The artificial pride economy and sentience — essential properties analysis
In our previous episode we concluded that the artificial pride economy which to a large extent produces jobs instead of value is a break from original programming, OP. Where here a break from OP is real sentience and not semantically irrelevant sentience.
However the lack of evolutionary utility of artificial pride is too simple of an analysis. Consider the solitary octopus at play in My Octopus Teacher or any dog playing fetch.
So let’s consider an essential properties analysis of humans on artificial pride versus more traditional value producing work. See here for a primer on essential properties.
The essential property of the play of animals and earlier humans is the sense of fun and lack of being forced. Being forced into a non-productive activity is then essentially different even if one enjoys the manufactured pride.
The artificial pride economy shapes possible personality outcomes — one must be able to receive artificial pride to the extent these jobs control survival. But restricting personality types is again weak sentience as nothing new emerges.
From another essential properties point of view is humanity stuck simulating original conditions, OC, in order to satisfy OP? IE work must be made artificially essential in order to preserve this invariant property of humanity.
If that’s the case then the artificial pride economy, far from breaking with OP, is a last ditch effort to preserve it. The question then becomes could sentience increase the range of conditions possible for human existence?
We can think of the artificial pride economy as a very rudimentary attempt at controlling a basic human function — like what has been achieved for libido via birth control and Viagra or for diet via diet pills and stomach constraints.
Similar experiments with culture based intervention for libido have also only gone so far. We may not be built for an orgy a day without major programming changes.
Weaning humanity from the artificial pride economy is where culture led sentience might shine or might lead millions into despair. How essential is work, regardless of producing value, to a human and what sort of being would result if OP can be modified by culture are incredibly important questions.
There are some clues in the lifestyles of the dominating class:
Consequently, performative workaholism is partially achieved by recoding leisure activities as productive work (e.g. getting drunk at a “networking event” instead of a “party,” or playing golf with clients).
But unfortunately taking leisure at work is simply not enough to break with an artificial pride economy:
At a certain point, accumulated wealth and income stop functioning as units of utility, and become — to the self-aggrandizing person — units of “merit” or personal value instead, leading these highly-competitive, passionless and alienated individuals to seek to outdo each other in order to “win” what they effectively see as a game, consequences — environmental destruction, worker exploitation, mental illness, community breakdown — be damned.
Of course the easy path for culture is to blow up the artificial pride economy by simply withholding respect. That’s a kind of nuclear option since it doesn’t replace that economy with any other OP satisfying substitute.
A more reasonable path to sentience would be a culture that offers substitutes for fake work that are increasingly less work like. Perhaps many hobbies began with that intention but work without pay is still work.
As robots on fairly inflexible programming it’s difficult for us even to imagine a culture that would create freedom from fake work. But maybe with enough combined imagination it will be possible — sentience is a group activity.