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this reminds me of two other hypothetical projects: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and The Australia Project from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 htt

this reminds me of two other hypothetical projects: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and The Australia Project from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1). This is the (I would think, obvious) utopian ideal of a post-scarcity or late-scarcity economy. The hard part is actually making it possible, ie routing through the potential futures to get to this destination. You have all of Earth's accumulated sociopolitical baggage as a headwind, plus the challenge of designing and implementing a global adaptive logistical system. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the fantasy is the easy part.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Great point. I've been thinking about this in terms of the declaration 'economic growth is decoupling from resource use'. I'm sure that what's meant by that is that portions of the economy are entering a late-scarcity stage; music and books certainly don't feel scarce right now. But the statement that an economy like that is 'growing' seems to imply something untrue about the things that still are scarce. I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum. Latinum isn't good for much except that it can't be replicated, so some traditions from the scarcity era use it as a medium of exchange, even though everything useful can be produced without any latinum. When a cup of earl grey is replicated, does the value of the remaining latinum go up or down compared to the (now slightly larger) economy? It seems like there's a fundamental problem with the structure of our thought around these questions. We can imagine scarcity and it's absence, but we seem cognitively unprepared for a situation where some things are valuable and scarce and others are valuable but not scarce.
- Ieghaehia9 5y ago
  > I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum. Perhaps it's some material where replicators always add some noise to the atomic structure when replicating; and then the "value" is just how close it's to a perfect structure, by whatever measure of perfection. Then you'd have replicator farms just replicating them over and over until something of acceptable quality pops out - like a physical PoW. It makes for a fun theory at least! And the post-scarcity societies can go "whatever would you want that for?"

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

Great point. I've been thinking about this in terms of the declaration 'economic growth is decoupling from resource use'. I'm sure that what's meant by that is that portions of the economy are entering a late-scarcity stage; music and books certainly don't feel scarce right now. But the statement that an economy like that is 'growing' seems to imply something untrue about the things that still are scarce. I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum. Latinum isn't good for much except that it can't be replicated, so some traditions from the scarcity era use it as a medium of exchange, even though everything useful can be produced without any latinum. When a cup of earl grey is replicated, does the value of the remaining latinum go up or down compared to the (now slightly larger) economy? It seems like there's a fundamental problem with the structure of our thought around these questions. We can imagine scarcity and it's absence, but we seem cognitively unprepared for a situation where some things are valuable and scarce and others are valuable but not scarce.

Ieghaehia9 5y ago
> I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum. Perhaps it's some material where replicators always add some noise to the atomic structure when replicating; and then the "value" is just how close it's to a perfect structure, by whatever measure of perfection. Then you'd have replicator farms just replicating them over and over until something of acceptable quality pops out - like a physical PoW. It makes for a fun theory at least! And the post-scarcity societies can go "whatever would you want that for?"