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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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With that out of the way, back to the thought experiment where we are alive. Monkeys and lions aren’t in the same status hierarchy. You don’t improve your standing by whipping and starving your pet dog. You, however, do by whipping and starving the other members of the same species.

The way I see it, in an unevenly distributed post-Singularity world, the gulf between the people who dominate and the rest of us will easily be as large, if not larger, than that between us and monkeys today. At that point, assuming that status hierarchies exist, and that these entities care about them, I don't expect to see the people in charge weight their status therein on dominating us, not when they can measure relativistic kill penises with the Matrioshka Brain next door.

I expect that they'll be thinking along the lines of "damn, Bezos Prime Alpha 1.2 managed to get dibs on that pair of binary neutron stars I was eyeing" rather than obsessing over the 0.000001% of increased output they could gain by getting rid of us quaint throwbacks.