[ExI] thought experiment part 1

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com> 



 

>…But your question gave me an idea John…spike

 

 

I have a few minutes, so I will start on a thought experiment, for which I hope you will use your collective imaginations, for that is what imaginations do best: imagine stuff.  Well, imagine that.

 

 

>… when a few thousand people become trillionaires… John

 

 

John opined that shortly a few thousand people become trillionaires, with an implied opinion that this would be a bad thing.  For the sake of thought experiment, let us assume it true, then take it to the absurd but absolutely ultimate extreme: one guy owns not just a trillion dollars, but aaaaaalllll the daaaaaaammm money in the world.  One guy.  Somehow he gets AI working for him before anybody else, and now he owns it all, one guy with all the money in the world.

 

OK.  Then what?  

 

I often talk about a ton of money, well how much is that?  In American currency, if we put it in one dollar bills, it is about a million bucks.  Reasoning: American paper currency is about a gram, so a million of those is about a ton.

 

OK then, but a one-dollar bill isn’t much.  Let us use the far more useful for thought experiments denomination, the US 20.  A twenty will buy a prole a hearty lunch in all the places I love most and frequent almost exclusively: Burger King, Taco Bell, Chick Fila, McDonalds, Subway, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wendys, Arby’s, all favorites of mine and all with convenient drive thru windows, all the better to clog one’s arteries, but mine are not particularly corroded after well over half a century of devouring the stuff.  An American 20 will get you lunch at any of those places.  So convert all the money in the world to hearty lunches, 20 dollar bills.

 

Now your ton of money is 20 million bucks.

 

Elon and Ellison have… well I don’t know, nor do they, nor does anyone exactly for at some point value and worth become subjective.  For convenience, we can use 400 billion because the numbers come out the way I want in my visualization, so 20 kilotons of money, which makes it sound like a nuclear weapon perhaps, but let us imagine it in American $20s, which are lunches.  Each $20 is a lunch, and has 1 gram mass.  

 

OK then.  Imagine some AI guy ends up owning all of it, all the damn money in the world.

 

Oy, I need to scoot once again, but I have a fun thought experiment to share.  Imagine, and stand by please.  Or share your thoughts.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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