High Challenge

Why do you think there are so many beetles? God is bored. Maybe he created us so we would invent the Wii?

We'll reject the games where everything is too easy. We will not want to live in a universe which is as we wish it were. It'll be unhealthy for us. We'll throw it off. Instead, we'll play games that are just as hard and frustrating as the life we live now.

Then, the robots will discover a way to circumvent thermodynamics and harness us as batteries and we'll all start saying "Woah!". Plus all the time playing computer games with help will make us so stupid that we give superintelligent, super-fast hostile ems a warning like "Dodge this!" before we shoot them because we don't comprehend their abilities. (Perhaps they meant that as a metaphor?)

On the subject of computer games (an underrated area for the study of psychology, economy and even AI, IMO):

During the last 3 years, I have spent just over 1000 hours playing World of Warcraft. Why did I choose to spend (some, incl my wife, might say waste) my time on this? I am fairly wealthy and quite fit - just about any fun activity is open to me. So why do I like WoW? And why 10 million people around the world do the same?

Some important reasons why the game is so pleasurable seem to be:

a) the ultimate goals are pretty clear (so unlike real life...)

b) the "measures of progress" are likewise clear - and there is only one way to go, namely "up"! (again, so unlike real life, apart from possibly "youth" - is that what makes "youth" so good?)

c) the rewards are clear - and are earned so progressively that playing the game seems akin to wireheading (the trickle of XPs, "gold" and new items continuously stimulates some pleasure centre or other).

(Good play involves fairly sophisticated analysis, strategy and tactics, which maintains intetrest... but is beside the point I want to make. The game is attractive to good and poor players.)

With this on the table, I would like to offer the following for comments:

1) Can the 3 items above (clarity of goals, clear measures of achievement, progressive rewards) be mapped onto real life in a way that makes life more, um, fun? There are some mechanisms like that already - money most clearly, yet pursuit of money as a goal is not considered that worthwhile.

2) this is a bit out of left field, but: Is a setting like World of Warcraft a good medium for development of AI? Clear goals, clear measures of progress, sufficient complexity to provide an indication of when important insights are achieved, and a safe environment (in the sense that the path to paperclip AI seems unlikely)...?

(For Robin Hanson: have you heard about the economic studies carried out in WoW setting?)

OK, duty calls... I have more to say on this when time permits.

D. Alex

@ D. Alex: Some important reasons why the game is so pleasurable seem to be:

a) the ultimate goals are pretty clear (so unlike real life...)

b) the "measures of progress" are likewise clear -

c) the rewards are clear -

This looks like real life without the hard parts. Sure, it makes it more fun, but at the end will you feel rewarded? If you look back now or in a few years to the time spent playing and consider what you could have achieved in real life if you invested the same time into real challenges how will you feel? From my own experience I can tell you that I regret every minute I wasted playing stupid games. Nowadays I still play chess ocasionally to relax, but I'm successfully getting rid of that habit. I avoid overly immersive/addictive games like the plague.

@D. Alex: (For Robin Hanson: have you heard about the economic studies carried out in WoW setting?)

Since you mentioned economics, did you ever consider the opportunity cost of playing WoW?

What you describe as targets over '4D states' reminds me of Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. For an example, playing a game of basketball with a winner/loser after an hour of play is a finite game. However, the sport of basketball overall, is an infinite game. So playing a specific video game to reach a score or pass the final level is a finite game, but being a 'gamer' is an infinite game, allowing ever more types of gaming to take place.

Unlike Roland, who is obviously a puritan, I rather enjoy the occasional spot of idleness. For a non-trivial number of people, playing WoW for a couple of hours a day is more fun that playing real life. Rather than make thinly veiled moral judgements about folks for their unproductivity, perhaps he should consider what makes certain games so engaging.

I spent a year playing a lot of WoW, attaining non-trivial sucess in both raiding and competitive PVP, but I gave it away, partly because the time commitment became too great and partly because what passed for progression started to lose its shine.

So, being suitably qualified, I'll take a stab at a few features that make this virtual social experience psychologically rewarding:

1. Competition with minimised risk. I love fighting. Seriously - nothing beats the adrenaline buzz, time compression and sheer physicality. Unfortunately even controlled fighting in the physical world entails a level of risk that as a father I'm not willing to assume. Simulated violence, while a poor substitute, helps to fill the void.

2. Persistent progress. Sure online FPS is fun, but when you log on you're always the same guy (more or less). There's also less risk of losing your shirt in an MMO compared to real life.

3. Social challenges. Much of the game content consists of elaborate logistical and combinatorial problems that require research, problem solving, and team coordination. All of which are fun.

I see a future where billions of uploaded humans exist primarily in a cartoonish sim, working out how to beat the latest uber boss the AI has dreamed up in order to get phat lewt.

@ ac: I agree with everything you said except the part about farming a scripted boss for phat lewt in the future. One would think that in the future they could code something more engaging. Have you seen LOTR...

Heaven is being perfect.

(Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull)

EY: you'll find that it contains some tasks that are - there's no kind word for this - effortful. (I would even say "difficult", with the understanding that we're talking about something that takes 10 minutes, not 10 years.)

Some tasks in WoW can take months to complete, and it's clearly intended by WoW developers. Many tasks require 'raiding', which is an organized, coordinated activity involving up to 40 players, strategy, advance preparations, purchases, crafting etc. -- I have a friend who keeps a calendar of his evening raids and plans his real-world time in advance. When I played WoW, I didn't raid at all because it placed too much constraints on my real-world schedule.

EY: So in the future, we'll have programs that help you play the game

To a certain extent, we already do. Speaking of WoW again, we have Thottbot and Ludwig that help you instantly look up any item or spell (this function isn't build into WoW), talent/glyph calculators, forums where people calculate all these probabilities of critical strikes, and a huge number of addons -- for example Auctioneer, which lets people trade at the Auction House far more effectively (you see mean/median/average prices for a certain commodity, standard deviation, confidence ratings etc.), or Recount, which keeps stats about your fighting performance and displays them as graphs or pie charts.

Some of these 'helper' programs, however, are explicitly prohibited by the game vendors. Examples include WoW Glider, a bot that basically does the grindwork for you (it just repeatedly slays monsters to get you experience). Another example is from competitive FPS games -- there is a kind of helper programs, called aimbots, that take the task of weapon aiming off the player, he just does the running. FPS vendors ban aimbots, and players absolutely hate anyone who uses them.

EY: So this is the ultimate end of the prophecy of technological progress - just staring at a screen that says "YOU WIN", forever.

That definitely didn't happen in modern games -- the games that explored this area probably just didn't sell, otherwise we'd see a lot more games of this kind. On the other hand, we have wireheads, such as alcoholics or drug addicts, who (seem to) do precisely that. The addiction issue is complicated by the physiological component of addiction. Speaking cynically, it would be interesting to see how many addicts abandoned the habit if their drug of choice was not physiologically addicting.

MMO of the future lol(some swearing)

And just so I'm not completely off topic, I agree with the original post. There should be games, they should be fun and challenging and require effort and so on. AI's definetly should not do everything for us. A friendly future is a nice place to live in and not a place wher an AI does the living for us so we might as well just curl up in a fetal position and die.

D. Alex:this is a bit out of left field, but: Is a setting like World of Warcraft a good medium for development of AI? Clear goals, clear measures of progress, sufficient complexity to provide an indication of when important insights are achieved, and a safe environment (in the sense that the path to paperclip AI seems unlikely)...?

Ben Goertzel proposes a exactly that (but for different reasons): http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0710.html

How about making games that serve a purpose in the real world? Imagine a virtual world that generates and distributes quests and puzzles based on what kind of (robotic) work is needed in the real world. I guess this would go under "removing low-quality work to make way for high-quality work".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_with_a_purpose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_computation

I watch kittens "playing", definitely building useful skills for the future. I enjoy effort on puzzles and games because each gives me a moment of pleasure on success, and no bad consequences of failure, but some games improve reactions or are otherwise useful.

The "Culture" sequence of novels by Iain M. Banks suggests how people might cope with machines doing all the work. One man works in a cafe, waiting on tables and cleaning up. Yes, the machines could do this work, but he gains happiness from the feeling of serving other people. Other people use machines which "surf" on lava flows, involving some danger, for excitement.

The problems around breeding would still provide interest, angst, challenge.

Artists could still work, though machines might be better able to communicate than humans.

EY: So this is the ultimate end of the prophecy of technological progress - just staring at a screen that says "YOU WIN", forever.

On second thought, playing a modern game IS staring at the "YOU WIN" screen.

Say, you just started playing a game. You did nothing at all, but you're already immortal, you look badass, you have fists the size of a boulder, and you can engage some mean-looking bad guys and win!

So, the actual product of the game industry is 4D "YOU WIN" screens.

There's so much to consider here. For me at least, for something to be fun, I have to know that there's a challenge. For it to be a challenge, there has to be the possibility of failure. There has to be scary parts, that remind you of failure. There has to be multiple real, meaningful, obvious paths that suggest fun in the short term, but disaster in the long term, that you have to look at and reject. There have to be rewards that are enticing, but incredibly rare and difficult, and other rewards that are easier, faster and more localized.

But more importantly, to me, you have to believe it is real - you can't know you're sitting in a fun-generating machine (FGM) - you might wonder about it, but have no real ability to test it.

I can see the possibility of some super-advanced version of me thinking "I want to run a simulation where I live in the 20th and 21st centuries back on Earth", configuring the simulation in various ways, and then "jacking in" to the simulation. All of my memories are suppressed, and 38 years of apparent time later, I'm stuck here arguing on forums with you guys ;-)

Eventually I "die", and the simulation ends, super-advanced me "wakes up" and gets to look at my list of accomplishments and challenges, etc, and chuckle over the choices I've made, in my abysmal ignorance. Then, perhaps, he sits around every once in a while, wondering if his super-advanced life is just a simulation in some even-more-advanced entity's FGM.

It's turtles all the way down.

Abigail:

"The "Culture" sequence of novels by Iain M. Banks suggests how people might cope with machines doing all the work."

Exactly, I think Culture is highly relevant to most topics discussed here. Obviously, it is just a fictional utopia, but I believe it gives plausible answer to "unlimited power future".

For the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

"Since you play the game to get gold and experience points, making the game easier will let you get more gold per unit time: the game will become more fun."

I know this statement is being set up to be knocked down but when I read it I recoiled in disgust. Many people already do not play games with the end goal of increasing the values in the computer that represent gold or experience, because that is a completely empty and pointless thing to care about. My goal when playing games is "to improve myself" and has been for several years. The most fun I have when playing a game is just after I improve my own skill enough to overcome some challenge in a game that I couldn't do before.

I mainly play competitive multiplayer games and extremely difficult singleplayer games. I refuse to play any multiplayer game with meaningful persistent character state because that inevitably makes the game revolve around grinding. Grinding is pointless and stupid and typically does not develop much skill.

"For me at least, for something to be fun, I have to know that there's a challenge. For it to be a challenge, there has to be the possibility of failure."

I go farther than this. For a game to be significantly fun for me I have to ACTUALLY FAIL. Repeatedly. Until I get good.

I find Greg Egan's Permutation City relevant here, particularly the character of Peer. He gives himself arbitrary desires over time, say collecting butterflies or making table legs with a lathe. Re-design the brain to enjoy some arbitrary, meaningless task for a finite time. It is one way of implementing jb's notion. At one point, he constructs a simulation that is perfectly circular: the experience is a closed loop that leads him back to his starting point and mental state. He realizes that he could maintain this one infinitely, or, with no loss, just run it once and permanently shut down.

Or as another character explains, how does it all feel? "However I want it to feel."

what's more fun? a holodeck that you have complete control over? or a holodeck with built in constraints?

playing god might be fun for awhile, but I think everyone would eventually switch over to programs with built in constraints to challenge themselves. the profession of highest prestige will probably people who write really really good holodeck programs.

Computer games are the devil but I agree strongly with Hyphen, the good ones are like sports not work.

"Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn't yours. A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers."

Eliezer: While people don't design their muscles, they presently don't design their brains either, so a robot car-designing contest seems like just as impure a contest. Even if people did repeatedly redesign their brains, wouldn't this either result in convergence, in which case the contestants would be identical and the contest wouldn't be interesting, or alternatively, the arbitrary initial advantages and disadvantages would just be passed on in modified and perhaps even amplified form and the contest stays as impure as ever. Even if you try to measure the amount of effort the contestants put in, that's no good either because different people are born with unfairly different amounts of will-power.

So what on earth do you mean by "purer contest"?

I didn't say pure, I said purer. If you write your own legs, that's a purer contest than running on muscles you don't understand. If you rewrite your own mind, that's a purer contest than thinking with neural circuits you don't understand. You never made and can never make yourself from scratch, from nothing; but it's possible that the brain you wield could be Truly Part Of You. The implications of which are not exactly straightforward, but I haven't gotten to the section on introspection yet.

What can I say, apart from "Progress Quest"

http://www.progressquest.com/ http://www.progressquest.com/info.php

Officially voted the Top Role Playing Game for Post-Singularity Sentient Beings.

Anonymous.

One common answer to the question "What will we do in the future when we've fixed all that is wrong with today" is "How the hell should I know?"

For example, imagine our neolithic ancestors asking each other the same question. "What will they do in the future when they don't have to worry about food, shelter, or even disease?" I think they could have imagined some things; "They'll make more complicated art." "They'll have more complicated sports."

But I don't they they would have imagined full time mathematicians, or video games, or TV, or even books. "Many many people will sit around and talk to each other while someone else gives them food and shelter in return." Unthinkable! Absurd!

So I would say that the technology of the future, insofar as it's impossible for us to imagine in detail, also makes the lifestyle of the future impossible to imagine in detail. Hence, the Singularity. Oh, and if you listen to those folks, they'll say that we'll merge with the AI's, so all of that 'automatic' engineering and whatnot will actually be performed by some sort of version of 'us'.

That one bothered me too. Perhaps you could say bodies are much more peripheral to people's identities than brains, so that in the running case what is being tested is meat that happens to be attached to you and in the robot case it's you yourself. On the other hand I'd still be me with some minor brain upgrades.

Oh, massive crosspost.

Based on the comments here, it would seem that it's the people who reject ultimately-meaningless forms of play - that is, 'play' that doesn't develop skills useful to perpetuation - and concentrate on the "real world" who will end up existing.

And the Luddites will inherit the Earth...

Or, to put it another way:

"Fixing" the future, in a way that renders human beings completely redundant and unnecessary even to themselves, isn't fixing anything. It's creating a problem of unlimited scope.

If that's the ultimate outcome of, say, producing superhuman minds - whether they're somehow enslaved to human preferences or not - then we're trying very hard to create a world in which the only rational treatment of humanity is extinction. Whether imposed from without or from within, voluntarily, is irrelevant.

Of course, this could all be moot if we (re: the universe) are simply coded bits and bytes in a giant simulation program. Cue the Matrix...

I don't know about you guys but I'm having fun just trying to keep this rock from rolling back down the hill.

What's most interesting to me is that lizards don't have fun.

Maybe they have fun. But if they do, I'm pretty sure worms don't have fun. A discussion like this one, carried on by lizards (or worms), wouldn't have included the concept "fun".

And if you keep going back in time or down in size, I'm sure you'll find organisms that don't experience pleasure.

Are there other types of possible experiences as qualitatively different and intrinsically good? Are there infinitely many of them? Is charting the course based on "fun theory" like lizards charting the course of the future based on "basking on a hot rock theory"?

Probably. And if the set of organisms that experience pleasure is a proper subset of the set of organisms that experience fun, then the answer is even more likely to be yes.

That should have said "as qualitatively different and intrinsically good as fun?"

"Heaven is being perfect.": Even a circle can't be perfect, in the classical sense of being the best possible circle. Is a circle of 2cm radius better than a circle of 1cm radius? It is much more nonsensical to talk of a person being perfect. It is even more nonsensical to talk of a still-evolving species being perfect.

I didn't mean "proper subset". I mean that if there are organisms that experience pleasure but not fun (or vice-versa), then it's more likely that there's an infinite number of possible "inherently good" noumena like pleasure, fun, and love; and that we've discovered only a small number of them.

And the mapping of attraction to those noumena is entirely subjective! Like in another Elizer Yudkowsky essay: http://lesswrong.com/lw/tn/the_true_prisoners_dilemma/

I'd say that "work" generally consists of activities that are only useful as a means, and not as an end. In general, "work" is anything that you'd rather have someone (or something) else do for you.

For example, you don't like cleaning the toilet, but you want the toilet to be clean, so you clean it anyway. Cleaning the toilet is work.

Anything you wouldn't volunteer to do if you weren't getting paid is work.

So, yeah, let's get rid of work!

@ac:

Unlike Roland, who is obviously a puritan, I rather enjoy the occasional spot of idleness. For a non-trivial number of people, playing WoW for a couple of hours a day is more fun that playing real life. Rather than make thinly veiled moral judgements about folks for their unproductivity, perhaps he should consider what makes certain games so engaging.

I enjoyed playing games myself, so I know what you are talking about.

You mention idleness, which I agree is sometimes worthwhile. This is the package deal fallacy since there are other ways to achieve that, hanging out with your friends being one of them. Also I'm not making a moral judgement here and the point is not loss of productivity but foregoing much more rewarding things like:

-increasing your social circle(online friends don't count). -enjoying some hobby with real life benefits. -having quality time with your significant other. -if you don't have a significant other invest some time trying to find one. -improve your health by doing exercise, or eating better. -etc...

And if you don't have any ideas then instead of solving artificial game riddles think about what you could do to improve your life.

caledonian: I agree. if we develop some sort of virtual reality that can provide any desire, we'll just be selecting for people who don't go in and never come out. If so the future will be populated by people who refuse such self gratification.

increasing your social circle(online friends don't count) It will be a small, lonely post-upload life...

On the subject of MMORPGs, I've enjoyed playing one for about a year and then it stopped being fun. In the beginning the interesting part was the world exploration, acts of learning new things, rules and interactions between various parts of the system, feeling of steady advance towards some clearly defined goal and work that was guaranteed to pay off. After a while grinding has started to become annoying and my interest shifted towards minmaxing everything and writing complex scripts to allow bots do the boring parts. Then realisation hit me. In real world an extraordinarily efficient way of doing things is good, it's called an invention. In a game it is called cheating. Nature doesn't care what smart tricks you used to achieve your goals. In a game if it wasn't anticipated by developers it probably counts as an exploit. The universe has a set of unchanging rules, a game is perpetually balanced by series of patches and crutches in unpredictable places. By being creative you are fighting against game developers, which is pointless because they will actively oppose and get rid of you through their control over the sandbox. You aren't expected to have hacker (in the original meaning of the word) kind of fun in such games.

Then realisation hit me. In real world an extraordinarily efficient way of doing things is good, it's called an invention. In a game it is called cheating. Nature doesn't care what smart tricks you used to achieve your goals. In a game if it wasn't anticipated by developers it probably counts as an exploit. The universe has a set of unchanging rules, a game is perpetually balanced by series of patches and crutches in unpredictable places. By being creative you are fighting against game developers, which is pointless because they will actively oppose and get rid of you through their control over the sandbox. You aren't expected to have hacker (in the original meaning of the word) kind of fun in such games.

I think you need to go play some Magic: The Gathering. The kind of exploration you describe is actively encouraged by the game design - and you get the equivalent of a significant rules change roughly three and a half times a year, with the release of every new card set. The developers definitely do NOT think of everything, and they expect us to surprise them.

EY: I'm not going to touch that one. I'll stick with the much simpler answer of "I wouldn't actually prefer to be a passive experiencer." If I wanted Nirvana, I might try to figure out how to achieve that impossibility. But once you strip away Buddha telling me that Nirvana is the end-all of existence, Nirvana seems rather more like "sounds like good news in the moment of first being told" or "ideological belief in desire" rather than, y'know, something I'd actually want.

Actually, to me Nirvana - or wireheading - sound like the opposite of the "sounds like good news at first" case. Most people, when being told about a scenario where they were turned into orgasmium, would instantly reject it and decide they wouldn't want it. But if they were made into orgasmium, even for a short while, then they wouldn't want it to ever stop...

I don't understand what's the problem Eliezer has with advanced computer games. Why not "waste effort" if it's fun, and all the important work in the real world is anyway getting done?

No, the end of the road for the MMORPGer wouldn't be staring at an "YOU WIN" screen. That's not fun, I want to instead go waste some effort in e.g. advanced ancestor simulations, possibly with my memories of "the future" temporarily erased.

Kaj: But if they were made into orgasmium, even for a short while, then they wouldn't want it to ever stop...

Well, yeah, but most people, if they had their brain removed and replaced by a slab of jelly, wouldn't raise any objections either.

I don't think wireheading is that different. A wireheaded brain is basically a hacked brain that doesn't work any more.

(you could also replace "made into orgasmium" by "given heroin")

Emile: A wireheaded brain is basically a hacked brain that doesn't work any more.

Sure, if you want to define it that way... but I'd be wary of that kind of thinking. Doesn't work for what anymore? It certainly still works for experiencing phenomenal sensations. Doesn't work for the evolutionary purpose of maximizing fitness? Well, we should try to get past that anyhow. Doesn't work for self-preservation? That's just a poorly implemented wirehead. If one were, say, running as code, you could relatively easily have a subprogram that monitored the environment and brought the wirehead out of the Nirvana state for as long as needed to defend itself.

(For the record, I wouldn't want to be wirehead, nor would I particularly wish that anybody else became one, but this is a position I find immensly difficult to justify on intellectual grounds. Permutation City -style hardwired bliss out of certain tasks might be okay, though.)

"I sometimes think that futuristic ideals phrased in terms of 'getting rid of work' would be better reformulated as 'removing low-quality work to make way for high-quality work'."

Alternatively, you could taboo work and play entirely, speaking instead of various forms of activity, and their various costs and benefits.

...a science fiction story about such a utopia included a conversation between a robot and a person. In the end, the robot said, "But, you can get drunk."

Do we even need the destination? When you consider "fun" as something that comes from a process, from the journey of approaching a goal, then wouldn't it make sense to disentangle the journey and the goal? We shouldn't need the destination in order to make the journey worthwhile. I mean, if the goal were actually important, then surely we'd just get our AI buddies to implement the goal, while I was off doing fun journey stuff.

For a more concrete example:

I like baking fruitcakes. (Something I don't do nearly often enough these days.) Mixing the raw ingredients is fun, and licking the bowl clean afterwards is always good times.

I also like eating fruitcake. Fruitcake is tasty.

Now, one of the things that induces me to bake a fruitcake rather than, say, play Baldur's Gate II is that, afterwards, there will be fruitcake. However, there have been times when other people (usually my mother) have been baking a fruitcake, and I have enthusiastically joined in the process, even though I know that she's better at it than I am, and even if I don't participate, there will still be fruitcake at the end of the day. So clearly I place some value on the process independently of the result.

I suspect, in fact, that actually getting the fruitcake at the end of the baking process is unnecessary to my enjoyment of the process. Maybe I'd be just as happy if we swapped the cake to another family for a cheesecake they'd just made. Maybe the need to be "rewarded" for participating in a process that was rewarding in itself, is just a cognitive bias that I can overcome. After all, if I really wanted a fruitcake, I could buy one, or just let my mother do the baking. The more I look at this, the more the fruitcake itself seems like fake justification for the baking process.

Now consider this situation in a world where optimal fruitcakes are constructed by nanomachines on demand. I should still be able to enjoy baking, even though the final product of the process is of trivial value. If I can separate the process from the goal - if, in fact, I can stop thinking of the baking process as a "journey" and instead just call it a goal in itself - a 4D goal - then I think that would be a substantial step towards being able to find fun in a post-work, post-scarcity world.

Damnit, now I want fruitcake.

I just want to say that your point about valuing actual people and not (potentially illusory) experiences of people is a very important one, and one I wish I could explain better to people who think that maximizing stimulation to the opiate system is the final word on happiness.

Though I've never thought of myself as a Singularitarian, one thing I do look forward to that could be called a "singularity" is the point at which all the problems where winning is what counts have been won---no more war, no more cancer, no more poverty. Amazingly, we are about 80% there, and have risen from roughly 20% in the last few hundred years.

I'm not sure that the difference between 4D states and 3D states is meaningful, with respect to eudaimoniac valuations. Doesn't this overlook the fact that human memories are encoded physically, and are therefore part of the 3D state being looked at? I don't see any meaningful difference between a valuation over a 4D state, and a valuation over a 3D state including memories of the past.

In other words, I can think of no 3D state whose eudaimoniac valuation is worse than that of the 4D state having it as its endpoint.

(In fact, I can think of quite a few which may in fact be better, for pathological choices of 4D state, e.g. ones extending all the way back to the Dark Ages or before.)

P.S. Is there a standardized spelling for the term which I have chosen to spell as "eudaimoniac"? A quick Google search suggested this one as the best candidate.

realistic nonsentient

But but anti-zombie principle!

Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn't yours.  A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers.

How do you figure? You didn't design your brain, either, so using your intellect to design a robot car is also using strength that isn't yours.