Is the hubris epidemic a sign of sentience?
Using culture and memory to achieve sentient humans that augmented their original programming, OP, is not necessarily an upgrade.
For diagnosing whether or not the hubris epidemic is sentience making us less happy, we first have to explore whether or not the obsession with external validation is new. Our culture pretends this obsession has always been there by taking a historic figure like Hamilton and having them say something like, “I am not throwing away my shot”.
The link above says (but please read the whole article)
They put people from the West and people from East Asia into the lab and found that their cognition still works in ways that reflect the history of their respective cultures, and that history was shaped in large part by geography. For instance, the landscape in East Asia 2,500 years ago was totally different than Greece. It was landlocked, with low mountains and undulating landscapes. To get ahead, you had to be part of a big farming community either growing wheat or rice, and you had to participate in these massive irrigation projects that were essential to group success.
So from this viewpoint not only is the rise in narcissism not new but it’s the result of ancient survival culture that may or may not be genetically coded OP. So Will Storr says (immediately following claiming that using rice farming technology or not changes who we are)
I think technology just shows us who we are; it doesn’t change who we are. I think it encourages us in certain ways, but I don’t see it as the cause of anything significant.
But slavery is a technology of sorts and it definitely changes who we are and not for the better. Ancient Greece had slavery and, America, the current center of the hubris epidemic is still culturally dominated by slavery (Will Storr is British but same recent historic culture of using unwilling others for economic gain).
So an alternate line of reasoning is:
Fairly recent forced labor from other humans => rise of individualism => hubris epidemic => break from OP => sentience but in a bad way
However here the “break from OP” is dubious. Are we breaking from OP or is there some built in programming that kicks in whenever abusing other humans for personal gain becomes possible?
Similarly could OP have some built in programming that kicks in whenever sharing work is necessary? See Rice Irrigation Relied on Norms
If reciprocity really traces back to rice, it might be a factor that contributes to explaining modern-day differences in social ties across cultures. For example, asking people in Korea (a rice-farming culture) to think about how another person helped them triggered feelings of indebtedness, but it had no such effect on Americans
Imagine the difference between wolves and dogs. Breeding dogs mostly just throws various switches that were already present in wolf DNA. So in that sense dogs are not a break from wolf OP but more of just a different expression of that programming.
So humans might have switches that can be purely culturally activated or maybe activated by culture and some small amount of breeding. However arguably throwing such a switch is not really sentience as no real augmentation occurred.
Then again there is a matter of degree in this analysis. Throw the switch a little and you haven’t augmented anything. Throw the switch way beyond it’s intended range of operation, cause a hubris epidemic, and maybe you have augmented OP.
That’s a long way to go to come back to the question — is our obsession with external validation really at a historic high? One could look to the Amish to try to measure but their lives are too complex for any easy answer and that will hold for comparing any two human cultures.
Offhand it is more likely that Mennonites and modern Americans are still all equally OP robots that have tuned rather than augmented their programming. I say this because breaking from OP is difficult and hard to achieve, assuming it is an achievement, without a more deliberate approach.