[ExI] thought experiment part 1

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2025 at 3:49 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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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.

Consider the first guy with a nanotech replicating assembler and a $20
bill.  Paper money becomes worthless.  About the same time, Bitcoin
will be broken by quantum computers.  More people believe in money
than in all religions. Money might make it through the singularity,
but it might be that you can have anything you want up to a space
colony or an interstellar ship, no charge.

Keith
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> OK.  Then what?
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Now your ton of money is 20 million bucks.
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> 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.
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> OK then.  Imagine some AI guy ends up owning all of it, all the damn money in the world.
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> 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.
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> spike
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