If conditions in the future are such that modern humans would be very unhappy (or very happy) we will change to become more so, or less.
I believe there’s a surprisingly high chance that selection pressures from non-agentic sources like Evolution may not matter much, or at all. In particular, digital people don’t have to evolve much, or at all. And there are real life regimes that don’t care about how effective their economy is if it makes people suffer.
There would be selection pressures for ems as well, in fact they would be stronger than for present- day people. Someone would need to create the ems and they would probably prefer ems with the psychological traits required to be efficient workers.
This is essentially Robin Hanson’s Age of Em scenario, and while this scenario is being replaced by AI (mostly because of more funding), I think that 2 major issues prevent the scenario of not being very unhappy/mass suffering from occuring:
The galaxy is very large, and this on its own allows for some pretty large scale suffering.
The workers in such an economy may be pretty small compared to the population of non-workers, especially if they are much more productive than RL workers, and the idea of a state that solely exists to make people suffer only requires different motivations than making money, especially if we assume that AI is distributed widely.
I believe there’s a surprisingly high chance that selection pressures from non-agentic sources like Evolution may not matter much, or at all. In particular, digital people don’t have to evolve much, or at all. And there are real life regimes that don’t care about how effective their economy is if it makes people suffer.
See North Korea for a good example.
There would be selection pressures for ems as well, in fact they would be stronger than for present- day people. Someone would need to create the ems and they would probably prefer ems with the psychological traits required to be efficient workers.
This is essentially Robin Hanson’s Age of Em scenario, and while this scenario is being replaced by AI (mostly because of more funding), I think that 2 major issues prevent the scenario of not being very unhappy/mass suffering from occuring:
The galaxy is very large, and this on its own allows for some pretty large scale suffering.
The workers in such an economy may be pretty small compared to the population of non-workers, especially if they are much more productive than RL workers, and the idea of a state that solely exists to make people suffer only requires different motivations than making money, especially if we assume that AI is distributed widely.
Yes, I’m not claiming anything new here.