In a world that is truly and completely post-scarcity there would be no need for making tradeoffs.
Normally when we think about a post-scarcity future we think in terms of physical resources like minerals and food and real estate because for many people these are the limiting resources.
But the world is wealthy enough that some people already have access to this kind of post-scarcity. That is, they have enough money that they are not effectively limited in access to physical resources. If they need food, shelter, clothing, materiel, etc. they can get it in sufficient quantities to satisfy their needs. And yet these post-scarcity people still have a scarce resource they can’t get enough of: time.
Because time is limited, we must be judicious in its use. In a world of true post-scarcity, there would be enough time that it would be effectively unlimited, say quadrillions of years of subjective experience. With so much time on our hands, we would not need to make judicious use of time. And that goes not just for our own time but for the time of others.
Today much of how we pick jobs, romantic partners, hobbies, etc. is determined by tradeoffs. Given many options but limited time and resources, we pick ones that let us maximize given the constraints. For example, maybe I’d really like to teach history and paint landscapes, but teaching history doesn’t pay me much and painting landscapes takes more spare time than I have, so instead I get a job in accounting and watch TikToks. They offer me a better tradeoff in terms of the things I want: getting paid and having fun with my spare time. I’m not necessarily happy that I cannot do better, but I am happy to at least do the best I can.
In a world with effectively unlimited time, these constraints would not apply and there would be no need to make tradeoffs.
Now, unfortunately, I don’t expect to ever see such a true world of post-scarcity. There’s a few things that are absolutely limited in this world like time and energy. Although we can get a lot of them, perhaps more than we know what to do with, they’re still limited, and so long as there’s sufficient competition from others I expect those resources to get eaten up. Lots of free time and energy? Let’s create some more people to make use of them. Maybe not Malthusian Trap, repugnant conclusion many of them, but a lot of them. Enough that we have to make time tradeoffs again. If we’re not making time tradeoffs, we’re not making enough people or using enough energy.
And so I expect to always face these limits. We’ll likely face different limits than we do today. For example, I’m not worried that in a post-scarcity future we wouldn’t have time to both teach history and paint landscapes if that’s what we wanted to do, but I do worry that we’d only have time to spend 10^29th lifetimes as a bird or snail, never getting to fully explore the full space of possible experiences. It’ll be a different kind of tradeoff we’ll have to make, but a tradeoff nonetheless.
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.
In a world that is truly and completely post-scarcity there would be no need for making tradeoffs.
Normally when we think about a post-scarcity future we think in terms of physical resources like minerals and food and real estate because for many people these are the limiting resources.
But the world is wealthy enough that some people already have access to this kind of post-scarcity. That is, they have enough money that they are not effectively limited in access to physical resources. If they need food, shelter, clothing, materiel, etc. they can get it in sufficient quantities to satisfy their needs. And yet these post-scarcity people still have a scarce resource they can’t get enough of: time.
Because time is limited, we must be judicious in its use. In a world of true post-scarcity, there would be enough time that it would be effectively unlimited, say quadrillions of years of subjective experience. With so much time on our hands, we would not need to make judicious use of time. And that goes not just for our own time but for the time of others.
Today much of how we pick jobs, romantic partners, hobbies, etc. is determined by tradeoffs. Given many options but limited time and resources, we pick ones that let us maximize given the constraints. For example, maybe I’d really like to teach history and paint landscapes, but teaching history doesn’t pay me much and painting landscapes takes more spare time than I have, so instead I get a job in accounting and watch TikToks. They offer me a better tradeoff in terms of the things I want: getting paid and having fun with my spare time. I’m not necessarily happy that I cannot do better, but I am happy to at least do the best I can.
In a world with effectively unlimited time, these constraints would not apply and there would be no need to make tradeoffs.
Now, unfortunately, I don’t expect to ever see such a true world of post-scarcity. There’s a few things that are absolutely limited in this world like time and energy. Although we can get a lot of them, perhaps more than we know what to do with, they’re still limited, and so long as there’s sufficient competition from others I expect those resources to get eaten up. Lots of free time and energy? Let’s create some more people to make use of them. Maybe not Malthusian Trap, repugnant conclusion many of them, but a lot of them. Enough that we have to make time tradeoffs again. If we’re not making time tradeoffs, we’re not making enough people or using enough energy.
And so I expect to always face these limits. We’ll likely face different limits than we do today. For example, I’m not worried that in a post-scarcity future we wouldn’t have time to both teach history and paint landscapes if that’s what we wanted to do, but I do worry that we’d only have time to spend 10^29th lifetimes as a bird or snail, never getting to fully explore the full space of possible experiences. It’ll be a different kind of tradeoff we’ll have to make, but a tradeoff nonetheless.
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.