From: micah glasser (micahglasser@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Jan 07 2007 - 23:57:20 MST
There won't be any money post-singularity. This statement is most likely
true for a number of reasons. To begin with money exists primarily to
facilitate the coordination of human labor and human labor will cease to
exist within the context of scarcity economics. Another reason why money
will not exist post-singularity is because AI will be the dominant species
and AI will not be motivated to work for the same reasons as naked apes
(read self interest). To illustrate my point consider the borg. I realize
that its cheezy science fiction but the point is that a species such as the
borg certainly would not use currency of any kind and for the same reasons
neither will a post-singularity collective entity use any kind of currency.
Currency arises out of the consciousness of apes and apes will cease to
exist as an economic force.
On 1/7/07, Joel Pitt <joel.pitt@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/8/07, Charles D Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Philip Goetz wrote:
> > > 3. Information: Bits of unknown information. This may be the main
> > > trading item of interest. However, what conveys information to one
> > > person may already be known by another. To use information as
> > > currency, you might have to create an exchange process, in which the
> > > giver doles out bits one at a time, and the receiver continually
> > > predicts the next bit. The number of bits deemed to have been given,
> > > to measure the exchange, would be taken as the total number of bits
> > > transferred, minus the number of bits the receiver predicted correctly
> > > (or possibly some more correct measure). The receiver could waive
> > > this process if it admits it doesn't have the information (say, a song
> > > it hasn't heard). A seller could require such a waiver as a condition
> > > of a sale. A difficulty is that the theoretical translation into
> > > energy is, and may continue to be, orders of magnitude apart from the
> > > practical translation into energy.
>
> > > 8. Goulash currency. A combination of all of the above, in which you
> > > might set your preferences about which currencies to be buying and
> > > selling in every exchange, and software agents working on behalf of
> > > the buyer and seller would work out what was actually exchanged in
> > > every transaction. I'd lay my bets on this one.
> > >
> > This makes the most sense. It's the currency that I'd use if I could,
> > and had the attention to spare for the requisite valuations.
> > N.B.: This currency will inherently cause different entities to value
> > different things differently. Well, of course that just makes it more
> > reflective of reality...
>
> One interesting side effect is that music lovers will probably value
> musical information higher, but will likely be better at predicting
> the next bit of information in a song. Thus the amount of new
> information in an unheard song will be less for someone with a more
> developed musical modality.
>
> Generalising this beyond music, information buyers who are familiar
> with a given type of information will be able to buy it cheaper then
> buying information from a completely unknown domain. Ironically, a
> true random number generator would be the most profitable information
> source.
>
> If this was a form of currency, or even a way of overseeing the
> transfer and purchase of information, then I envision a demand for
> prediction tools in different knowledge domains. These tools would
> save a consumer "money" by increasing the customers apparent domain
> knowledge.
>
> --
> -Joel
>
> "Unless you try to do something beyond what you have mastered, you
> will never grow." -C.R. Lawton
>
-- A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist. R. Buckminster Fuller
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