There will be always a way to ruin post-scarcity, if humanity reproduces exponentially. Unless some new laws of physics are discovered that would allow unlimited exponential growth. Or maybe future legislation will make reproduction the only remaining scarce thing. As people currently get richer, they have fewer babies on average, but the reason is that we live in (from historical perspective) unprecedented luxury that we now take for granted, and need to give up a part of it when taking care of kids. Post-scarcity robotic nannies could easily revert this trend.
I wonder what it is like to be super rich. I can easily imagine burning lots of money for things that my current self would consider reasonable. First, I could somewhat trade money for time, by paying people to do stuff that I want to get done but isn’t inherently enjoyable and would take too much time to do it myself. Second, I could move to more ambitious projects that are currently clearly out of my reach so I usually do not even think much about them. Third, there are global projects like solving poverty or curing malaria, that even Bill Gates cannot handle alone.
Yeah, immortality would be nice; it would remove a lot of pressure from… almost everything. I wonder whether humans invent some way to ruin this, too. For example, imagine a culture that you want to be a part of, that updates in some way frequently (changes its norms; evolves new jargon), so need to spend a lot of time every day keeping up with it; and if you fall of the wagon once, it will be very difficult to join again. Maybe to avoid low status, you will need to spend a lot of time doing some stupid things that you do not enjoy, but it will be a kind of multiplayer prisonner’s dilemma. Some kind of trap, where people get punished for (a) refusing to sacrifice to Moloch, and (b) interacting with those who get punished; and even if many of your friends would agree that the system is stupid, they would not be ready to get socially shunned by the rest of humanity forever. In a more dystopian version, all human communication would be monitored, and merely saying “this is stupid” or otherwise trying to create common knowledge could get you called out and punished.
There will be always a way to ruin post-scarcity, if humanity reproduces exponentially. Unless some new laws of physics are discovered that would allow unlimited exponential growth. Or maybe future legislation will make reproduction the only remaining scarce thing. As people currently get richer, they have fewer babies on average, but the reason is that we live in (from historical perspective) unprecedented luxury that we now take for granted, and need to give up a part of it when taking care of kids. Post-scarcity robotic nannies could easily revert this trend.
I wonder what it is like to be super rich. I can easily imagine burning lots of money for things that my current self would consider reasonable. First, I could somewhat trade money for time, by paying people to do stuff that I want to get done but isn’t inherently enjoyable and would take too much time to do it myself. Second, I could move to more ambitious projects that are currently clearly out of my reach so I usually do not even think much about them. Third, there are global projects like solving poverty or curing malaria, that even Bill Gates cannot handle alone.
Yeah, immortality would be nice; it would remove a lot of pressure from… almost everything. I wonder whether humans invent some way to ruin this, too. For example, imagine a culture that you want to be a part of, that updates in some way frequently (changes its norms; evolves new jargon), so need to spend a lot of time every day keeping up with it; and if you fall of the wagon once, it will be very difficult to join again. Maybe to avoid low status, you will need to spend a lot of time doing some stupid things that you do not enjoy, but it will be a kind of multiplayer prisonner’s dilemma. Some kind of trap, where people get punished for (a) refusing to sacrifice to Moloch, and (b) interacting with those who get punished; and even if many of your friends would agree that the system is stupid, they would not be ready to get socially shunned by the rest of humanity forever. In a more dystopian version, all human communication would be monitored, and merely saying “this is stupid” or otherwise trying to create common knowledge could get you called out and punished.