It sure isn’t the 1920s, it’s the 2020s so things like digital money are ephemeral and whimsical.

The bigger question is how much food and medicine is there in the supply chain buffers? If all production was to stop immediately — how many calories are on the continent? How many grams of insulin or penicillin?

In a crisis how will those things be distributed? Will it be based on immediate need or social class?

What’s keeping the system going anyways? Why do ships continue to come with consumer goods from China? Why do farmers send their grain to market?

It’s kind of neat to think about what will happen in this sort of scenario. I wonder how long the data centres will keep running, churning out models that don’t have a market an aren’t quite good enough for AGI.