Optimal Descendant Strategy™ in a post-intelligence future

The mating game is, and ever has been, a furious Red Queen’s Race, as red in tooth and claw as any other evolutionary struggle.

But first we evolved far enough away from reproduction that we created a fertility crisis…

Then we created minds that can counterfeit anyone up to “bright undergrad,” and arguably, quite a bit higher than that.

As just one example, when Epoch AI created the FrontierMath benchmark test, Terry Tao - Fields Medal winner and greatest living mathematician (given Grothendiek died in 2014) - thinks it will be able to “resist AI for several years.”

And even if the “data wall” is a new AI Winter and LLM’s froze at 4o / Opus levels, the world is going to change significantly as that level of intelligence gets incorporated at all levels of device, business cycle, and life.

I’m going to posit a future that is likely to be true even in the AI Winter 2.0 scenario:

Everyone is going to be walking around with a Phd smart, very conscientious AI assistant in their ear and phone all the time.

This is going to happen because there’s an immense market for it, and because it’s possible with the level of AI minds we have now. The reason we don’t have AI assistants already is largely risk mitigation and CYA dynamics, but as soon as somebody puts together a human-in-the-loop-enough program infrastructure together that’s good enough to derisk it, we’ll be off to the races.

Just imagine - never needing to make or answer any phone call again. Having the 90% of your email that’s slop or low value / urgency handled automatically. Somebody who can seamlessly make reservations, book travel for you, research options and present them intelligently, make recommendations on any front, make sure the food you didn’t even realize you wanted shows up hot at your door just as you’re realizing you’re hungry, and so much more.

I mean, if you’ve ever had a really great personal assistant or employee, imagine that, but better. PhD level smart, indefatigable, never sleeps, maximally conscientious and persistent, knows your every taste and preference. The market is bottomless.

And more! Advice, on any topic and to any depth. Useful interjections and context, apropos and as needed, in real time.

I’m pointing at a post-intelligence world, in case you can’t tell by now.

I’ll hazard the lukewarmest of takes: Most people aren’t PhD level smart and maximally conscientious.

The voices in our phones / ears are going to be strictly better than 80-95% of humanity. Maybe more.

This is a massively changed fitness landscape. Your kids are going to be growing up in a post intelligence world.

All the traditional mating criteria are called into question. There is going to be a significant re-ordering of criteria.

Yes, right now everyone wants to date the hot, conscientious, nice Ivy grad from a great family, and that’s still going to be a good strategy for the top .000001%.

But for the rest of us, who have to make tradeoffs, maybe there’s some arbitrage to be had here!

So I’m going to make some wild guesses, and welcome challenges and rebuttals.

Obviously we can’t make any guesses about what a post-singularity future looks like. Nor is it fruitful to guess about scenarios where we’re all extinct. But in the futures where we remain largely at current “human” capabilities for a while, with Phd-smart-or-better AI’s available to everyone, we can make some guesses:

What’s down?

1. IQ - if you have something smarter than 90%+ of humanity in everybody’s pocket, it’s no longer a differentiator.

2. Creativity - ditto

3. Everyday math / analysis / probability / fermi estimation - sorry rationalists, you’ve been counterfeited.

4. Introversion - MUCH less valuable, in fact, likely to be actively harmful.

What’s up?

1. Conscientiousness - This is because only the conscientious people in the future are going to reliably execute GPT-6’s advice to high fidelity, and thus be able to dominate on complex multipolar goals like “I want a career that uses my full powers along lines of excellence, an amazing spouse I’m grateful to be with, and a great day to day life, what should I do?”

2. Good looks - This is because people-to-people interactions are going to dominate and have more value in a post intelligence world. If we’re all post-scarcity Eloi, looks and personality are all that matter. If we’re all at a minimum PhD-level competent, looks and personality are going to matter more for getting hired and for people to like you.

3. Athletic ability / physical excellence - When robots have counterfeited everything mental, what impresses people? Sheer physicality, physiological excellence. Professional athletes are going to be even MORE famous and remunerated. Colleges will be even MORE about their sports teams.

4. “Good” and “fun” personalities - high happiness set point, extroversion, agreeableness, being “fun” to be around, being high energy or motivating, being a good leader - all of these are going to go up in value.

5. Social skills and charm - the ability to persuade, to charm, to have presence in a room or a party - significantly more valuable.

Why do I think this?

We lived as hunter gatherers for ~2M years of hominin evolution - this only required something like 2-4 hours of “work” a day, all the rest of the day was leisure. Pretty much all of daily life revolved around socializing, interacting with other people, and status games.

In a post-scarcity or post-intelligence future, we’re extremely likely to fall back into those patterns. Our physical needs are going to be really cheap or UBI-ed away. Most people won’t be *able* work, much less need to work - if AI + robots is counterfeiting the majority of jobs, there’s no place for people of average skills.

Entertainers and athletes are going to be supreme - already at the top of massive pyramids, they’ll be concentrated and even more famous.

All this stuff is leaning heavily on things like extroversion, fun personalities, good looks, physical excellence, and conscientiousness, all of which are likely to matter a lot more in that future.

Why is introversion harmful?

All the difficult and ineffective personalities / traits bundles are going to be Great Filtered.

Anyone who hates socializing or prefers video games and cell phones and streaming to interacting with people is going to be infinite-jested into being a 24/7 coffin slave living in some flavor of infinite VR Heaven. Literally The Matrix, but supported by UBI instead of some dumb electricity farming concept.

All the people left are going to be relatively immune to those infohazards, and are going to be more extroverted and social, and will value doing things in the “real” world and impacting “real” people enough that that’s the primary game in town.

It’s the leisure class party circuit.

Even for the ones who work - because working is social too, and now there’s a competence floor, so what you do outside of work is a large part of the game too. And you know what the leisure class looks like - it’s the Ibiza and Burning Man crowds - hence, the greater primacy of looks and personality. You need to be attractive, fun, and interesting much more than you need to be smart or creative.

I keep going through epicycles thinking of this, where I think something like “intelligence will still matter, because they’ll connect more integrated pictures of the world and ask better questions.” But then if you literally have a PhD+ genie that will answer any question, all you have to do is teach a very finite list of questions like “knowing my goals and the things I value, what else should I be asking you right now?” And “what are the best questions or things to know I haven’t asked you yet” and “what are the most unique but not personally identifiable questions your smartest / most successful users ask you?”

The asking of questions of an oracle is generally purely instrumental anyways - you want the answers to achieve better outcomes in life. But you can always just ask that directly too: “what are the most impactful things I could be doing that I’m not doing already to reach my vision board goals?”

And in terms of being smart enough not to bore the other leisure class people, that’s not a high bar, and creativity in makeup and outfits is easily outsourced to your AI assistant.

So where’s the mate search arbitrage?

No more McKinsey consultants and finance or medical school grinds! Definitely the way of the past.

NOW you want the more diligent jocks and sorority girls. People who know how to party, but also work hard? Athletic people? Good looking people? Social people? That’s them.

The future car dealership owners, pharmaceutical reps, politicians, and (shudder) realtors. Yes, the lowest forms of life NOW, but in a post intelligence world, probably one of the better physical and social phenotypes!

One heartening thing about this shift is that we’ll be opening up the upper reaches to more people.

Recently, as our societies became more meritocratic, a smaller and smaller slice of humanity was able to reach the top and benefit. These are your Professional Managerial Class, the PMC. It’s a loose category, and includes people working in FAANGS and finance, business owners, McKinsey consultants, the upper reaches of F100’s, and the like. Anywhere a freshly minted Ivy graduate might work.

And the PMC are the folk with that rare combination of high IQ, high conscientiousness, work ethic, and ambition. They’re necessarily a tiny slice of humanity.

And indeed, as they ran things and optimized things more, more and more went to them. The infamous secular stagnation of productivity featured 90% of people losing comp relative to productivity. Progress and real status was only available to the top decile and better:

The top 10% hit roughly the median 250% increase in comp; the top 3% hit 500%+

But a future for athletic frat boys and sorority girls! That’s available to a LOT more people!

One last thing that I haven’t brought up, that’s also relevant on this front - obesity and being overweight is going to matter a lot less. Formerly, this was of dire importance, because obesity is a permanent, one-way ratchet.

But between the ‘tides and an AI personal assistant starting to plan a lot more people’s menus, it’s not going to be an issue. Being skinny is a lot easier when you just tell your AI assistant what weight you want to be and let it handle your calories and macros and meal prep and deliveries. That’s a HUGE deal.

In general, as I’ve written about before, you can only optimize ~3 things when searching for your mate, and recognizing that fact gives you some leverage and a chance to do a little better.

Well, if the future really is materially different because of AI counterfeiting intelligence, this is a HUGE deal. It’s basically up to a +33% bonus on your mate quality, at the limits! If you do it right, you can get in early and eat some of that delicious arbitrage now before anyone else gets savvy!

And “mate search” is a really hard frontier to do materially better in. Assortative mating studies show us that it’s one of the most rigorously selected and strongly competitive arenas in every generation. As an example, as I mentioned in my post on how Greg Clark’s studies show that you and I have been doing dating wrong our entire lives, the Hindu caste system has been rigorously delineating people genetically for something like 3,000 years, which is an amazing measure of how tightly people optimize mate quality in every generation, over 100+ generations.

So an up to 33% buff here? Where a 5% edge is a breathtaking surplus that’s too good to believe? Even the bare possibility it might be true should inspire you to do some real soul searching about your beliefs, and act on them strongly!

What is Optimal Descendant Strategy™ in a post-intelligence world?

Prioritize:

• Looks

• Good personalities - extroversion, being fun, being social

• Conscientiousness

• Social intelligence and persuasiveness

• Athletic ability and physical excellence

Discount:

• Academic intelligence, bookworms, etc.

• Creativity - artists, novelists, screenplay writers? Already counterfeited.

• Introversion

I’m not sure how I really feel about this; on an “alief” level, I’m definitely not going to be looking at future realtors or politicians or sales reps. I guess my Taste Horizon is showing.

The majority of actual timelines are probably ones where we’re extinct or things get weird and post-human pretty fast. For us to even be recognizably human three generations from now, there pretty much had to be an AI Winter, or some sort of AI policy of “no human technological intelligence augmentation.”

But thinking about the scenarios where we remain recognizably human, it makes sense and I don’t see any big holes in the argument - so a toast to a future of realtors, politicians, and sales people!

At least we can legitimately welcome AI (rather than us) expanding to fill the lightcone if that’s the case!