And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity and energy will be used. And since everything is very efficient, there will be no food left for birds or even poor humans.
You can quickly approach a situation where time is the limiting factor. In this case I think that the private jet or extremely fast transportation allows you to get some time back. Beyond that you might have one or two projects that you really enjoy, like a palace, but you don’t really have enough time to handle much more. Elon is a good example: he’s got a few projects that he really cares about and does them at an extreme scale. He effectively has unlimited resources but he would not make any progress on his three major initiatives if he was much more fragmented than he is.
And if you run this to the extreme, the true cost of overconsumption creates the problem of environmental damage and negative externalities on others that can wind you up like Marie-Antoinette.
Plenty of other people are happy with minimalism. And that can be hard for some folks to understand if they aren’t minimalists.
Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to travel its length in a lifetime at light speed. There's a limit for you. But you likely won't want to spend your entire life travelling at lightspeed to the far wing of your house, then die. So that drops the limit enormously.
What does it mean for it to be "your Versailles" - could you draw or depict Versailles in detail from memory? How will you verify that your clone is exactly like the original? Do you care? Do you really mean that you get to design your own mega-palace? So now you spend your life choosing furnishings and layouts and architectural details - hope you like that kind of passtime, because there's a lot of it. But if you don't like that, why bother having "your Versailles" instead of going to look at someone else's for a few hours? Or look at a picture, for that matter? What are you going to do with your Versailles? Are you a king or queen with courtiers and subjects so that you can have extravagant parties? Are you going to organise the food and cleaning and heating that the robots do?
How old are you, were you around when computers ran at Khz speeds? And now you have effectively "infinite computing power", you spend your time commenting about Bitcoin on HN - why aren't you simulating your own Virtual Versailles and flights to the moon and stuff? Because it's not that interesting now you can do it? Endless hedonism is boring.
> "Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?"
OK, that's taken a week of sitting in a tiny box waiting and doing nothing. What about the rest of your entire life?
Listing fancy sounding things is what religions do to entrap people with dreams of heavenly afterlives. All you have to do is look around you at all the things you once wanted, and suddenly don't once you attain them - the drawer of abandoned Raspberry Pies is a common one for HN people to notice, then start to internalise that you can have any film ever made delivered to you from Amazon for a few bucks, and you don't, you can't think of a film you'd rather watch than comment "Make your own exchange." on a Robinhood thread on HN. Got a wardrobe of too many clothes? Got boxes of unused stuff? A garage of tools and spares?
See what a pointless status grab it is? If it's outside all possible knowledge, it may as well be lies (it's not though). You can play Elite: Dangerous if you want a galaxy full of combat, and it's happening right now and better than the rest of the Milky Way there are actual players and ships and things and not silent void. The main lesson I took away from Elite Dangerous is that the Galactic PowerPlay between all the major factions can never end. If it ends, if one side can dominate and win, there is no way for another faction to recover from that without a reset and restart, like all games - play, end, restart.
> "Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition"
Competition doesn't need ever increasing resource use and hedonism, it's not the resource use which captivates people (but it can make a spectacle); competition is fine with animals running, with kickball, with Chess - 32 pieces on 64 squares creates world champions, millionaires, tournaments, audiences, lifelong obsessed people, gambling opportunities, it doesn't need galaxy spanning resource use. The thing about competition is that you can't be Usain Bolt or Magnus Carlsen or John Carmack just by throwing more resources at it. At the point where you can say "I have a Versailles on every planet in the Milky Way" and someone else says "so what, everyone has", there's no competition there. If you claim you can win the Tour de France on a bike in a small region of Earth, people will sit up and take notice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)
Modern, first-world society does seem to be reaching some sort of inflection point that might point to a "top" (of physical consumption at least) as we get more efficient and more stuff is moving digital. That's not to say there is really anything conclusive, but it is interesting to think about.
So no, that's not really a solution either.
But even then, the goal isn't to limit human productivity, is it? It's to limit how much we work and lifestyle inflation, which doesn't require growth to go to zero.
If there is, it's somewhere beyond launching sports cars into orbit.
While he and many others could buy personal space launches, that launch is not a demonstration of such. He wasn't paying for it, and it wasn't for him.
I think it's more "vying for the 'richest person on earth' title" that's important here.
Take a look at just about any book on consumerism
Obviously that's the extreme case, and the question is how close to universal replicators do you need to come before people can't want more things fast enough.
I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded.
I kind of am? Besides, people don't need to never be stupid again, they just need to become stupider at a slower rate than productivity increases. If hour by hour production significantly increased, how could people possibly waste enough?
More importantly, would they? We waste resources to signal wealth. Wasting an ever greater proportion of your allocated geyser of materials doesn't signal anything.
We'll probably reach technological self-replication singularity before AGI. I envision a small self replicating/repairing/transforming factory that could function based on local resources. Mostly 3d-printers, robots and tools for making tools.
But I think in reality there will be limited resources, energy and pollution we can all use, so we can't have our exponential utopia. Technology will be more like biology, and it will get good at recycling anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame%21
>> The "Netsphere", a sort of computerized control network for The City. The City is an immense volume of artificial structure, separated into massive "floors" by nearly-impenetrable barriers known as "Megastructure". The City is inhabited by scattered human and transhuman tribes as well as hostile cyborgs known as Silicon Creatures. The Net Terminal Genes appear to be the key to halting the unhindered, chaotic expansion of the Megastructure, as well as a way of stopping the murderous robot horde known as the Safeguard from destroying all of humanity.
For anyone curious: https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/compel-vs-impel...
and also
No, when Larry Ellison built a 200 foot yacht, a Russian oligarch built a 250 foot yacht, The next guy will build a 300 foot yacht, etc.
There ought to be a point at which continuing increases in income fail to generate increases in either life expectancy or the proportion of adults who are able to work (not necessarily working). It would be necessary to distinguish this from the effects of anti-aging technology, but it should be possible in principle; improving diet/sleep/exercise and reducing pollution exposure isn't "anti-aging technology", nor are childcare/education.
My conclusion: individual satisfaction is bounded, as long as we have bounded brains. First I should mention that the best principle I've found to underlie life is that we should maximize or optimize some kind of experience of consciousness, for every conscious entity. It's hard to define precisely what that entails, but we have quite good intuition: your life should be rich in activity, in interaction with others, in learning, in thought, in seeing, hearing, thinking; of course, not so rich as to be overwhelming and collapse the whole thing or leave us unable to digest or grasp or understand (at least a part of) what we're experiencing. I don't claim to be completely original: Wilheim von Humboldt for me is one of the great thinkers of conscious motivation (he lived in the 18th century).
"I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves." -- WvH
Being clear: what matters is not the experiences themselves, i.e. the input/output, but what the various consciousness apprehend. What goes on in your brain. It doesn't matter you're at the most beautiful beach in the most beautiful sunset behaving joyfully and peacefully if internally you're depressed or in despair.
"The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole." -- WvH
You can only make an individual so complete, so harmonious with itself. Our brains have about 100 billion neurons, i.e. a finite number, and there's only so much you can activate those connections. Really the goal is not with any single individual -- our goal should be with every conscious being. That's why we should not plan individually, we should plan as a society. A billionaire can only get so happy -- he can keep linearly stacking jet skis and race cars and yatchs but his happiness won't follow (linearly). We should realize we are all part of a society, as a whole, and ideally be completely indifferent among individuals (i.e. everyone deserves as much happiness as we can collectively get them).
In other words, we should take the Golden Rule literally. (of course, in practice, not everyone can be responsible for every other individual, but it should be our ultimate guiding principle, really, as individuals and society, unmistakably): every conscious being has the same value to yourself as yourself.
Because individual satisfaction is bounded, this allows maximizing the practically unbounded (because of almost unbounded entity numbers) satisfaction of society as a whole, currently about 8 billion individuals. We need to move past egoism. I don't think an egoistical civilization, as was Western Society for much of the 20th century, can reliably go much further than we've come (see: climate change, rising political instability, fluctuating inequality, stagnating quality of life).
I'm not arguing for any political system, I'm arguing for a cultural-social-technological outlook of the entire society. I'd label it 'Universalism' (but that's taken), so perhaps 'Conscious Universalism', or 'Concious value universalism'.
That's how we move our entire civilization forward, achieve better political stability, how we're able to tackle mega projects like engineering the climate and rethinking our global supply chain, how we can allocate massive resources to space exploration, space colonization, prevention of extinction events (like asteroid impacts, etc.), how we move definitely past threat of nuclear annihilation (a nuclear conflict, still not completely out of imagination, could perhaps still collapse society).
How to do it? I think part of it is simply enlightenment, discussion, writing and reading; the other is indeed recreating our institutions, including our economic and political systems (focused around this goal).
This century is when we decide whether we become the Borg or the Federation. Cylon or Human. Dalek or Doctor. (or just slowly collapse... hopefully not; we have potential)
To be clear, by conscious experience I don't mean just pleasure (or even just "happiness", just joy). Experience is much more complicated than pleasure alone, or any single feeling -- although of course generally they are good proxies in most situations (if you're happy it's usually, but not as a law, having good experiences).
I'll leave it as a reflection to the reader exactly what it entails -- with Humboldt's observation in mind (of "harmonious development [...] to a complete and consistent whole).
Another important observation to be had, is that we should have freedom to chose, in a way, what gives us pleasure, what's engrossing to us -- guided by reason. I call this concept 'freedom of utility' -- sure, we (generally) enjoy physically food, sex, and various other things (sometimes drugs that destroy our bodies and our minds); but what should we like? Imagine our intuitive tastes could be aligned to changes since we've developed millions of years ago, living in totally different environments under new light of reasoning, and new understanding of the universe.
Even if we were to assume that an arbitrarily low standard of living is acceptable, at some point that standard of living will include mass starvation and death so there is a real capacity limit. Being well below that limit is a virtue.
More importantly, there's absolutely no reason to think that technology will somehow stop pushing the carrying capacity further. More people will yield more innovation, yielding more growth, yielding more people. If there's an endpoint to that, I doubt we'll see it any time soon. Yes, I too see how insane it is to think that sometime relatively soon global GDP will double twice in a year. But twice in a decade would be just as crazy 500 years ago.
If there is a natural (not physical out of resources) limit where humans feel satiated i doubt we're anywhere near it. If we do hit it, wait a bunch of generations and they'll be more humans.
We're already maxed out on information, tools, media and interactions.