| To my mind the article is excellently written, but it comes with many bigger "if"s than the one it states. That said, taking for granted some of its premisses, indeed saying that cost goes to zero in term of money is no big deal. That is, money is purely human conventions. So if humans are put out of the loop, not only monetary cost goes to zero, the whole notion can skipped. Of course, there is still some energy and material needed to run data centers, which do have costs in whatever unit one might measure them with. A market is a place where human encounter to trade. Without humans, there is no market. We do with mere local scalar currency because using vectorial computation taking into account everything that can be probed and measured into account integrated into a single whole is out of reach for human representation, even for the most intellectually gifted human person. Money is a stupid unit, that tries to conflate everything in a single scalar and proves every single time that it's not able to deem what something is worth in all its intricated relationships. But somehow humans seem unable to leverage at scale on any tool that would be more sophisticated in all their socioeconomical exchanges. Once again, if one eliminate humans from the equation, or isolate as a ridiculously marginal factor, money and market become irrelevant. All that said, once again, that stand on a very large set of "if"s. |
Yeah, probably I should have listed some more premises, i.e. that corporations maximize profits, the state maximizes power and security (I don't entirely buy the Realist framework, but if you want to predict how things work out "in the limit", rather than tomorrow, it seems alright?).
And naturally every "therefore" becomes weaker the further out into the future you try to predict.