brief post on what the future economic system is going to look like. I have 20 minutes to write this for you I tihnk I get it done in time

Long story short the first question for us to answer is "why do we use money to coordinate? like, why does this coffee shop accept my USD?" 

And you might have many answers for that but I'll give you the True Correct answer from On High and in order to illustrate it probably it's best to think about your friend group or your family.

When you gather with your family for a dinner, do you charge people for each plate? Do you offer the head of the table to the person who paid for the premium plus price? Do you pay the person who does the dishes?

no, of course not. social dynamics have a different physics than economic dynamics. 

So, why don't we use them everywhere? Why can't you just show up at the coffee shop and help yourself to the coffee machine like you would at your friend's home?

The only problem is externality pricing.

Building https://negationgame.com

I think understanding this is easier with a really concrete story so here we go:
In 20 years, you will walk into a store and you will walk out with the good you want (strawberries, etc). 

You won't pay for it, at least not in the way we deduct payment from an account today. Instead, the event will be remembered in much the same way your grandmother remembers the last time you ate.

You will pay for much much less, in fact most things will be free!

What's happening in the background is that your personal agent is speaking with the agent that manages the store, and is telling them the story about you, and in exchange the store's agent is approving you to take the goods. The agent does this because it knows it can then use your story as part of its own story to stock more items (in much the same way you might get a special deal by being a celebrity, but we will ALL be celebrities to the AIs because they have infinite attention)

The other day I laughed somewhat sadly at a coffee shop because I was sitting across from a guy who was describing how he was preparing for AGI by "getting to $200m as soon as possible" because for some reason money was going to be important in his cosmology. Because it's important now, right? And so therefore clearly I should build my nest here on this branch so that when the tree falls I'll be safe from ground predators.

Your chips just won't be valuable. Stories about what you did with your money might be, but only for the story value that the agent can pass off to the next agent.

Systems maximize channel capacity and economic systems have been stuck in scalar-land for centuries now, and we're now high-dimensional.

Anyway, if money has been a primary pursuit or source of safety for your life so far this might land a little uncomfortably.

But just take the time to think about it. Think about how you and your friends pay when you go out. How you happily give them gifts. Think about how you introduce a friend, or how you talk your way into backseat passes at a concert. It's all stories anyway. Why aren't the agents going to play the same game?

Are you wondering about whether you've lived a good story? Yeah, me too. But I'm sure you have, it's just that we're not used to thinking in these terms.

This does produce quite a scary attack vector, which is that if someone can control which stories the AIs prefer, then there's a lot of potential for coercive and oppressive control.

The benefit of money is that it's credibly neutral, you know that the person who bought the strawberries wanted them, and so it seems quite safe to reward people for providing them (of course, this logic starts to change when the good is cigarettes rather than strawberries but that's for a later post).

What's the method by which we arrive at credibly neutral agreement on the kinds of stories we pass around as narrative collateral? That's the most important question, and until we answer that properly this new dynamic won't be capable of emerging.

one last thought for those that made it here:
In the land of abundance, generosity is only scarcity, because now no one needs it.

What's different between your community and strangers is exactly what defines the two: you don't know each other. And of course you can't know each other, there are too many people in the world for you to give them your limited attention.

It's said that Dunbar's number is that limit: at about 150 people you can't attend to all the members of a community anymore.

And with that word you can hopefully see how the economic system of the future will look. 

Something has fundamentally changed: we're no longer bounded by attention. We can spin it up for pennies.

What this means is that the bounds of our communities can now grow, and that means that we'll go back to the more information rich ways of tracking contributions: stories not monies.

It means of course that the crypto people were totally right, in the future we'll use tokens to totally transform our economic system. Just not the tokens they expected.

Love this, great quick explanation. Very apt analogy!