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by visarga 1399 days ago
Money will not be meaningless because it does not only represent work, but also the cost of materials. After automating work I think the focus will move to ensuring the supply chain.
1 comments

This is true. There is no evidence that we're on track for a state in which money is meaningless. Rather, the evidence is strong that we're on track for one in which money represents one's share of the corruptly attained and corruptly retained asymmetric state services called "property rights" [1] and in which labor (of value approaching zero) has nothing to do with it.

Without a complete overthrow of corporate capitalism, we're going to regress to the state of medieval Europe and many of the poorest, most corrupt countries today, in which there are people who have money and there are people who work but it is impossible to get meaningful money by working.

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[1] Please note that there's a distinction between personal property and private property. You're not an asshole for wanting people not to take stuff you need for personal use, such as your car and your books and your toiletries. That's personal property, which is a different thing. If we take this reasonable idea, though, and run it up without attention to how it might behave at scale, though, we run the risk of enabling the kind of nightmarish private property that afflicts countries like the US, inevitably leading to extreme inequality, intractable political corruption, and metastatic governmental dysfunction.