Money is really a substitute for people's time

Money is really a substitute for people’s time, isn’t it?

The richer you are, the more of it you can buy. A cleaner. A personal chef. The 100 people it took to build your super yacht. You leverage other people’s time for a better quality of life.

The less money you have, the more you have to do yourself.

So, here’s something I’ve thought about for 15 years… in an AI future where human work has been replaced (we’re not there yet), the meaning of money changes completely.

If robots do the labour, the cost of things falls. Towards the cost of energy and raw inputs (and even those get cheaper to source when robots are doing the digging).

A huge amount of what costs money today is really just bundled-up human hours, and that part could largely evaporate. Some things stay scarce (land, rare materials) but the labour line on almost every price tag trends toward zero.

But who owns the robots? Who owns the compute power they need? The energy they rely on?

How robots are distributed in society might dictate between abundance and poverty.

There’s a chance that anything people need to thrive, from housing to food, is covered for everyone through robotic labour. We usher in a new era of abundance. People will likely still compete for the rarest of things or play status games, but everyone gets their baseline needs met. (What do you think they do with that freed up time?)

Or, access to robots is restricted to a handful of people that own them all. They keep their operation and output for themselves, and everyone else scrapes by and survives through trading Pokemon cards for food.

Maybe somewhere in the middle? To me, the most pressing issue is not the destination (although it’s obviously important, let’s park that for now 😅), but the transition to it.

We’re in a system that values people through their work. Without work the system isn’t sure how to value someone. We don’t really know how to value parenting - we incentivise people to go to a job and outsource raising their kids to someone else (usually not to anyone’s benefit).

Now if the stove of AI gently simmers away jobs over a number of years, how do people cope whilst that system still relies on having a job to be valued and survive? I’ve not heard a good answer yet, but it’s what governments should have been thinking about for a long time. That gap is the danger. Not the robots.

There are lots of issues around the economics of the future which I’m really interested in. What’s your take?