Hacker News Reader

Comment by passion__desire | Hacker News Reader

Do people ever think that these AIs can model economics processes in so much detail that they don't even need the concept of money. Just directly go and procure the materials needed, do whatever necessary resource allocations required. Money is a concept for humans to transact, a proxy for resources. But if all the planning is done by AI, do we even need money.

View on HN

Do we even need matter that hasn't been converted into paperclips or the machinery to produce more paperclips?

Better send more probes to be sure.

No, money is a means for states to procure things without needing to exercise violence at the point of procurement. It has a side benefit of providing a tool the rest of the economy can use to power itself. To your point, states are very good at imposing tax obligations when no money changes hands, which is all that is needed for money to be maintained.

Money is crucial for giving us prices and without knowing prices the economy would be screwed.

If we couldn't tell that it was cheaper to use renewable over fossil fuels or eat chicken over beef as two examples there could be big efficiency and allocation problems.

Sure, but that's the side effect of the state setting the value. It's definitely necessary, don't get me wrong, and in the absence of state money I daresay another solution would have been found.

The existence of money preceded the state by a wide margin. There is also a long history of privately issued money that only ended recently (and considering crypto in some ways never ended).

State issuance of money and the tax required to imbue it with value is merely a sufficient condition for money to exist. My original point is that as long as a states continue to exist, and continue to issue and tax money, money will continue to exist. Debating the history of money is besides the point (though I'd posit that in every case the money was used to a non-trivial extent, it bore some explicit value from a trustworthy authority, be that a state or a local warlord or a powerful corporation...).

An unguided, yet somehow planned and modelled economy?

AIs with total surveillance perhaps? Would need weather-control too or giant surpluses squirreled away in a distributed fashion.

Some kind of ascetic commune, but at global scale? Might work in a military setup when fighting the alien invasion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com