Social Status is Paperclipping

 The grey goo scenario already happened. It was actually green, we call it the oxygen catastrophe. You are not smarter than Nature. Nature thinks slower than you do, it is true, but Nature's brain includes yours. Even if it didn't, it's much, much, much, much, much bigger. 

 Likewise papperclipping AIs are already here. We call them Homo sapiens. 

 Social status is zero sum. Not to mention, net worth is a genetic trait. This means all effort put into social status is a complete waste. Any nondegenerate amount will lead to exactly the same hierarchy. [Zero effort] is only probably degenerate. 

 Paperclipping is in fact better than social status. At the end of the day, you can fasten paper with paperclips. It has more utility than a social status display. If the world isn't only the paperclipper, you can melt the clips down and reforge them into something else, taking advantage of the clipper's mining operations. The clips don't have zero value. 

 A virtue signal has zero value. Negative value, in fact, because it consumed something that could have otherwise been used profitably. 

 I exaggerate slightly. Caino masochiens can sometimes be tricked into competing at doing something useful, and in these cases genuine creation occurs. However, the social status system itself assigns more status to non-useful activity. Production is noise in the system. It is rebellion and perversion of the system's nature. 

 A proper paperclip AI is supposed to be hostile to all other life. Let's check a newspaper, see how that's turning out...

 The idea that long-term human habitation produces deserts is suspiciously plausible. Africa and the middle east. Mortals have already turned everything in the regions into social status. Even the weather... City dwellers in particular find rain nothing but a nuisance, and it, too, gets fed into the furnaces... Southern africa is only not bone dry because the mortals were inefficient and ended up turning their own societies into social status when the environment could no longer support them.

 AI cannot be aligned, reason #60987: a paperclip AI is mortally hostile to all other AIs, and Caino masochiens cannot be aligned.