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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

The question isn't lifestyle in the abstract. Everything that people buy today is specifically intended to impel more buying. Whether that's cars, houses or sugary foods. The situation is incredibly different than simple "everyone gets what they need" society.

Take a look at just about any book on consumerism

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But again, it seems like there are physical limits to how much people can consume. Like, we can agree that if everyone had a machine that could magically summon up to 10 thousand cubic meters of material every day, we realistically would have universal material abundance. Even if we exceeded what the boxes could make, one or two dedicated to making more would result in runaway exponential growth that would speed up much faster than human consumption could.

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.

Then people would create television shows demonstrating innovative ways go waste 10,000 cubic meters of material every day.

I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded.

> 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.

> how close to universal replicators do you need to come

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.

There is a manga series which is set in this concept of exponential self-replication technology gone wrong somewhere in the past (thus a futuristic dystopia):

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.

Comment aside, I’d never seen the word impel before. Interesting.

For anyone curious: https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/compel-vs-impel...

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