3 ms·

Why do you think this is post-scarcity?

• __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  The assumption (from the comment I was replying to, and which I'm taking for granted here) is that software will be drastically easier to make. When things become easier they become cheaper. When things become cheaper we end up with more of them. Also, things that are currently too complex to be worth bothering with currently will become viable because taming that complexity becomes easier. Together these things mean that a greater percentage of our problems will be solved by software. So what kinds of problems does software solve anyway? Well, it's things that we already know how to do but would prefer not to spend time doing: Drudgery. Our concept of value is coupled to scarcity. Even if two people have vastly different perspectives, they can both trade a scarce thing for progress towards their goals. We used to use gold as that scarce thing. Now, the scarce thing is intervals of time where a human is willing to tolerate drudgery. So in a world where the scope of software is maximized, the existence of drudgery is minimized. That breaks our scarcity based economic system, so unless you have an idea for some third thing--not gold, not willingness to endure drudgery, but something else whose pursuit can be used to underpin "value", the conclusion is that we'll have to come up with something else to do. Something other than blindly chasing value without a thought about whose agenda were furthering by doing so. It can't happen soon enough, because our scarcity based system is currently causing us to do a lot of really dumb things.