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

[Gregory Jones]

--- 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.
 
I have gone thru pi radians on this notion of post scarcity.  I can imagine plenty of reasons why some parts of humanity would intentionally create scarcity, such as reasoning that if the proletariat have plenty of everything, they will fail to pray to Mecca.
 
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.
 
Simulated damn.  {8-[
 
spike
 
 
 
 

 

 
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