This argument ignores sexual selection and people's desire for status (the two are closely related). In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of. Yet we convince ourselves that's not enough and continue to work.

What is the object of that work, usually? The respect of others, exclusive limited resources like land, and to have highly desirable mates. These three are closely related, and that's probably not an accident. Sexual selection has likely been a powerful force in shaping our psychology.

Spending all day alone watching TikTok is low-status and doesn't get anyone's respect, so I predict that it won't actually be the thing that most people end up doing.

People at the bottom of the status hierarchy will drop out to live in simulations that give them what they wanted but couldn't get from life. After a while, they'd likely choose to suppress their memories of ever having existed outside the simulation - there's nobody in the experience machine that'll judge you for doing it. With those people gone, the people immediately above them now occupy that bottom level, and the cycle repeats.

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.

The objects of status are quite flexible culturally, though. Cultural anthropology shows us a huge variety of ways that different cultures handle status competition. People will definitely still compete for status but what that entails could look very different from our current toxic grindset culture. Much like sports often serve as a substitute outlet for the same instincts that lead to fighting or war, that social selection will find different outlets that don't have to be literal survival battles for much of the population if we can create different material and cultural conditions.

> In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of.

They might be right now, but for most of us they aren't next month. Or next year. Or for the years after retirement

"We convince ourselves it's not enough" completely misses the fact that for most of us it isn't, past the very short term!

> and to have highly desirable mates

The younger generation doesn't seem to date much, and this appears to be true in most countries.

> In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of. Yet we convince ourselves that's not enough and continue to work.

Almost no one is usa has 'enough' to pay for healthcare. My daughter's nicu bill was 750k, which would've easily bankrupted me.

The last part reminded me of this story. "Screen time is a lower class problem."

Covered in the first 2 minutes of this video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=e9wUam96eH0

What about working on things for the intrinsic value of learning, challenging oneself, creating something useful or beautiful, or the satisfaction of a job well done? Sure, social status is one motivator among many, but I find this genre of evolutionary psychology extremely reductive and empirically dubious.

But in the absence of any human driven task that meaningfully improves well being the way to signal status will likely devolve into some form of fighting. The display of status might be narrowed to demonstrating who can kill more. Either literally kill or at best partake in some arbitrarily conceived games or intrigues designed (by AI?) to flag status.

I spend most of my day alone at work reading HN comments while women at work want to talk to me.

Nah, I'd rather read comments like yours.

This argument also seems totally american lifestyle centered where even your hobbies needs to be productive.

My brother installed Bazzite just for the fun and he is learning things about the computer and he just seems to be curious. That's totally improductive for him : he is actually trying to launch a business around flowers delivery, and not your typical uber-like startup. He is buying a truck and will work for its previous clients. But still, he is learning linux because that looks cool. He is also trying to learn piano.

Me ? If I didnt have to work in an AI utopia, I'd go on the skatepark everyday doing rollerblading tricks, socializing and learning from other rollerbladers. There is nothing less productive than rollerblading, it's not even a practical mean of transportation. It's just fun and humans love to socialize around fun things.

I don't think we'll ever get to this AI utopia. I think we are either going full cyberpunk or extinct by our own. But would it happen, I'm not sure I'd be on tiktok watching AI slop all the day.

I'd even go as far as saying that without work, the humans would be able to remove the social mask that working involves and that it would make use more human.

The status thing really got turned on it head around late 2015 when more GetThingsDone oriented groups detected that Facebook was actively engineering social consensus through orchestrated shadowbanning.

The prigs are oh so high status .. to other prigs.

> exclusive limited resources like land

I think you almost hit something more important there. Desires like mating, respect, status etc can only exists with the entities that needs it, but what if the existence of those entities is fundamentally no longer needed? Why then should "the society" maintain it? It's known that a society less burden advances faster, and it's also known that countries need to move fast to stay competitive.

I believe future is much grimmer for people currently living, because if productivity can increase without the import of human labors, then eventually the humans will simply not be kept alive. Meaning, shrink in human population, and even more intense competition for fewer still competitiable resources etc. Of course you'll are not hanging out, you're too busy doing hard labor the robots still can't yet do.

All of this is easy to see if you understand that human societies are not built to advance and provide, instead they are fundamentally built to fairly distribute resources from ones who's non-productive, to ones are. And most type of societies that is alive and well today is very good at that.

Also, off-topic here: most people confused the word "productivity" with something like "hard work", it's not that. I'll give you the readers some examples: Elon Musk can build and launch rockets that carries actual people to space safely, but you can't (so far) no matter how hard you work, and thus Elon Musk is more productive than you; Jeff Bezos (so far) deliver goods to millions of people or more each year, but you can't no matter how hard you try, and thus Jeff Bezos is more productive than you. That's what "productivity" actually mean, not "I work my ass off everyday so I deserve to get paid more". And that's the real reason why these guys are rich and you're not, not because rich people are evil, but because they found their way to be productive and thus they get rich.

In the US 85%ish live <100 miles from their childhood home

Fewer people than you want to believe from staring into a filter bubble of HN approved tech startup/disrupt! psychosis generator care about impressing a billionaire investor

People out there have fucked animals for sexual release

Don't anthropomorphize the humans; they don't have a reliable track record of being worth the respect. They’re animals and care more about enslavement of each others minds and agency to the benefit of a toxic minority of codependent losers who are too lazy to learn how to rotate a tire or flip a burger on their own