[ExI] My review of Eliezer Yudkowsky's new book

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2025 at 8:44 AM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> So... what happens if suddenly your credit card doesn't work and we have no
> trade medium?  What do we do now, coach?

New trade mediums naturally come into existence.  Barter, if nothing else.

I am reminded of an old skit about a kid who wished, to a genie, to
have all the money in the world.  Every object usable as money was
instantly teleported to a hoard under his control.  (Presumably,
electronic records were likewise altered by this magic.)  New things
were introduced as replacement currency, only to be instantly
teleported and added to the hoard.  New economies emerged, albeit with
difficulty.

The situation here is analogous.  If the AIs take over all financial
networks, and continue to expand their influence so that any new
network that served the same purpose soon got infiltrated and taken
over, it would be much the same scenario.  The logical thing would be
to set up to continue to provide value, rather than rent-seek or rely
on investments, so that if all wealth gets reset to zero then you
still have an income stream.  Next best is to make sure your
investments are unlikely to be seized or zero-valued, for instance
owning a manufacturing setup that only you know how to operate or that
requires cryptographic keys to function which are not worth the
compute capacity for an adversary to crack.