the end of money -- further thoughts

[miriam_e]

I've previously written that I think money will cease to be an important thing in the near future and that not long after it will largely disappear from mainstream society. As the very essence of scarcity, it would fall away as a butterfly sheds its ugly pupal shell. But I have been wondering... might it just adapt?


A quick recap:

Value in our society is mostly assigned by scarcity. This is why money is historically based upon gold, because there is only so much of it and it can't be duplicated. Hitler tried to fix Germany's money problems by simply printing more of it, but that didn't work because it is the very scarcity of money that gives it its value. He sent his country spiralling into terrible inflation. Why does the value of an artist's works increase after their death? This little absurdity results from the sudden scarcity of their creations. Their intrinsic worth hasn't changed; just their availability. Mass production has been great for our society because it propagated previously scarce and expensive items to everybody cheaply. The lowered prices are generally ascribed to reduced production costs, but that isn't so. If the companies had been able to maintain high prices and a wider profit margin then they certainly would have, but money works by assigning value to scarcity. It has been a very useful system, but also riddled with absurdities and has made possible great evil, allowing some to control bottlenecks and restrict the flow of goods and knowledge and enslave others.

We live at a pivotal time in history: this scarcity-based system is changing. The information age allows pictures, music, books, and other electronically codable data to be easily duplicated at virtually no cost. The world can easily be swamped in humanity's greatest art, our most useful knowledge and insights completely independent of money. The open source movement has shown that simple cooperation of people on a grand scale where money plays no real part can produce results superior to those made by the richest and most powerful corporations. Increasingly, the best software products are free. The not-for-profit sector has become one of the largest and most effective parts of society, growing under our noses with hardly anybody realising it.

A new technology, just now beginning to grow, will take these first baby-steps to a gallop. It is the 3d printer. Currently is is expensive and only small numbers exist. They are often called 3d prototyping machines. A person or a company wants to see if their design for something is correct, so they send the 3d computer files to the 3d prototypers to create the object for real. NASA uses this technology for manufacturing a lot of parts because they often need just one of each; off the shelf items don't exist and conventional production would just be too expensive. Some companies are starting to consider using 3d printing in their production lines because it can save them a lot of money while enhancing their flexibility. Some researchers have shown how to use conductive plastics to incorporate electronics directly into such 3d printed objects. Not long ago the idea that everybody would soon be able to buy a cheap printer to produce high quality documents just sounded absurd. In light of that is it so difficult to imagine that we will all soon own small, cheap 3d printers? But this won't be just another in a long stream of useless consumer items because a 3d printer will be able to create other consumer items from data! And data is a fundamentally different thing. Soon after, somebody will circulate the design for how to use a 3d printer to create another 3d printer, and suddenly poverty is no longer an obstacle to owning almost any consumer good.

Similar things will happen later with food, energy, transport and land, but I won't go into them here. (I will if you are really interested.) Suffice it to say that scarcity will no longer function as a model for an economy. Thank heavens large (unofficial) parts of society are making preparations so that we will be able to take this in our stride.


In a world no longer ruled by scarcity, money could become simply an indicator of an object's true worth as judged by each person. Any person could create as much much money as they wished and send it to an admired designer. It would be an indicator of worth in the eyes of others. You couldn't buy anything with it, at least not in the normal sense, but there wouldn't be any need to buy things anymore. I know it sounds strange, but it is easier to understand if you replace the word "money" with the word "credit", in the sense of giving someone credit for a job well done.

What a wonderful future to look forward to.

Comments

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

For consumer-level items, can this ever come true?

Look at photo processing. If you have a 35mm camera and take photos, they cost about 10c/shot to buy the film and 20c/shot to have it developed. If you buy a digital camera and a photo printer, it costs about $1 in consumables to print a single photo. Of course, digital cameras have taken off because most people don't need all the shots on a roll printed. Indeed, many only want the photos in digital form anyhow, so it doesn't matter to them.

But the 3D printer doesn't have that advantage. Its only use is to create, and it needs the raw materials. The items that the 3D printer produces won't come out of thin air. They'll be produced using raw materials which, like the paper and ink for a photo printer, will almost certainly cost more than the bought mass-produced product.

At best, cheap 3D printers might put a limit on items which currently become insanely expensive by scarcity: Games that go out of print, etc. However, even then, copyright laws would make such reproductions illegal, just as 2D reproductions of copyright items are now. Artists make a poor enough living already to want us "swamped" in art at little cost. Food and land will always have scarcity value, so people will need money (or an equivalent) to buy both. An ability to copy 3D items won't change that.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

But the 3D printer... needs the raw materials. The items that the 3D printer produces won't come out of thin air.

Yes, that will be true for a while, but some time after 3d printers become common I expect they'll begin to actually use air as their raw material. Plastics are hydrocarbons; they're composed of hydrogen and carbon. Some plastics have some oxygen and nitrogen too if I remember rightly. Plants use just air and water to make them all the time. I think doing this at the domestic level may be some decades off, but I don't for one minute believe it is insoluble. Already there are ways of harnessing microbes to make plastics.

copyright laws would make such reproductions illegal

It is illegal to record TV shows onto videotape. Does that stop anyone? Have you downloaded any mp3s or given or received any recently? They can use copyright laws to make such things illegal, but when the law gets out of step with reality it becomes irrelevant.

Artists make a poor enough living already to want us "swamped" in art at little cost.

This was the whole point of my thoughts about the end of the era of scarcity. I am an artist myself and have heard so many other artists crying over this spilled milk that I felt I needed to think more fully about the implications... certainly nobody else seemed to be following it through. We are being conned into a dependence upon scarcity and being led to believe that it is the only way we can survive. Plenty for all is happening whether we want it or not. The only question is: how can we use it to our, and everybody's advantage? It should be a good thing, right? -- no more poverty. It has already begun with data (text, pictures, music, videos).

Food and land will always have scarcity value, so people will need money (or an equivalent) to buy both.

So you want me to expand on that? OK. Next posting. In the meantime you can find some of it in an earlier posting here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/miriam_e/17310.html).

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

This loops back to another topic there too. Plants don't use just air and water, they use energy too. Sure, we can make anything out of component atoms in theory, but the energy requirements are astronomical, so we are on the path to even greater energy usage.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Our energy use can be vastly improved, and in some areas is getting much better. Manipulation of molecules gathered from air and water will most likely use similar techniques to those used by plants and other living things, i.e. enzymes. They are not consumed in reactions themselves, but merely facilitate them on application of a small amount of energy.

Even purely standard electronic equipment is becoming amazingly energy efficient. There are now watches that are powered by body heat. I used to have a self-winding mechanical watch, which I always thought was a brilliant use of simple technology. My little PalmVx computer uses a minuscule amount of power and can run on its rechargeable battery for days and days. My brother used a hydraulic ram pump when he lived out in the bush. It required no power source other than fall of water about one foot in the creek where it sat, had one moving part, and pumped water some hundreds of feet up the hillside to where he lived.

We should be using solar power more. In time we will have to. It just makes too much good sense. But there are many other readily available sources of power too that are generally ignored.

• Wind could be used far more on a domestic level.
• Brownian motion from heat can be "rectified" and used (tricky but can be done).
• Sound is all around us and can be very easily converted with piezoelectric devices.
• The temperature differential between day and night.
• There are even theoretical schemes for tapping quantum fluctuations in zero-point energy (though I'll believe that when I see it).