[extropy-chat] economics of scarcity to economics of plenty

[Samantha Atkins]

On Oct 31, 2005, at 4:58 AM, BillK wrote:
>
> So our magic machines will have to support a non-working population.
> How? Everybody on Social Security?
>

If our well-augmented future selves are not competitive relative to  
pure AIs and robots then some other arrangement will be needed.  I  
hope at some point that we reach a high enough level of abundance  
that most physical necessities are easily available because they are  
"too cheap to meter" after MNT.  Computational/information resources  
would also likely be ubiquitous and nearly unimaginably powerful.    
Medical care could easily be as cheap as a shot of nanobots and  
occasional software upgrades freely available on the Net.  If that  
much is so then there would be no such thing as abject poverty in the  
sense of being homeless, lacking for food, and so on.  There would  
also not be literal computational  have-nots although there could  
well be some tools and capabilities that were not mass accessible.

The big question is whether human beings are the type of beings who  
can create/open up to/live in this type of world.  The situation with  
human starvation in the face of plenty of food production capacity  
doesn't seem a promising sign.

- samantha