The Meta Game: What’s Left for Humans Post-AGI?

One of the questions I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is whether humans have any role to play in the economy of the future.

Once you get past the whole ‘humans will become economically irrelevant’ part of AGI (inevitable, in my opinion), you move to this question naturally:

What will humans do? 

It’s natural for the human brain to catastrophise scenarios; to immediately jump to the worst possible conclusion, or to the best. 

But the truth, more often than not, does lie in the messy middle.

I don’t know what happens post-AGI, but I do currently believe two things:

1. Any goal-directed task will be done better by AI. Even determining what the right goal is, and the right question to ask, will be done better by AI. As a result of this, there will be no economically relevant task which humans will be able to do better, smarter nor cheaper than an AI. This will happen within 2-5 years, not 20 years. We can debate timelines, and we can debate what the regulatory landscape will look like, but that is besides the point right now. The world we are heading towards looks like fully autonomous corporations, along with fully autonomous factories of intelligent robots building intelligent robots.
2. Humans will still do things. But what we do will look dramatically different. It won’t be based on economic utility anymore. It likely won’t be to earn money (except for a small class of elites who may still care about that). It is much more likely to look like what sports, gaming, fitness, entertainment and leisure look like today.

I am calling Number 2 ‘The Meta Game’, and it goes as follows:

In a world where humans become economically obsolete due to AGI, humans will begin to optimise for the only thing they still control: being human. 

What are the things that make us uniquely human?It’s all the weird shit that people don’t spend much time on today because they’re too busy working. 

Maybe it’s that chess competition nerds like to go to, maybe for others it’s a Salsa class they attend after work at nights, or learning to surf, or doing crossfit. 

Or gaming. 

All of this stuff is ‘meta’.

It’s meta af.

What I believe will happen is the market for this type of thing will expand enormously, because 1) people will have nothing to do (they won’t have a job), and 2) most people enjoy this type of thing anyway.

So why is it meta?

Because it is the game within the game. 

And this is the key to understanding what I think will happen over the next decade. 

The key to what the new social world order might look like if I am correct.

Since the vast majority of people will be on UBI with their physical needs met by the combination of AI and humanoid robotics, they won’t care that much about material things. In some ways class mobility will be locked - whatever you had pre-AGI is largely what you get post-AGI.

But there is one way out.

Yes, you guessed it.

The Meta Game.

You will compete within the Meta Game to earn jackpot prizes that might give you a chance of earning your way out of the permanent underclass.

At this point you might be forgiven for thinking I’m just rehashing the plot of Ready, Player, One to you, or that Black Mirror episode where contestants must perform to escape a life of manual labor (S1, E2)...

But I am completely serious.

This is the world I think we may be heading towards. 

Let me give you a more concrete example.

When you ‘finish’ a video game, do you stop playing it?

No.

For the most part, you don’t.

What do you do?

You invent a game within the game.

In Call of Duty, if you get to the highest level you don’t just decide ‘oh, I’m sick of this game now, I’ve reached the highest level’.

Instead, you create rules within the rules.

You create a new way to have fun within the game itself. One that the original game designers never would have envisaged.

You join a clan, you verse others 1 on 1 with ridiculous self-imposed limitations, you set goals for yourself that are outside what the game even rewards…

Why do you do this?

Because in the absence of the ability to control the game itself, you control only the things you can control: you control the subset that is still optimisable - the things that you can create yourself - and then you use social influence to try to convince others that what you have done is valuable.

You do this in an attempt to artificially create extra status once you have milked the status goals set by the game.

This is what I am talking about. 

This is the Meta Game.

Coming back to reality…

AI will optimise everything, but it will never be able to optimise The Meta Game, because the Meta Game is created by humans - we choose what has value to us, and we choose how to influence other humans. Humans care about humans - we care what other humans think of us, how they see us, whether they like us, etc, and this will never change.

We won’t win the Economic Game, so we will retreat to The Meta Game, and that is where new status hierarchies will form for the 80-90% of people who will be without a job.

One other thing is important to note: