From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Jan 19 2000 - 18:08:00 MST
At 09:32 AM 19/01/00 -0500, Robin wrote:
>1) You could take $30,000, move to a poor country, and pay the locals
>$2,000 per year, and they would feed, clothe, and house you [...]And yet,
almost no one does this.
I do. (Sort of.) And this isn't a poor country. But I `pay the locals' more
like $10K a year.
>2) You could now save a huge fraction (>50%?) by buying simple standard
>items [...]rather than getting[...]sales folks to advise you about things.
Few people
>do this.
I do (in effect). With the surly sales staff you get in many Australian
shops, who'd notice the difference? :)
Does this mean my vision is warped or am I a frontrunner?
Then it gets down to detail, and one needs to specify the kinds of nano
minting and AI under discussion. I suppose I had in mind a sort of generic
2025/2030, pre-singularity (assuming one can stave it off for five minutes,
pace Eliezer) but with fairly smart AI agents and freely available matter
compilation systems of various dimensions, some for home use, some held by
the community (so you need to book in):
>3) Services include insurance, stock markets,
Mostly done on the net with smart systems?
>fast food,
What, pop into the Golden Arches to have *them* compile a burger for you?
There'll still be places to meet and hang out, but maybe no food is faster
and easier than stuff out of a `replicator'.
>education,
Universities and other high-level teaching and related research, okay. But
lots of local-level AI-assisted teaching at home or community level, I'd
expect.
>telecom,
Surely most of this will be automated?
>security, hotels, movies, doctors, lawyers,
Fair enough, but again much of these skills might be handed off to expert
systems and fun-seeking, hard-working self-important amateurs.
>car repair, ...
Throw the clunker in the goop pool and pull out a new one in the morning...
I'm probably being way too glib in these remarks, and confusing decades.
But I still suspect there's something radically disruptive in this
perspective.
Damien
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