| Economies are based around scarcity. In the fictional economies of Sci-Fi like Star Trek, there is no scarcity. If you can replicate a Rembrandt, atom by atom, it essentially loses its value. Today is all about me creating something, convincing you that you need it, and getting enough "yous" to contribute that I make enough to produce said thing. When you really start to break it down, money is like the Ghz speed of a processor or the Calorie measure used to measure energy in food. It's a poor measure of worth. We see people with millions of money, just because they convinced some poor smoo their life wouldn't be complete without this shitty knife. If you believe in Glenn Renolds version of reality (Army of Davids), technology is what will level the scale. But he wrote that a decade ago and it hasn't really held true. There are Kickstarters and crowd-funding, but it's all still based around the same failing model. We need some pretty big technological breakthroughs: truly mastering the atom. Right now we can only blow shit up (and by we I mean the ones with the money, resources and power to build atomic bombs) or generate power by breaking apart that atom to boil and pressurize water. Humanity needs to solve the energy problem: both producing large amounts of power in non-polluting ways and storing power more efficiently. Humanity needs to truly master the atom: to be able to manipulate atoms with a reasonable amount of energy to easily synthesize things (3D and chemical printers on steroids) Humanity needs to move beyond money. Once you eliminate scarcity, money will essentially become worthless; an archaic idea. This might all seem crazy and well beyond even the realm of what's possible. But I really feel like if it's not, humanity may only have another 3,000 ~ 5,000 years left. It's pretty much the simulation theory argument: we either continue to evolve and develop to the point where we could partially simulate enough of our world that the simulations would be self away (feel real) ... or we go extinct... Even if we go back and fourth between the stone age due to war/conflict ... eventually one of those two outcomes is inevitable. I really feel if humanity is here 5,000 from now, money will be an ancient concept that people will have difficult comprehending. |