But the value in seeking mathematical answers was never in the answers themselves. It was in the things one discovers along the way, the questions asked, the tools developed. The artisanal fashion is the part that benefits non-mathematicians.

These AI proofs only serve as an I-told-you-so. They're not creating surrounding theory which can later turn out to have useful applications elsewhere.

If you're targeting many many instances of cheap decentralized infrastructure that doesn't take the whole region down when hit, it merely degrades slightly, then you're looking at something like $1:$1.

At efficiencies like that you might as well give up and resort to diplomacy.

What a nice surprise, and here I thought we'd be using inches and feet forever. SI system here we come.

So if you get tired of banging the energy cost drum, consider a fill or two on the adversarial resilience drum.

Or if you prefer, consider resilience in the face of a heat wave. The fear that maybe the power will go out mid-disaster... it's just not actionable. That changes with a distributed system: you can channel it into making sure your house's or your neighborhood's battery is up to the task.

I'm not asking people to behave according to some social norms. I'm expecting them to already have such norms and to use them to decide on a direction in which to shove the market. We've got plenty of horsepower, what we're lacking is a compass. I might not agree with the choices that get made, but I'm still in favor of them being choices that had humans at the helm, rather than the whims of an irrational market.

Whereas with a strictly scarcity based system, our preferences only half matter. It has created a dangerous blindness to outcomes. As long as the number goes up, we keep our foot on the gas, never mind the cliff over there. There are a variety ways to steer an economy:

- say yes/no to a transaction...

-- based on expectations about the value of what is being bought/sold

-- based on whether the transaction will enable the buyer to help/harm the seller or visa versa

I suppose that's 8 buttons to push. But we're currently ignoring the third dimension which reduces it to just 4. We haven't provided people with an expressive enough control panel to act rationally. Not enough input to make a good decision, and outputs that don't carry enough information to be used as actionable feedback, it's just flattened to a yes or a no.

> Prices show up in optimization whether you want them to or not.

Yes but they could carry more information, such as why you're getting a good or a bad price, which might lead one to change their behavior so that more people are more willing to work with them and they therefore get a better price.

> that's more opaque and harder to understand

Well yes, a car with only an engine and no steering wheel is indeed easier to understand than one with both, but I'd still prefer the latter.

Which is why I'm saying we need to start now. We can't wait for scarcity to be gone, we need to actively make space for something else to grow. Not so the new thing can replace scarcity, but so it can find an equilibrium with it.

His other SciFi is also great.

I think its pretty clear to everybody now that we cannot protect you if your enemies are:

- sufficiently crazy

- willing to spend $1 attacking for every $50 we spend "defending"

It's now a very different kind of bargain.

Suppose I own a store, and they each show up and offer me $1 in exchange for my product. If I accept that dollar, I'm now participating in making their venture happen. If I refuse, I've resisted it in some way, however small. Whether I accept the dollar is a proxy for my consent re: whatever venture caused it to be issued.

A sane design for an economic system which was not strictly scarcity based would attempt create an advantage for ventures that are helpful, and a disadvantage to those that are harmful. One way to do this would be to provide enough metadata along with the money so that I can make a more informed choice about whether to create a liquidity problem for the holder of this money.

Like maybe Alice's venture is going to poison my drinking water, and Bob's venture is going to treat my dad's cancer. Then it's likely in my best interest to tell Alice to get lost but to support Bob. This would be a sort of nucleation site around which unions could form and solidarity could be built. Not trade unions, but rather a union of people with shared interest re: where they get their drinking water or somesuch.

We're allegedly into people acting in rational self interest, yet we've designed a system which limits access to the information necessary to behave rationally when deciding whether or not to engage in a transaction: "What behavior will I be enabling?" needs to be part of the equation.

I'm not an economist, maybe my idea about metadata on the money is silly. Probably there's a better way. But whatever it is it should be in some way sensitive to my values--even if they differ from the bank's values.

Our system is not. It assumes that both parties to a transaction have shared interests, which is increasingly not the case. It forgoes a bias for help over harm in favor of fungibility and liquidity instead. (I expect this property is a historical accident having to do with the unique chemical properties of gold, and not something we would have designed for, were we doing it from scratch. It succeeded because nature implemented the scarcity part for us, not because it resulted in an optimal set of economic properties.)

Re: Georgism...

> landowners getting control of the taxation mechanism and taking the money back that belongs to the rest of society

...that only works for the landowners if there is some central point in the flow of money that they can focus their corruption on: a government or a bank.

If you shift the whether-this-money-is-legitimate question to the next person to receive that money, recursively, corruption becomes much more expensive because it must be sustained for every transaction--it becomes something that they have to do continuously, rather than a battle that they need only win once and then defend for generations. The cost of doing so creates a drag which is not experienced by people pursuing pro-social goals (because holders of that money can reliably spend it widely, no need for coersion).

It was pretty awkward to later emerge as the PGP expert at work. I was at that time a bit shy about explaining how I got so comfortable with it.

We had to tolerate gold because it implied a game that was facilitated by the laws of physics, and we didn't have the resources to set up any other sort. But now we do, the rules can be whatever we want them to be.

Sure, let's try Georgism, but given the historical track record of that kind of reform, let's work on other things in parallel.

It doesn't have to be ((post scarcity) economics), it can be (post (scarcity economics)). Both systems can coexist for a while, one providing a bit of a safety net while the other falls apart.