accomplishing subgoals. Next come longer-term games like 4x or tower defence where there's progression or some sort (often available to skill or how much time you have to spend) where payoff is delayed to the end but there are still progress rewards like new technology or beating a wave of enemies. Finally RPGs and MMOs where there is (often) no final payout but leveling up, completing quests, acquiring special items, etc. happens at a pace that rewards time spent. At no time is the next step mysterious; there's a journal with next steps which will each provide their own rewards.
Contrast that with real life where reward is on a fixed schedule (N paychecks a month) with no short-term feedback on performance. At best a short "good work" reward fairly rarely from management. There are subtler rewards people get like socialization or status, but they aren't on a quest journal and they arrive less frequently for most people.
I think for extroverts in high social contact jobs it may actually be as rewarding as gaming, e.g. direct sales.
Contractors and spot workers (day laborers, etc.) also get a bit more frequent reward feedback, but far fewer rails unless it's a very canned pipeline of clients.
Contrast with the ancestral environment where hunting or gathering had minutes or hours between reward feedback and our natural senses and instincts provided a lot of the rails (hunger, visual attention to animals and edible plants, potential mates).
Now I’m a FI millionaire who works because it’s the best way to meet interesting people my age. I look forward to when AI frees everyone from work and they have time to do fun stuff during the day too.
IRL, success is NOT guaranteed. time in does not necessarily yield additional income.
in the former case, the reward pathway in the brain is satisfied, so why risk it?
But why would you even want that? They like it in the simulation, and nobody really wants to deal with them outside the simulation.