alt Hacker NewsPeople at the bottom of the status hierarchy will drop out to live in simulations that give them what they wanted but couldn't get from life. After a while, they'd likely choose to suppress their memories of ever having existed outside the simulation - there's nobody in the experience machine that'll judge you for doing it. With those people gone, the people immediately above them now occupy that bottom level, and the cycle repeats.
Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.
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The movie The Congress explores the ideas of control through society-scale simulation and the loss of one's real identity when immersed in that setting, much like what you suggest. It's a visual trip, thoroughly thought provoking, and I highly recommend it
> Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force
But why would you even want that? They like it in the simulation, and nobody really wants to deal with them outside the simulation.
My math brain is immediately broken by your irrefutably correct induction argument!
I don’t fully agree with your thesis, but good prospective future model version names.
Why do you need to drop to some kind of simulation and memory suppressing? It seems like it would be sufficient to do what many subcultures do today - come up with reasons why my hobbies are the coolest and it’s actually the normies playing their status games who are missing out.
To a lesser extent, myself and others already are in the 'simulation'. I go to work, go home, play some games or muck around in my lab, repeat. I don't really have aspirations or an outside presence, just focused on ignoring every manmade horror that has been shown to us over the past four years.