It's weird living in an approximately post-scarcity part of the world. Competitions aren't much about survival, they're sometimes about comfort and always about status. Houses are essentially free, if you're willing to live where there's less competition and no jobs. Soon the AI will automate the remaining jobs, but what do we do with all this free time? Fortunately, Yudkowsky has the answer, even though my inner nihilist doesn't agree.

But today I'd like to wildly speculate about an alternative world where AI doesn't eliminate all work, only raises the bar enough that less than 1% of the population can actually contribute. But how do we pay them? Total material abundance has been reached, in the sense that all you could reasonably consume is available. The simple solution would be to reserve the nicest things for rewards only, but that seems wasteful.

Of material abundance, we already have that for food, calorie-wise. And so we have an obesity epidemic, too. Fixing the root causes is hard; at least we have Ozempic now. Health-wise it's a miracle, and maybe just cures all diseases. Yeah, yeah. This is the post-scarcity world with free healthcare, though not having to see a doctor, getting rid of addictions, and stopping aging are still nice. But I'm going to talk about what actually matters. Status.

Not that many centuries ago overweightness was a sign of prosperity, because having lots of food while avoiding physical labor was hard. Suddenly fast food is cheap, and people pay to access the gym, and the status relation is reversed. I wonder if wide availability of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic reverses the trend again, or at least makes it less relevant. Seems implausible, but so do all societal changes where preferences are deeply ingrained, yet mostly learned.

There's another food-related example. It used to be that meat was rare and expensive, and eating it was high status. Factory farming makes meat so ubiquitous and cheap that it's hard to avoid. As a response, in the past decade or two, veganism for ethical or environmental reasons has gained prevalence. This has much been helped with the availability of better meat alternatives, and the feedback loop between these. I think we'll slide a good amount to that direction, but eventually this trend will reverse, too.

The pattern is the same in both cases:

1. We don't have enough of X, so having X is high status
2. The society values X, so of course we figure out how to make more of it
3. Abundance of X has its own issues, making X lower status
4. A new development negates the issues from too much X
5. ???

Let's take a look at another case, where we know the final step too, this time using our neat numbered list:

1. Diamonds are rare and shiny. A wedding ring should have one
2. We start mining diamonds to have enough of them
3. Mining business gets really exploitative
4. We figure out how to make diamonds in a laboratory, cheaply
5. People still value "natural diamonds" more (partially due to advertising)

I can't help but think that the lab diamonds are seen as cheating, and such do not count. The point of the wedding ring diamond is to be expensive.

Supposedly the same could happen to overweightness. Getting thin with Ozempic isn't worth much, status-wise. If you didn't suffer to get the results, they're worth nothing, because anyone could have done it. And veganism, too. If a real animal didn't suffer for it, why would you bother to eat it? Or maybe vegan food just becomes the default.

Now I think we finally have the tools to answer the original question. How do we pay when all material needs are fulfilled? Not only with status, but a specific flavour of status. Suffering.

Manually performed work will be more valuable. Effort was spent. It's worth more if the person performing the work was high-status, as the humiliation is also worth something. Human flesh will be eaten by those at the top of the status hierarchy.

Suffering is what makes it special.