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Comment by rogerrogerr | Hacker News Reader

If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.

My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.

Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t like out of partaking from them? That’d make some sense.

If replicators were replicatable, that control evaporates quickly. Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship, then suddenly a $2000 MacBook Pro could run pretty great open source models that seem a few months behind SOTA?

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IMO - Money will NEVER stops making sense.

Money is a cheap way to translate unlike objects. Cows to art, labor to goods. Green to triangle.

Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.

In a word: it's fungible[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

> Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.

So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions.

> So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions

Which you will always have some need for, because resources aren't infinite, real estate isn't infinite, services aren't infinite, etc

> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense.

There are many, many, many, many positional goods. Beachfront properties, original art, historical artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top restaurants, etc.

The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly without money if only we had some more iPhones and other goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.

Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less. Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume 16x as much.

What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?

People would still want to be able to trade with lower friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having the current money around the whole time?

The general limiting factor with the "one person controls the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they would rapidly lose that income because nobody else would have anything to trade them anymore. (If you toss in the AI/robotic dream scenario, they don't even need humans to manage the raw material.) But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off, or Star Trek utopia?

> But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off

Probably extremely bloody revolt and collapse

Only if you assume people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have, as opposed to wanting a little more to survive. History shows the opposite.

> History shows the opposite.

I strongly disagree, everything I know about history points the other way

Human history is littered with "people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have"

Look at the conflicts happening right now in Ukraine, or Israel

Come on, be serious

> What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?

Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.

That just seems very wasteful when proof-of-stake works.

Or even good old centralised distributed systems that do it another 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more efficiently than PoS.

It sounds terrible when you approach it from the point of money. Of course you can do money more efficiently. But if you approach this form the side of energy it's a way to organically tie a value to any energy produced. Even the energy produced at times when production vastly exceeds the demand. And that's going to be most of the energy produced since we need to develop renewables capacity and can't really wait for the storage technologies that lag horribly so we can match the supply the demand.

This is a way to make all energy valuable and providing incentive to build renewables even when 90% of the energy they produce will find no traditional buyer.

Using crypto to consume stranded wind and solar is an elegant idea.

It's not really wasteful if you use excess energy for mining that you couldn't store because storage is very limited.

The goal is not efficiency. The goal to provide incentive to overbuild the renewables.

> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.

If you can make many replicators, you certainly won't be providing them to anyone else. You'd be using them to ensure that money starts funneling into your revenue stream, and use that as a cash cow to pursue other projects.

That’s only a temporary possibility, once the tech gets out everyone will have replicators.

What are they replicating? Patented things, copyrighted things? Or groceries? Do they want to replicate things? In Star Trek, they travel light, wear uniforms, and have few personal possessions, because they're on a ship, in the navy. That's why everything has to be digital and everybody stuffs their life inside a phonecorder and drinks synthale. When he's back on earth, Picard has a horse. I could be wrong but I don't think he replicated it.

Just like everyone owns factories today

  You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.

So what's stopping you from replicating a power source and battery?

Seems analogous to LLM's: replicators replicate but do not create. Information would then seem to the proper choice for a new currency..

But energy is essentially free also, at least on the margin, and if we're talking about sunlight.

Sure. And AI will only run at peak solar times.

Did you know, that there is always a place on earth enjoying peak solar time right now?

> Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship

You're taking the wrong lesson from that observation. Models that people actually use are just as censored now as they ever were. What changed was the the hysterical anti-censorship babies realized that it's not that big of a problem, at least acutely.

> I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.

It has nothing to do with how cheap the goods are

The problem is that at some point people won't be able to afford literally anything because all, and I mean literally all, of the wealth will be hyper concentrated in a super small percentage of the population

Do you have anything to support this hypothesis?

Simple hypothesis. Top 5percent of US wealth now belongs to top 50 richest American. Even if you ignore corruption, lobbying and any ill intent you can definitely conclude that this top 50 individuals have better way of getting return from money than rest of the population. Even if if their delta of return is 5% we can assume that withing next 50 years there is a high probability that these guys will own 30-50% of wealth. I have a strong belive AI will acclerate that further.

But all your numbers (except maybe top 5% one) are completely made up. Strong beliefs don't prevent one from being completely wrong. Neville Chamberlain has a strong belief that he had ensured peace; Einstein had a strong belief that quantum theory's "spooky action at a distance" was incorrect. Both were wrong. Fifty years is a long time, and anything could happen. The last fifty years had the fall of Communism, the EU, China going from an impoverished countryside to a superpower, video phones in our pocket, social media upending communication and mental health, renewable energy displacing coal, Trump, etc.

Not to mention that 50% of US wealth is only 15% of the world's total wealth - a far cry from "literally all wealth"

https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf

Link's broken.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250126183923/https://delong.ty...

This should work

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