SpaceweaverSat, Nov 1, 2008 It seems that a future economy will not be based on energy, and probably not on information (mostly because its easy duplicability). These commodities, I believe will become free commodities sooner than we think. What seems to be the basis of a future economy if there will be an economy at all is computation power. In a future where core technologies such as nanotechnology, robotics, clean energy technology, and biotechnology will become mature, computing something will also amount to actually manufacturing it. In an abundance scenario material costs, energy costs and even design costs will be marginal (given we have AI). So, what we are left with is computing power. The economical growth, and economical wealth will be measured if so in computronium mass, that is how much of the stuff around us we managed to transform into optimized 'thinking matter'.
I know this sounds a bit far reaching but if we look at the on going trends today we already see the first hints: The stock market can be seen as a huge computing machine integrating humans and silicon engaged in continuously calculating our economy according to given models most of them open source. In the future, being able to compute something will become the only sense of owning that something. But this becomes even more complex if we consider that conscious agents (i.e. future persons) are realized as computations as well which might mean that the depth and quality of being will also become economically measurable in terms of computing power. I will try to further explore this direction in a separate post.
Having said all that, I hardly believe we can transform or replace our economical system without undergoing a very deep and all encompassing conceptual transformation regarding the human phenomenon and life at large. Economy as we know it is a representation and manifest of very basic patterns, we cannot change it without changing the patterns
It seems that a future economy will not be based on energy, and probably not on information (mostly because its easy duplicability). These commodities, I believe will become free commodities sooner than we think. What seems to be the basis of a future economy if there will be an economy at all is computation power. In a future where core technologies such as nanotechnology, robotics, clean energy technology, and biotechnology will become mature, computing something will also amount to actually manufacturing it. In an abundance scenario material costs, energy costs and even design costs will be marginal (given we have AI). So, what we are left with is computing power. The economical growth, and economical wealth will be measured if so in computronium mass, that is how much of the stuff around us we managed to transform into optimized 'thinking matter'.
I know this sounds a bit far reaching but if we look at the on going trends today we already see the first hints: The stock market can be seen as a huge computing machine integrating humans and silicon engaged in continuously calculating our economy according to given models most of them open source. In the future, being able to compute something will become the only sense of owning that something. But this becomes even more complex if we consider that conscious agents (i.e. future persons) are realized as computations as well which might mean that the depth and quality of being will also become economically measurable in terms of computing power. I will try to further explore this direction in a separate post.
Having said all that, I hardly believe we can transform or replace our economical system without undergoing a very deep and all encompassing conceptual transformation regarding the human phenomenon and life at large. Economy as we know it is a representation and manifest of very basic patterns, we cannot change it without changing the patterns