Comment by irjustin
11 days ago
Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real.
This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest.
The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset?
Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.
If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.
Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t like out of partaking from them? That’d make some sense.
If replicators were replicatable, that control evaporates quickly. Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship, then suddenly a $2000 MacBook Pro could run pretty great open source models that seem a few months behind SOTA?
IMO - Money will NEVER stops making sense.
Money is a cheap way to translate unlike objects. Cows to art, labor to goods. Green to triangle.
Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.
In a word: it's fungible[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
> Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.
So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions.
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> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense.
There are many, many, many, many positional goods. Beachfront properties, original art, historical artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top restaurants, etc.
The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly without money if only we had some more iPhones and other goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.
Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less. Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume 16x as much.
What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?
People would still want to be able to trade with lower friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having the current money around the whole time?
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The general limiting factor with the "one person controls the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they would rapidly lose that income because nobody else would have anything to trade them anymore. (If you toss in the AI/robotic dream scenario, they don't even need humans to manage the raw material.) But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off, or Star Trek utopia?
> What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?
Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.
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> But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off
Probably extremely bloody revolt and collapse
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> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
If you can make many replicators, you certainly won't be providing them to anyone else. You'd be using them to ensure that money starts funneling into your revenue stream, and use that as a cash cow to pursue other projects.
That’s only a temporary possibility, once the tech gets out everyone will have replicators.
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So what's stopping you from replicating a power source and battery?
Seems analogous to LLM's: replicators replicate but do not create. Information would then seem to the proper choice for a new currency..
But energy is essentially free also, at least on the margin, and if we're talking about sunlight.
Sure. And AI will only run at peak solar times.
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> Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship
You're taking the wrong lesson from that observation. Models that people actually use are just as censored now as they ever were. What changed was the the hysterical anti-censorship babies realized that it's not that big of a problem, at least acutely.
> I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.
It has nothing to do with how cheap the goods are
The problem is that at some point people won't be able to afford literally anything because all, and I mean literally all, of the wealth will be hyper concentrated in a super small percentage of the population
Do you have anything to support this hypothesis?
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But these aren’t replicators owned by a monopolist. There are a number of highly funded, highly competitive vendors at every level of the stack.
Sure, but you're not one of them.
Sure, but who do they sell stuff to if no one has a job? We’re on the brink of some _very_ unexplored branches of human behavior.
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The world of Star Trek was fully post scarcity. Rich/poor were not things that existed.
They had to get through this before things got better: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
> The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts
This never happens. It's not the relative wealth gap that creates revolts it's the poverty/bad conditions in absolute terms.
If the lower class conditions improve, even just a little bit, there is no revolt.
Ultimately labour goes and works on something else instead. And the availability of free labour makes that possible. New industries and markets develop as a result. But a huge number of people will be left behind. But people will focus on things that were a lower priority before.
I have bad news for you, we've run out of sectors to pretend labor could be funneled towards. Manufacturing and agriculture are highly automated, service industry is full tf up, and nobody can afford more construction.
What about medical, elder care, fitness, leisure. Even service industries that focus on a more human connection. Or jobs focused on nature, the environment etc.
And i don't think this would nbe an easy process or something that could or would be managed. But it is probably already happening.
Thought experiments in science work because there are falsifiable scientific theories that make definite predictions about the world than can be tested.
What you wrote is not that.
Yeah, but which tech has not had a homegrown variant that ultimately democratized it? Makes me think of the "feed" vs the "seed" in "The Diamond Age".