Future of Currency and AI Impact
the future look like?
Yeah, money becomes irrelevant. Uh, I mean, th- th- th- there,
there will be still
a currency, but I think currency will be measured in
fundamental, uh, physics
metrics like,
um,
po- you know, power, like wattage and tonnage,
ma- mass and energy.
Or, you know, mass and power or energy, basically.
So,
um,
th- th- but conventional currency will not matter
in, in the future.
Uh, so that- that's, that's, uh, that's my guess. I,
I think it's pretty obvious.
Um, and, uh, and, and as soon as you start getting to many
orders of magnitude
bigger than, than Earth's economy,
um, satisfying whatever humans can possibly
think of, uh, for their
needs is, is very easy. You know, if you're several orders of magnitude
bigger than the Earth- Earth's economy, um,
then
providing humans wh- whatever goods and services they can think of
that they might
want, uh, is, is trivial.
And so what do we do then
as humans?
What gives us meaning? How do we organize ourselves?
I mean, I do struggle with this question.
I think people will, will, will find
w- ways to be happy, uh, in the, in the same way that, say, w- w-
people who
retire seem to be rela- you know, fairly happy even though they're not
working.
But I think the reality is that you w- humans will not...
There won't, there won't be anything that humans can do that, that the,
the AI and
the robots can't do better. One
analogy might be
gardening, you know, where you, you, you don't have to grow your own
fruits and vegetables, you can just go buy them from the store.
But, uh, sometimes people like to grow their own
fruits and vegetables and
make dinner for friends and it's, uh, kind of a nice touch.
Uh-
What about creating art or that type of creativity?
Is that more in the sphere-
Sure
... of humans?
Yeah, you could certainly create art or
whatever you feel like doing essentially.
We like to think of this as a time of unprecedented technological
change, but you know, we historians go back to the 1890s
when you get
electricity and telephones and cars and, you know,
subways and, uh, radio and movies,
all these things happening at once, and it leads to many things, but it
al- often leads to a great disparity of
wealth, a lot of
sense of robber barons, a lot of people then picking up pitchforks
and
deciding that this is bad, and there's some echoes of that
now. Is there a way to prevent that, given
the amount of wealth being generated?
Will we put certain things in the commons the way they did in the
1890s when they make high school universal and free?
Will we say, okay, healthcare, for example,
should just be in the commons,
and that's gonna sap some of the populist revulsion at
what's happening?
Well, um,
uh, I mean, as, as you heard me say, I mean,
I don't think money's gonna matter in
the future. Um,
it, it... Like anyone will be able to have any goods
and services that they want,
and I don't think even so-called wealthy people will ultimately control
the AIs. I think they'll control themselves.
So, so it's not like
you have to separate,
uh... Like, like if... I think the, uh, sort of a fundamental
misunderstanding of economics arises because of conflating
resource allocation and consumption.
So there's, there's, there's a limit to what any single human
can consume.
It's, it's, it's... You know, you hit that saturation point pretty fast.
So like, say, going from, say,
a billion dollars net worth to $10 billions of net worth doesn't make you 10
times happier or have meaning or have 10 times more stuff.
It actually means you've got a resource allocation po-
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