2 ms·

I'm speculating about a state that's pre-post-scarcity (at least for most things humans want, there will always be scarcity somewhere) by maybe about 50 years.

I'm speculating about a state that's pre-post-scarcity (at least for most things humans want, there will always be scarcity somewhere) by maybe about 50 years. It's not like you're going to be able to just wave a magic wand and poof the scarcity away. We'll have the capacity to provide what people need, and that day will come and go long before somebody actually authors the commit that makes it happen. That author is going to need a sense of security that everything is going to be ok if they just start giving everything away for free. I'm open to hearing alternatives, but the best I can come up with is a system where we allocate whatever resources remain scarce based on merit. Not merit like whoever manages to wrest more money from whoever else wins, but merit like wow that's a really great contribution to society--I personally value what you've done, so I'm going to behave in a way that benefits you. A generation that grows up thinking along those lines just as often as they think in terms of market clearing price is more likely to produce the magical commit that redirects the robots from competition to cooperation, and fungibility just doesn't fit that use case very well. -- In the more immediate term, I wish that I shared your optimism about the stability of sovereign states. I'm not saying that we should disrupt the government, I'm saying that the government is doing a fine job of disrupting itself and I wish we had some kind of backup system in place.

preseinger 5y ago
Eliminating scarcity requires unlimited and easily accessible resources i.e. energy. We are hundreds to thousands of years away from this point. You are otherwise describing a barter meritocracy, which is dystopian :(
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  It strikes me as rather utopian compared with: > The "we choose" of the prior clause isn't an individual choice, it's a collective choice expressed via government. But I guess it's ok that we disagree about which modes of exchange are desirable, the world is probably big enough for both :)
  - preseinger 5y ago
    I mean, humanity started out as a loose collection of independently-governed city states. We evolved to the current notion of larger-scale sovereign national governments. This wasn't an accident or a pathology. It delivers better outcomes. A competent single governing body like the Roddenbury Federation would be better still! What you're suggesting is a regression :(
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      It's a regression that has happened several times, and it'll happen several times more before we've got that pre-to-post scarcity transition to contend with. It's what happens to systems that don't regulate their parts well--they get cancer and die, and in the case of societies, their people move on and try again. When I said that I'd prefer to live in a world with decentralized power structures, I should've said that I'd prefer it to a centralized one that's on the decline. I think we need to iterate faster on our societal structures until we find one that works for everybody, and bail earlier on things that clearly don't work. Probably, when we find it, the ideal system will involve some central authority--though held better accountable. 100 years ago, getting creative with how we structure society meant starvation and bloodshed. I see crypto as an opportunity to build a stop gap. It need not be better than whatever we build that follows it, it just needs to hold us over until we can figure out what that's going to be.

preseinger 5y ago

Eliminating scarcity requires unlimited and easily accessible resources i.e. energy. We are hundreds to thousands of years away from this point. You are otherwise describing a barter meritocracy, which is dystopian :(

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
It strikes me as rather utopian compared with: > The "we choose" of the prior clause isn't an individual choice, it's a collective choice expressed via government. But I guess it's ok that we disagree about which modes of exchange are desirable, the world is probably big enough for both :)
- preseinger 5y ago
  I mean, humanity started out as a loose collection of independently-governed city states. We evolved to the current notion of larger-scale sovereign national governments. This wasn't an accident or a pathology. It delivers better outcomes. A competent single governing body like the Roddenbury Federation would be better still! What you're suggesting is a regression :(
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    It's a regression that has happened several times, and it'll happen several times more before we've got that pre-to-post scarcity transition to contend with. It's what happens to systems that don't regulate their parts well--they get cancer and die, and in the case of societies, their people move on and try again. When I said that I'd prefer to live in a world with decentralized power structures, I should've said that I'd prefer it to a centralized one that's on the decline. I think we need to iterate faster on our societal structures until we find one that works for everybody, and bail earlier on things that clearly don't work. Probably, when we find it, the ideal system will involve some central authority--though held better accountable. 100 years ago, getting creative with how we structure society meant starvation and bloodshed. I see crypto as an opportunity to build a stop gap. It need not be better than whatever we build that follows it, it just needs to hold us over until we can figure out what that's going to be.