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> Yeah, but when money becomes information then everyone has money.

Categorically, no. When everyone has money, in fact, no one has money. If you don't believe me ask someone from Zimbabwe.

> When food, medicine and narcotics become information with genetic engineering, then everyone has food, medicine and narcotics.

The barrier to everyone having food, medicine and narcotics is not money, it's the restriction of those important goods to people who have money; because food is not grown because people are hungry, nor are medicines made because they are sick; both of these things are done for profit, and people without money are unprofitable to the producers and distributors of those goods.

We have enough food for everyone almost twice over. The problem is the majority of it is pumped to overweight westerners who have disposable income.

> What good is for me, 10 songs which each one has 10 seconds of a part i like, and i am indifferent to the rest of the song. I take these 100 seconds in total and compress them down to a new song which is totally to my liking.

Oh that's so nice for you. And all it took was the bankrupting of every music artist.

Your views on this are so myopic as I genuinely wonder if you're a parody account. I didn't think it was possible for someone to be this short-sighted and selfish but here we are.

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emporas 4 days ago | parent [-]

Ok, let's focus on food then instead of being all over the place. I personally produce on average 1 ton of olive oil a year. A little bit less 800 kilos or something, but let's say it's 1 ton. I keep some for myself and the rest is sold for profit.

Let's say someone in Zimbabwe wants to buy olive oil. He has to buy from the top producers in the world, i.e. Spain, Italy and Greece. I will sell olive oil to Zimbabweans only for profit, if they don't have money they will not have olive oil.

But let's say a smart Zimbabwean figures out a way to genetically modify Chlorella or Spiroulina which only need sun and no particular climate or fertile land and he produces so much olive oil that it's price collapses to nothing. Not only that will bankrupt me, but such a new innovation in food production will put me at a disadvantage of even competing using the new innovation because the reason is simple, i don't have even half the sun Zimbabwe has.

But even if my income stream of olive oil goes to zero, i can sell something else, i can even learn to program computer code, and sell that. Or learn genetic engineering myself and create some new innovation. There is never any shortage of problems to solve, and things to produce.

	▲	ToucanLoucan 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> But let's say a smart Zimbabwean figures out a way to genetically modify Chlorella or Spiroulina which only need sun and no particular climate or fertile land and he produces so much olive oil that it's price collapses to nothing. That's a hell of an industrious Zimbabwean, firstly. Secondly though, while I understand where your metaphor is aiming, it just doesn't really work. There has never been a "business with a competitive advantage" on the scale of human creative output vs. AI. I would argue even this example you've cooked up which already strains belief on several points doesn't truly capture it. AI in your example wouldn't be one person in one place that can make a product at unbelievable scale; I think it would be more analogous to everyone on Earth suddenly having a machine on their countertop that produces Olive Oil by itself, of low quality, for free, forever. And I think the effects would be similar: any producer of less than fantastic olive oil would go bankrupt, because they're effectively competing with a free product (not unlike the Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer problem) and most consumers who are fine with a low-grade oil have zero reason to buy more when they can just buy access to the infinite olive oil maker. You would also then have producers of food both industrial and restaurants who would begin advertising that they use real proper olive oil, many of which would doubtlessly be using the shitty stuff from our imaginary machine or perhaps a blend of both to cut costs, but nevertheless, this hurts the producers of the good stuff too, because again, they are competing with a free-at-point-of-use product. And like, on balance, all of this is just a net negative for everyone: * A lot of the olive oil is worse now, for everyone, seemingly permanently absent regulations * People are now losing a lot of counter space to the machine * We've obliterated an entire agricultural sector and farmers who have done nothing but this their entire lives have to retrain jobs and/or their land has to be used to grow something else * One company that made the infinite olive oil machine now has billions and billions of dollars, that they have earned by making the other three things happen And just... why? Why is this a good thing for humanity? Put aside the stupid game with the made up money and line go up and justify to me why we've now done this, because it seems like everyone has lost a little bit, some have lost a lot, and a vanishingly tiny minority have won big, explicitly at the expense of everyone else. And before you start with "well the market chose-" no, it didn't. The market followed incentives established by the market and those who regulate it. That's not a choice anyone or anything made, any more than it's a choice if a river floods it's banks and destroys a bridge.