Social Status in the New World Order: How Status Hierarchies Form in an AGI World

Does status still exist in a world of material abundance?

The beauty of capitalism is that it allows hierarchies of competence to flourish.

If you’re a talented, high-agency individual, there are very few things that can stop you from succeeding under a capitalist economy.

If you work hard, surround yourself with the right people, and you have the humility to accept when you’re wrong and pivot - to learn quickly - eventually you will succeed.

And when you succeed and work your way up the ladder, you gain status.

That’s how it used to work anyway.

But unfortunately that whole model is now in the process of being thrown down the drain.

Actually, it’s kind of already down the drain.

But I think we all already know this.

We can certainly sense it, even if we can’t quite describe why it’s happening or how.

All of us intuitively know that life seems to be getting harder.

We’re working longer hours, housing is getting more expensive, electricity costs are going up, there seems to be less social cohesion - the list is long and extensive.

Things have gone deeply wrong somewhere (an inevitable end result of the fiat monetary system).

Rather than stewing on this, what interests me more at the moment is this question of ‘okay, but what comes next?’

What might the society of the future actually look like?

Because we can talk about the problems all day long, but at the end of the day if you want to succeed in life you need to bet on the future, not fret about the past.

No one, including myself, has the answer to this.

But I do have some thoughts, so I’m going to share them.

If you’ve been following me so far, you’ll know that I believe, eventually, AI replaces most white collar work, and thereafter replaces most blue collar work too (after a significant time lag whereby billions of humanoid robots need to be manufactured cheap enough to sell at a mass market consumer price point).

I’m not going to rehash details about why I believe this nor the specific timelines, as you can read about it from me in these 6 articles: one, two, three, four, five, six.

I instead want to focus this article specifically on the social aspects of this type of economy - one where most businesses are automated AI firms.

What does it actually look like socially and how might status accrue?

My strong belief is that the big tech companies and data centres are going to be taxed very heavily, on a global, coordinated basis, to fund Universal Basic Income (UBI).

I don’t see any other way for governments around the world to quell the inevitable social unrest that will result from millions of their citizens losing their jobs within a relatively short time period.

For those individuals who are ambitious and want more than their UBI, it’s going to be slim pickings, however here are three things I expect to boom, all of which are driven by status:

1. Humans as a Luxury (HaaS)

SaaS is out, HaaS is in.

There will be a booming sector for luxury human services.

Why?

Because if you have all the money in the world, what do you want?

Scarcity.

You want what other people cannot have, because that is what gives you status.

So if we are entering a world where there is first digital abundance, and then eventually physical abundance of most items too, what is most scarce?

Bitcoin, attention and humans themselves.

If you’re rich, you could get a robot to do everything for you - and for many things you will - but you know what would be an even bigger flex to your equally rich friends all with super yachts?

Getting a human to do it.

It becomes a huge status symbol.

The plebs will have the bots, and the elites will have the humans.

However this will only apply to service based industries like entertainment and hospitality, where showing off a human is a flex. Anything based on utility or intelligence will be automated and executed by AI.