X-Message-Number: 10879 Date: Sun, 06 Dec 1998 12:31:25 -0800 From: Peter Merel <> Subject: "I'm in the high fidelity first class travelling set ..." George Smith writes, >If production continues to become robotic/automatic, money will become extinct. Since everything is free today, my friend has decided he'd like to move the stars in their courses. Me, I like 'em just where they are. But Betelgeuse can only go one direction, not two. We have to find a way to resolve this conflict. Now one way is for me to kill my friend, or him to kill me, before either of us can do much else. But since my friend and I don't feel much like dueling or warring today, we would like to use some quieter and more equitable system to resolve matters like this. Now me, I like the seas to be blue. My perverse friend likes 'em green. So we do a little swap; we barter blue seas for irregular stars. Somehow still there's a fly in the ointment. My nextdoor neighbour has always liked blue seas, and he's put out. Of course there's something he'd like; he'd like my wife to do the Watussi for him every night at 8 pm. Well, we get together and start thinking about all these little barters and conflicts, and we think, you know what, if we had some way to allocate control in these matters, to define a market for them, then you know what, things would run a lot smoother. It'd sure save a lot of harsh words and violent sieges. Now maybe a good way to resolve things would be with currency. Oh, I don't mean that fiat-backed centrally issued bureaucratic stuff we use here in the tail end of the 20th. I mean a kind of equitable currency, one that controls not just private ownership but public shared resources too. If we did that, then we could easily sort matters out without coming to blows. Maybe this would be important on small scales too. After all, if we want all those foglets cooperating to do laminar flow to fly us uploaded nano gods around without cracking our heads, the foglets need some equitable system for resolving matters too. In fact you already see the use of such mini-currencies in distributed databases and network routers, where although things are almost free it's still a real hardship to deny someone service or force inefficient processing. So it seems like money, even if only in a form something like I describe at http://home.connectnet.com/peter/ss.html, is going to be with us no matter what we do. Unless perhaps the only chap left standing after the harsh words and sieges is George Smith, who can proceed to order the universe without needing to accomodate anyone else ... Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10879