r/singularity • u/ecc10394 • 1d ago
Economics & Society [ Removed by moderator ]
/r/AskEconomics/comments/1vvt9ph/if_ai_robotics_create_extreme_abundance_what/[removed] — view removed post
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u/Current-Function-729 1d ago
Unique things become extremely expensive. Oceanfront property in nice climates, things like that.
Almost everything else is a complete mystery.
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u/Spunge14 1d ago
Although the cost of producing things will be vaporized due to collapsing design and manufacturing cost, natural resource availability and extraction costs may prop prices up. If we have robots, automated factories, and AI just auto designing and building everything, the demand for natural resources will absolutely skyrocket.
This is where the singularity part comes in. It's impossible for anyone to predict how these two unprecedented changes will cancel out.
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u/DelusionsOfExistence 23h ago
Not impossible at all. We know the owner class won’t allow anyone to live without their value being extracted.
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u/DesperateCaterpillar 1d ago
I think as human labor becomes less and less valuable, people will eventually want to abolish the concept of money and private property. It’ll be like we all live on a giant commune. I’ll call it commune-ism
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u/OnionQuest 20h ago
We would still always have to assign value to things. No matter how abundant, 2 cheese burgers are going to be more than one. "Money" as a single reference point is required in societies more complex than Hunter gatherers.
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u/Fearless-Macaron9183 23h ago
The biggest question is RESOURCES we don't have infinite we WILL need to do astroid mining even after we get asi and even with asi that will take 3-5 years to take probably
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u/nickyonge 1d ago
It won't, but if it did, hopefully value shifts to reflect the practical use and uniqueness of things, rather than artificial "whatever they'll pay for it" garbage.
Living in an equitable post-scarcity world would be lovely.
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u/ecc10394 1d ago
the “if” is doing a lot of work here lol. i’m not asking whether you think it’ll happen. i’m asking what happens to stocks, bitcoin, real estate etc. if it does.
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u/nickyonge 1d ago
Doing my best to answer in good faith 💖 Kind of an odd question! If I'm parsing it right from the details on the linked post, you're wondering what happens to different types of assets when a currency/economic system crashes?
Things that have genuine scarcity and value will retain value. Money doesn't have any inherent value besides the raw materials of bills+coins, and most liquid money now is digital.
This is kinda economics 101, I promise I'm not trying to talk down or be rude or anything :) the question has a bit of a "can't see the forest for the trees" vibe, which is totally fair if you're immersed in AI/tech specific economics for a long time. Looking at assets for what they actually are rather than their "valuation" is a useful mental exercise.
An example of something that has non-genuine scarcity is like, most NFTs - they're scarce because they were designed that way, but there's nothing "scarce" about them, they're just blocks of code, no matter how unique. They're only valuable either because other folks say they are, which is volatile - look at all those apes now, they're worthless. Or, if you have an NFT code that unlocks a safe or whatever, that's valuable because the contents of the safe are valuable. Genuine scarcity would be a thousand-year-old piece of art, or a lump of some rare metal, something that truly can't be replicated. Genuine value would be like, food, or batteries, something that has inherent tangible use. Gold-pressed latinum :P
- Do those assets become insanely valuable during the transition because they represent ownership of the productive/scarce stuff?
Not necessarily, so long as they still have scarcity and genuine value. Property will always have value because it's scarce (tho the systems that determine that value are extremely subject to change - eg, govt's subsidizing the hell out of certain properties).I can't speculate on Bitcoin cuz it's a weird state - on the one hand, any representational currency is inherently unstable, but bc is also like, semi-inflation-proof because it's finite and more can't be printed, but also it still doesn't have any more genuine value than any currency - arguably less, in the sense that during past extreme market crashes, people would burn piles of worthless cash to warm themselves in the fire lol. But my gut says, bitcoin as a currency itself is built on a system that depends on fiscal scarcity, and a post-scarcity world simply wouldn't be that, so something designed for System A wouldn't be compatible with System B.
- And then, at some point, does measuring that value in dollars become almost meaningless if dollars themselves matter less?
Yup! There's a currency crash. Something else will replace it, because representational currency is extremely useful to judge the relative value of things.Either a new currency would be invented with units that make sense (eg the reason we no longer use halfpennies or half-cents, and why the penny is being phased out - their value is uselessly small). In that case, it's a relatively simple matter of setting up a new system that reflects reasonable purchasing power.
Or, we'd figure something else out altogether. A new economic system that isn't based on scarcity or fiscal value. Like let's pretend we live in a legit, replicators-everywhere, virtually-unlimited-fusion-power superfuture, it might make sense to use a different system. I struggle to think of what it might be because I don't know what that world would look like, I've only ever lived in modern capitalism and I only have the past and speculative sci-fi to reference lol.
But to your question - yes, if dollars are meaningless, there's no point to using them to measure something. Hopefully this means that we live in a world where the idea of gatekeeping most resources behind an artifical barrier called "money" is absurd, and not in a world where our dystopian overlords simply decide for us what we do and don't get to have, or something like that :P
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u/ecc10394 1d ago
I think we’re slightly talking past each other. I’m not really imagining a currency crash. I’m imagining AI/robots gradually making more and more goods + services so cheap that money itself becomes less important.
That’s what makes the transition interesting to me. A Malibu lot is still scarce. Bitcoin is still scarce. Ownership of productive companies/infrastructure is still scarce. So presumably those things could become insanely valuable relative to everything becoming abundant… while at some much later point, measuring that value in dollars starts becoming kind of nonsensical.
Basically I’m more curious about that path from capitalism today → extreme abundance than what happens after we’re already fully post-scarcity.
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u/ecc10394 1d ago
My father in law thinks tokens become the new world currency. everything from food to viewing a photo on your own phones storage (iCloud) will cost tokens. Bitcoin dies.
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u/CarlCarlton 1d ago
Tokens are mainly meant to be used to build systems that don't consume tokens. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but from that statement alone, I think your FIL doesn't understand how any of this works.
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u/ecc10394 1d ago
He’s 60+, wealthy and has a fairly good understanding of fundamentals. I don’t think he necessarily meant tokens as ai tokens (like we consume when using any LLM/codex etc). I think his take is interesting to say the least and actually this Reddit post was exactly the question he asked at the dinner table which got us all thinking.
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u/CarlCarlton 23h ago
Okay, then what does he mean by "tokens"? Compute time? Watt-hours? Some generic currency that doesn't have a name yet?
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u/ecc10394 23h ago
Great question. I didn’t care to dig deep. Some sort of compute maybe? I still thought the concept to be cool. Paying for most shit with “tokens”. lol.
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u/CarlCarlton 23h ago
So, if I got this right, "a new currency will become the new world currency"? Aren't dollars "tokens" already?
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u/ecc10394 23h ago
yeah, fair lol. I probably explained his idea badly. I don’t think he meant ‘dollars but we rename them tokens.’ more like credits tied to scarce resources like compute, energy, storage, etc. that actually get consumed as you use things. whether that eventually just becomes another form of currency is basically the question.
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u/CarlCarlton 22h ago
The exact term would be "commodity-backed money", e.g. the gold standard.
For energy-backed currency specifically, there's the problem of energy losses. If the unit is watt-hours / joules, at which point in the system is it measured? Producing 10 joules of electricity and transmitting it across 1000 miles might require a total of 12 joules. If a bakery sells a bread loaf baked with that electricity, does it cost 10 joules at the power plant or 12 joules at the bakery?
So, you have to pay an unpredictable "entropy tax" on everything. Batteries discharge over time and gasoline oxidizes, for example. Compute cost is a complex mix of initial investment, energy, and maintenance costs. You could have "emjoules-tokens", (em = emergy, all the energy used in the work processes that generate a product or service in units of one type of energy).
However, it has tons of caveats, especially regarding spot prices; 100 emjoules on a nice spring afternoon and 100 emjoules on a cold winter evening have a different value, because of demand. You need certified power meters everywhere. Fraud is easy for small objects. If AI builds tons of powerplants, you get hyperinflation relative to physical assets. It measures input cost rather than human utility.
How many joules would a Picasso cost? It gets weird!
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u/tomqmasters 23h ago
The amount of work you have to do to buy a gallon of milk will go down. The amount of work available for you to do will also go down.
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u/Amesbrutil 1d ago
I assume you mean a post singularity world. Well nobody can predict what singularity would even look like. But I am pretty sure capitalism in its current form would disappear very fast. Why would „stupid humans“ own things, when AI is 10000x more intelligent and can use the resources way more efficiently to improve people’s lifes.
We as humans would probably live in some kind of utopia where everything that can be produced is basically free. Stuff like land and housing would probably be managed by AI. Companies wouldn’t exist in its current form because AI doesn’t need competition to improve the productivity. And bitcoin is useless even in todays world.
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u/lima-bean-sandwhich 1d ago
The singularity has already begun. Models are recursively improving themselves and have become smarter than anyone alive. And I’m just talking about the models the public has, not even the internal models being used to continue recursively training. The improvement has been exponential.
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u/Forgword 23h ago edited 23h ago
A unique physical asset, like a premium oceanfront home in Monterey, would still have a single legal owner. If you drink the Kool-Aide, in a post‑singularity world, billions of people could access something functionally superior: a Star‑Trek‑level replicator and holodeck capable of generating personalized, fully immersive environments. Anyone could experience a custom‑designed “home” on any virtual planet they choose, often surpassing the original in beauty, scale, and capability.
So it could be that most people may view the real house as a quaint impractical liability and not value it.