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Maybe nobody has to starve, work, or even die from anything besides a freak accident ever again, but not all the 100 billion humans who want to can possibly liv

Maybe nobody has to starve, work, or even die from anything besides a freak accident ever again, but not all the 100 billion humans who want to can possibly live in Neo-Manhattan (at least until the Mega Dome is finished in 50 years, but then not everyone can live on the Upper Rim). Not everybody can meet the coolest celebrity in the metaverse, or all have the same clever instagram handle. Not everyone can control who is allowed to visit and build on holy sites or nature preserves. I think people can always invent or discover new things that are functionally finite, and their claims on these kinds of things and the way they decide to distribute it can always theoretically be quantized into something we can understand as currency or wealth. Even if it's not done explicitly, it will simply be done in something like an extremely advanced algorithm or even an opaque shadow economy of networks of favors and patronages.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
It's true that some things are naturally scarce (like land, or celebrity exposure, or attention), and that people can make things scarce on purpose. It probably isn't possible to work around this - but this doesn't mean we couldn't have a post-scarcity society in spite of it. The way I see it, if "nobody has to starve, work, or even die from anything besides a freak accident ever again", if everyone has free access to as much varied, healthy and tasty food as they want, if they can pursue almost arbitrary hobby[0], or do interesting and challenging service adjacent to their interests - then the bits that remain fundamentally scarce (like land or attention) won't be enough to justify having a money-based economy, and without it, people will lose the reason for creating artificial scarcity. Some people may end up trading IOUs over trivialities like clever Instagram handle - something that, on a global scale, nobody cares about. But there would be no need to e.g. DRM movies or games anymore - the producers aren't getting paid for it, they do it for fun/reputation/self-actualization - so what's the point of making infinitely-copyable good artificially scarce? Post-scarcity doesn't have to be absolute for it to be a money-less utopia - it's enough to make enough goods too cheap to meter that money becomes irrelevant for everyday life of average citizen. -- [0] - There will always be limits to what individuals can do - post-scarcity is a practical concept, not an absolute one. Even Star Trek societies wouldn't be able to afford people having a hobby of "detonating warp cores to use the gamma ray flash for interplanetary Morse code".

TeMPOraL 5y ago

It's true that some things are naturally scarce (like land, or celebrity exposure, or attention), and that people can make things scarce on purpose. It probably isn't possible to work around this - but this doesn't mean we couldn't have a post-scarcity society in spite of it. The way I see it, if "nobody has to starve, work, or even die from anything besides a freak accident ever again", if everyone has free access to as much varied, healthy and tasty food as they want, if they can pursue almost arbitrary hobby[0], or do interesting and challenging service adjacent to their interests - then the bits that remain fundamentally scarce (like land or attention) won't be enough to justify having a money-based economy, and without it, people will lose the reason for creating artificial scarcity. Some people may end up trading IOUs over trivialities like clever Instagram handle - something that, on a global scale, nobody cares about. But there would be no need to e.g. DRM movies or games anymore - the producers aren't getting paid for it, they do it for fun/reputation/self-actualization - so what's the point of making infinitely-copyable good artificially scarce? Post-scarcity doesn't have to be absolute for it to be a money-less utopia - it's enough to make enough goods too cheap to meter that money becomes irrelevant for everyday life of average citizen. -- [0] - There will always be limits to what individuals can do - post-scarcity is a practical concept, not an absolute one. Even Star Trek societies wouldn't be able to afford people having a hobby of "detonating warp cores to use the gamma ray flash for interplanetary Morse code".