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We use money to exchange resources (actual or promised) in form of credit to each other. If most of the population doesn't participate in the exchange, money i
by dmantis 7d ago
We use money to exchange resources (actual or promised) in form of credit to each other.
If most of the population doesn't participate in the exchange, money is worthless. You can make numbers, but those are meaningless without the underlying exchange.
It's effectively a disruption of a modern society.
- HEmanZ 7d agoWhy would no one have underlying resources if there were very few jobs? There are many millions of people in the USA who don’t work but own things. Some don’t work and own a lot of things
- dmantis 7d agoThere is no way of redistributing those resources but violence if there is no economy. Say, you have 98 people who have literally nothing and no established way to obtain basic needs, and 2 people who has something based on whatever. Say, these 2 people can close their needs by asking a magic machine to do something for them, or even exchange some goods between each other, but there is no economic sense to hire anybody. Those 98 left aren't going to sit and die, watching.
- HEmanZ 7d agoNo but what if those 2 hand out bread and circuses, use the super-intelligence they can afford (using super intelligence smarter than anyone alive) to keep the masses controlled, and are protected by all of the wonderful new machines of war (like ai controlled autonomous drones). Also what if it’s not 2 vs 98, but something more like 10 vs 90, or 30 vs 70? Or 50 vs 50? And this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over a generation, or at least a few decades. Anyway, the point isn’t this will happen, the point is that really bad outcomes that are almost impossible to walk back from are completely within the realm of possibility. And we have no real way to predict where we’re headed. So people are rightly very afraid.