Is Gaming the Future of Humanity?

One hot topic of conversation right now is “What are all the humans going to do when AI plus humanoid robotics becomes better at everything?”.

As William Gibson famously said “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. So it’s worth looking at what activities are already taking up excess human time, allowing humans to form status hierarchies, and satisfying the human need to feel like they are accomplishing something.

One of those activities is video games, which continue to take up an increasing fraction of people’s time. But many other human activities can in some senses be seen as being forms of gaming - in the sense that they are activities that lead to dubious material benefits, but allow people to gain status and feel accomplished. This includes a large fraction of academia (definitely not all), the art world, sports, and yes, blogging.

Some people even believe superintelligence actually happened a long time ago, and what we experience now is actually a simulated video game reality, designed to keep us entertained.