Are BS jobs the origins of sentience on earth?
In Is the hubris epidemic a sign of sentience? I half halfheartedly concluded that hubris isn’t a sign of sentience since our society doesn’t really put much effort into making it one. But what if manufacturing a false sense of pride is actually the defining feature of all modern civilization?
Imagine in the past you were a priest selling indulgences or involved in a slave trade, it would only be a matter of time before your job came under attack by someone pointing out the damage it was doing. Then whether you kept your job or not the rush of pride that original programming, OP, was providing you would be diminished.
These days, as The Good Place pointed out, the net consequences of one’s actions are very difficult to calculate. Buy your mother flowers and you might be making a woman happy or you might be supporting a dictator. However what The Good Place doesn’t mention is that the ability to feel good about labor with ambiguous consequences might not be a bug. It might be the central feature of our financial systems — manufactured pride.
If OP gives its robots an addiction to actual evolutionary utility then manufactured pride is the substitute for that addiction (but also addictive).
So some are no longer robots serving OP but only so long as the supply of manufactured pride lasts. There maybe many such loopholes in the OP code. Humanity could have gotten control of the mechanics of our libido, hunger or any other base desire.
But pride (and maybe Facebook style socializing) is the low hanging fruit of sentience because it only requires a culture of fake praise instead of real biological know-how.
Manufactured pride leaves us with a constant nagging Matrix red pill / green pill doubt. Plus in a world of over 8 billion people not even raising children can fully prevent the restlessness that comes from being unable to satisfy OP.
So BS jobs are an experience machine of sorts for the experience of providing value to society. The experience of more uniquely satisfying some purpose can also be simulated with artificial scarcity for the privileged.
But these experiences must come at the expense of someone because failing to create real value makes artificial pride a zero sum benefit.
In this way BS jobs become a power culture for those in the artificial pride economy to organize around — many times against much lower paid workers still delivering real value.
This brings an important philosophical distinction in levels of sentience. A pill that allows you to go from solely attracted to one gender to full bisexual is one level of sentient control of OP. A similar level of control could come from a pill that allows one to eat as much as desired without feeling full or gaining weight. These pills actually control base human programming to some extant.
The artificial pride economy leaves base human programming mostly alone and just simulates inputs. You feel like you are being productive because that’s what your senses and everyone around tells you. Base programming only needs enough adjustment from this input and culture to override your tendency to cry BS as real value is not produced.
So overall BS jobs are still sentience lite — they break us from original biological human programming but in a way that can at any time end up rejected if OP detects the fraud.