[ExI] POST-SCARCITY SYMBOLS Launched (defeat despair, create utopia, share hope).

[samantha]

 On 9/6/10 12:37 PM, Gregory Jones wrote:
>
>
> --- On *Mon, 9/6/10, samantha /<sjatkins at mac.com>/* wrote:
>  
> On 9/1/10 1:58 AM, Singularity Utopia wrote:
>> >I believe Post-Scarcity is the most important aspect of the
>> Singularity (Extropy).
>
> >>...Unfortunately it is made up pie in the sky.  Even with MNT there
> is no miraculous, inescapable and they lived happily ever after ending
> coming.  There is a very slim chance that it works out really really
> well for everybody and a much better chance it works out well for a
> relatively smaller number.  But at no time will it be true there is an
> infinite amount of everything desirable... 
>  
>  
>  
> There is an even stronger argument for Samantha's point.  In those few
> cases where production temporarily far outruns demand, our answer to
> it is to create artificial scarcity.  Examples: housing, using the
> Byzantine building codes and land use restrictions, farm produce,
> using our system of non-production subsidies, printer ink, using our
> protocol patenting system, actually plenty of examples of artificial
> scarcity because of our intellectual property protection system. 
> Perhaps the best example would be in software, where the marginal
> production of an item goes to near or exactly zero.
>

Do you actually know what it takes to produce good software?  The
marginal cost of copying bits has nothing to do with the actual real
scarcity of excellent software talent.  I am not talking artificial
scarcity but real scarcity. 

>  
> This line of reasoning leads to the startling and depressing
> realization that even if we manage to create an MBrain and upload
> collective conscious, with plenty of energy to do all the simulated
> thought we simulated want, we would *still* have both scarcity and
> war!  Of course, they would be simulated, but even that would not be
> utopia, for it would not be free of simulated want and simulated
> suffering.
>  
>

Not just artificial scarcity or limits.   If you have the ability to
make whatever kind of upload world you wish or feel compatible with and
you make an ugly world - oh well.  Guess you have some growing left to
do.  We all do.  It is a very interesting subject how we must change to
actually be compatible with and maximally take advantage of such
possibilities.

- s

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