The abundance topic returns (#1554423).
I generally refer to this as "infinite generation" (#1553596, #1550071), but whatever: same idea. We shall not be horsed about! #1486740
Here's Nic Carter writing/posting a chapter(?) of a futuristic AI novel... Human in the Loop: all this abundance everywhere, humans being "time-rich" and wealth measured in human hours...
. When the Automation had hit fifty years earlier, machines had gained the ability to do anything, so everything they could do had become almost free. Food, housing, medicine, transport, education, computation, entertainment – all delivered at a marginal cost approaching zero. The only remaining scarce good was human time and attention. And this was becoming scarcer by the year. The population kept shrinking, and those who remained preferred to tap into their neural feeds rather than work.
Human time and attention... ah, yes, we at SN are well equipped to (financially) deal with that! #1552780
"Economists called the result the Baumol terminus"
Edward understood it more viscerally. In this age of complete abundance, Pritchard could afford a housekeeper and he could not. Among the ultra-rich, the Baumol terminus had produced a curious revival of the Victorian household, down to the footmen, readers, and valets.
Horrid prospectus?
Edward supposed he had a point. They were lucky, after all. Working for Hargreaves had given them advantages few could dream of. A chance at becoming net time importers one day.
This segment is, uh, disturbing!
As the convoy approached Ouranoupoli, they passed two young men waiting by the side of the road. They had the slack expressions and unfocused eyes of people deep in their neural feeds. Mallory stared through the window.
“Good God.”
Edward followed his gaze.
The men might have been arguing philosophy, watching films composed uniquely for them**, consuming pornography that was tailored precisely to their fantasies**, or chatting with friends. Either way, they were doing it in the open.
“In public too,” Edward said. “No shame.”
“You foreigners are snobs,” said Demetrios. “You have interfaces.”
Edward thought unhappily of his mother in Adelaide. She lived alone in a fully automated house and had gone neural years ago. Everything was taken care of: cooking and cleaning, her health, travel. The system remembered everything she forgot and kept her company. She told Edward that she had never been happier.
Most people lived that way now. His mother, those Greek boys on the street, everyone. Fewer than four billion left and falling every year, and hardly any of them worked at all.
I'll let more qualified fiction commentators opine on the story, but the idea is that in a world of material abundance taken completely care of, all that's left is the (human) arts... and humans compete to become as pure (not augmented, or human embodiment at some percentage). Dudes measure their craft's success at "verified hours" e.g., playing the piano or like the arch-monk in the monastery, to which they trek: "Makarios had accumulated over one hundred thousand hours of contemplation, study, and prayer. Without once interacting with a machine."
"What do you want? More"
Hargreaves began to explain. In the wider world, there was abundance. Anything one might want was available. Water, food, shelter, medicine. Poverty was extinct.
The rich stack people -- an entourage. Various companions to accompany them in their households; go wherever they feel like, do whatever they please.
Hargreaves went on.
The old distinctions had not vanished. Class, affluence, whatever you wanted to call it. They had taken a new form, this time based not on property or money or things but on people. People were scarce. He explained the Human Balance, the Human 100, even Voss. “My rival is ahead of me. He has three hundred and twenty." [people in his household]
Outside, Edward was struggling to retain his composure. He thought of his own Human Balance, which he checked obsessively every morning. Pritchard’s housekeeper. Sofia and her tennis lessons. Beatrice waiting in town. Mallory’s son learning the piano.
He thought of all the nights he had pined for the promotion so he could afford an assistant of his own. The small resentments he carried towards those who had more.
OK...
From the excerpts it seems quite shallow.
I mean, not everyone is motivated by keeping up with the Jones's. There has to be more interesting things that could keep people up at night in such a society.
Furthermore, it reads as if the characters are outright obsessed by it. They're bound to be unhappy in any system, abundant or not.
And finally, the section about the slack expressions and unfocused eyes... well, that's a reality already. Only with the additional "burden" of having to hold a device.
This is it. Not a system problem, a meaning problem... Follows you in every economic world, past or future
A little too on the nose, perhaps. The best scifi doesn't spell things out so explicitly.
Some questions arise: if time and attention are the only things with value, how do the rich become rich or stay rich?
Is it because they were endowed with ownership of the AI resources? In that case, the valuable resources will not just be time and attention, but time and attention that can be converted into maintaining control and suppressing revolutionary fervor.
Right, also there are just some things that arent capable of being mass produced. While the Dutch are good at making new beach front property, there are limitations and differences in desirability of location. If trips to Mars suddenly become a thing, there may just be physical resource constraints preventing moving 8 billion people to mars and back for their vacation. Post scarcity on everything seems a bit far fetched.
A more refined version of my prediction that there would be lots of positions as members of celebrity posses.
sign me up to be a swiftie
nic is now a fictional author?
castle island must not be doing to well
literally the movie 'In Time' with justin timberlake with some minor additions.
meh
Carter wrote some fiction with his quantum thief who steals Satoshi's coins thing: #1404785
Curiously enough, there is a novel I'm reading called The Quantum Thief where time as a currency features heavily...
I kind of enjoyed his previous dip into fiction, I'll be curious to see how this one reads.
Yup, v meh
I like the idea of human connections being more of value in this imagined future. I've always thought that good speculative piece needs to ring true for readers in the present, but should also be plausible in the future.
On first glance the concept seems to owe a debt to Musk's grandiloquent conjectures for the future.
Thanks for sharing. I'll give it a closer read when I can afford to.
USA lost the trade war.
China now dominates global trade in manufactured goods and commodities.
Since time immemorial the dominant trading nations currency has been the dominant currency of trade.
USA was dominant post WW2 - but is not today.
It is clinging to the petrodollar hegemony it built upon the post WW2 era but the logic and fundamentals of the petrodollar are seriously eroded. $40T debt.
Because western powers have dominated global institutional and financial protocols for 500 years accepting Chinese protocols will take time for western nations as they are losing something they have assumed is their birthright- but it is happening already with the global south increasingly adopting direct bilateral trade settlements and those mediated by China.
USA has demonstrably lost the ability to project its power and maintain stable trade routes, just as Britain did in The Suez Crisis USA is now exposed in The Strait of Hormuz.
The British pound sterling retained its dominance in trade payments until The Suez Crisis.
The transition away from petrodollar dominance has begun and will be swifter than US exceptionalists can imagine.
https://investoffshore.com/chinas-cross-border-digital-rmb-payment-system-challenges-dollar-dominance/
'On March 17, 2025, the People’s Bank of China unveiled a pivotal shift in global finance: the digital RMB cross-border settlement system is now fully connected to the ten ASEAN nations and six Middle Eastern countries. This move instantly expands digital yuan interoperability to cover nearly 38% of global trade, enabling participants to bypass the SWIFT network long dominated by the U.S. dollar. In the words of The Economist, this is a “Bretton Woods System 2.0 Outpost Battle,” and blockchain is the new battlefield.
While the legacy SWIFT infrastructure still endures 3–5 day delays for cross-border transactions, China’s digital currency bridge compresses settlement time to just 7 seconds. In a landmark trial between Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi, a payment from a Chinese firm to a Middle Eastern supplier was completed in real-time—without six layers of intermediary banks, and at 98% lower transaction costs. This “lightning settlement” is reshaping expectations for global capital flow.
The implications extend far beyond speed and cost. The digital RMB’s blockchain architecture embeds automated compliance features, such as traceability and anti-money laundering protocols, directly into each transaction. For example, in the China-Indonesia “Two Countries, Two Parks” initiative, a digital RMB cross-border payment cleared in 8 seconds—a process 100 times more efficient than traditional banking methods. These efficiencies have already attracted 23 central banks to join China’s digital currency bridge trials. Notably, Middle Eastern energy exporters report a 75% reduction in settlement costs.
This technological leap is redefining financial sovereignty. Where previous U.S.-led sanctions relied on cutting off SWIFT access—as seen with Iran—China has been busy establishing RMB-centric payment loops across Southeast Asia. In 2024, cross-border RMB settlements with ASEAN surpassed 5.8 trillion yuan, more than double the volume recorded in 2021. Countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have not only added the yuan to their reserves but are now settling oil trades in digital RMB.
What’s more, China’s ambitions for the digital RMB extend beyond fintech. The currency serves as a strategic pillar of the Belt and Road Initiative, seamlessly integrated with Beidou satellite navigation and quantum communication to forge a “Digital Silk Road.” In infrastructure mega-projects like the China-Laos Railway and Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Rail, the digital yuan is used to settle freight, wages, and logistics in real-time. European automakers, too, are adopting digital RMB for Arctic route trade, boosting efficiency by up to 400%.
Today, over 87% of countries worldwide are now compatible with the digital RMB system, and cross-border payments have topped $1.2 trillion USD. While Washington debates the future of the dollar in a digital age, Beijing has already built a blockchain-based global settlement network spanning more than 200 countries.
This is more than just a shift in monetary plumbing—it’s a quiet but seismic reordering of global economic influence. For international investors, especially those seeking alternatives beyond U.S.-centric finance, China’s digital RMB strategy is a powerful signal of where the future may be headed.'
good