Could it work without money?

Great Debates
201

Ah, that’s a nice breeze you’ve got going there, with all that handwaving. Could you turn a little to the left? My ear’s getting a little warm, from all the bullshit being piped into it.

You want to see absurdity crystallized? Here it is: “haircuts… there is going to be someone who will do it at no cost”. Why in the everloving world do you think that people are going to want to cut your hair for free? For the thrill of running their fingers through your glossy locks? Okay, let’s suppose that there are some people so enraptured with the glorious art of their haircuts that they will do it just for the art of it. I’d be terrified to put myself under their scissors, not being the guinea-pig type for somebody’s artistic rapture, but okay. So, how many of these people are there? A few thousand, on the entire planet? You wanna travel three thousand miles and stand in line for six months to get a haircut?

Now let’s talk about those people who will do plumbing for free for the artistic thrill of fitting pipes. And the police and sanitarium guards who do it for the sheer thrill of enforcing justice through club and gun. (Okay, you could probably find plenty of people like that, so long as you don’t interfere with them with annoying moral limitations on their behavior.) And then of course there are all those experts who are doing hard work as full time judges - though again, there are probably enough people who like being controlling, manipulating, and power-mad to fill those slots.

Here’s where you made your error: you’re trying to pretend that humans can participate in your society, when there’s a much easier answer for you: sentient robots with supermagic AIs. Sentient robots give all the haircuts, do all the guarding, make all the decisions, give all the advice, provide all the casual sex, and provide all the companionship. Only these godlike silicon beings, who will have been flawlessly programmed to all be selfless altuistic angels by God himself, only they can be relied upon to act as the cogs of a functioning society.

Obviously somebody’s been reading some sci-fi. Though apparently only a limited selection - the robots turn evil or go loopy in at least half of those stories, largely because it makes for a more interesting plot. Heck, even Asimovian robots with the three laws go bad half the time!

But anyway, back to the idealized super-robot-run society: what are we actually talking about here? We’re talking about humans having been almost completely removed from functional society. Certainly, humans can’t be tasked with doing anything that needs to be done - the human could easily decide to quit and go home any time things get a little hard (since you’re not paying him). So all necessary tasks of any kind must be done by the sentient robots that will permeate society, most likely in numbers exceeding humanity itself (since everyone will always want at least one robotic slave handy).

So, what do humans do in this society? Well, humans have shown a limited inclination to do creative endeavors for no pay. Most of stuff so created is crap, mind you - the artistic community will be dominated by Mary Sues and other quick throwaway work. Presumably there will still be some art of scope and quantity created, though. I suspect much of it will never be distributed to a general audience - if you’ve put a lot of effort into something and care about it, you may not want to see it taken and mocked or (worse) modified by the hack down the street, painting penises on your masterpeice. But there will surely be some who are both skilled and interested enough in the mere acclaim of the faceless masses to expose their work to the world, so human art will not be completely dead.

Plus of course, we can reasonably expect the robots to be creating art too - they’re creative and imaginative enough to govern everything, so it makes sense they could create art too. Presumably better art than any human, since we’ve already assumed the robots are perfect and godlike.

So anyway, some humans will be spending their time creating art for public consumption - assuming they feel that they’re not totally outclassed and shamed by the robot art, anyway. What else will humans do? Well, not work obviously; there’s no job we wouldn’t rather give to the robot, so we wouldn’t let people work. (You’ve explicitly said that human labor is valueless anyway - my haircuts are crap, my advice is crap, everything I could do is crap, according to your thesis.) So, what would people do? Laze around their houses, presumably, doing nothing of importance. Most people will get fat and slothful. And associating with other people? People hurt other people. And you’ve got all these much-nicer, kinder, angelic robots around - so who needs people? My robobuddy gives me all the companionship and sex and love I need.

I’d expect the majority of humanity to die off peacefully within three generations, having failed to reproduce. Those that remain will likely have a religious aversion to robot companionship, possibly taking it so far as to reject the robots entirely. Luddiite enclaves might spring up, taking increasingly strident cultural measures to encourage their youth to remain in the fold and actually put up with and reproduce with other human beings. Possibly they might actually declare war on the robots and attempt to destroy them - though I would expect the robots (who would vastly outnumber the humans by that point) to be able to passively let the humans attack and simply replace damaged robots as fast as the humans can destroy them. This is of course assuming that the robots don’t decide the humans would be better off dead, or decide that the spotted owls would be better off if the humans would dead, or decide that the robots would would better off if the humans were dead.

Of course, if the humans all die (one way or the other), then the dream will finally be achieved: a civilization composed entirely of perfectly unselfish, constructive, generous individuals, who will all voluntarily work together in perfect harmony forever. As an added bonus, they’re immune to the effects of disease and aging, too! Perfect! And all it will take is stupidly impossible fantasy made-up AI robots to achieve this end. Surely, that glorious new world will be upon us any day now.

202

Bicycles aren’t a leisure activity! There’s an important means of transportation. And you can build a house just fine without aluminum siding!

Even such a simple economic problem – do you use the ingots for bicycle wheels or aluminum siding – doesn’t have a simple or obvious answer.

“I’d use whatever benefited the most people” sounds very nice, but how do you make that determination? How do you measure “benefit”, particularly when it varies from individual to individual and location to location? Here in Los Angeles where traffic is bad and the weather is mild a new bicycle may provide far more benefit than durable siding. In Minneapolis the opposite may be true.

Well, yes, because one of the big advantages to using money is that it tends to correlate with benefit. If something will provide a lot of benefit to someone, they tend to be willing to pay a lot for it. If something provides only a little benefit, they won’t.

Pricing is a means of communicating both scarcity to consumers and utility to producers. It’s a way for people to share information about how to allocate resources. It’s not a perfect system, but if you remove it you have to come up with a replacement for all the things it does do.

203

The Communists built and designed cars according to your model. The East Germans came up with the Trabant, which you can get rides in in East Berlin, but which I don’t think anyone owns any more. Oddly, people buy different things because they want different product features. If you design one car that combines the features of a hybrid and a pickup you will get something that is no good at either job.

As for cpus - in your world you won’t get either, at least not for a long time. It takes hundreds of people to design a cpu, and it takes years of 10 and 12 hour days. I’ve done it. Most of them won’t get any fame. Who is going to do this for very long if not for money and security?

I don’t know if anyone has brought up open source, which might appear superficially to be an example of this thing working - people developing sophisticated products for free. If you think that this is the open source model, you are wrong. Almost all work on open source things is done by people either in companies or paid for by foundations. The companies always have a good business reason (or maybe a not-so good one) to fund these projects. Open source projects done totally by volunteers don’t get all that far.

But I must congratulate you on bringing us together. From the far left to the far right, everyone seems united in thinking this stuff is hooey.

204

The apocalypse is is surely upon us. :wink:

205

So that much won’t change, eh?
:smiley:

206

Don’t underestimate how much harder it’ll be to tell which art is crap, without the benefit of price tags and sales numbers to tell us which is better!

(Note: the above could in theory be broadly overinterpreted to mean that price is not a reflector of value for non-art things, like steel and cars and the like. Such an interpretation would be incorrect - art is somewhat unique in that different people’s valuation of things vary so much - and because each piece is effectively unique it diminishes the ability to aggregate demand for art as a whole. Er, not to overthink the joke or anything…)

207

Honestly, I don’t think that’s really the problem. The problem with works that haven’t gone through the normal publishing process is that they haven’t had to pass through the hands of a disinterested party for evaluation and criticism; an editor, in other words. Fanfiction is like a huge slush pile; there’s plenty of good stuff there, but no one has slogged though the garbage to pluck it out, much less noted any errors and sent it back to the writer for correction.

I don’t regard getting people to write as a problem with a no-money system; I think the problem will be who’s going to read all that awful writing and serve as some aspiring writer’s editor for free? The price tag is largely irrelevant for the purposes of judgement; high priced works can easily be worse than the cheaper ones. Art, lacking in much of an objective standard, is highly vulnerable to status based price inflation;art can and often is expensive because the artist is famous, not because the art is good. Or just because the people publishing it are banking that people will take the attitude that since it’s expensive, it must be good.

208

The problem with “no-money” creativity is that if someone is really good at something we should encourage them to do it full time. I’m glad the Beatles could quit their day jobs and spend a lot of time in the studio. There are lots of fantastically talented people creating art in their spare time out of love. But there’s only so much you can cram into the odd corners of your life. If someone is capable of writing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, we’re all better off if we can set things up so they have the time to do it.

209

Well, there’s a tremendous difference between books and (say) paintings. Books do have a price measure telling us about their perceived quality: is it for sale or not! As you say, publishers provide a valuable (if not perfectly reliable) filtration service - which is entirely fueled by money. Publishers select for perceived salability - if they don’t think it’ll sell, it gets a price tag of $0 and is dumped back into the author’s hands. The fact that a book makes it to the market at all indicates that somebody with professional experience at judging such things has decided the material will be appealing to some noninsignificant segment of the populace.

Self-publishing, of course, bypasses this - and you get the slush pile that characterizes the internet.

Works of art that don’t include mass duplication and reproduction are kind of a special case from a free market perspective: they’re a product with a supply of 1. Necessarily these things don’t function with the usual supply/demand curve pricing models, because those relate quantity and price sold -with quantity as a flexible amount. So, the optimum price is whatever a single person with pay for it - the person who will pay the most for it, specifically. Auction systems are relatively good at determining this, and (in theory*) serve to get the art in the hands of the person who wants it most, as determined by willingness to pay more. If you chuck money, there’s literally no way to know who should own the thing - if anyone. Hence the proposal to have “experts” choose which art should be saved and which should be burned, and which should be moved to museums and which should be moved into preferably-unlit basements. Which neither accounts for the fact that quality of art isn’t an objective measure and is instead (as you note) subject to a host of other factors - and the fact that just because the experts don’t like something, there might be a group of uncultured plebes who like it and should have the option of one of them owning it - and without price, how do we decide which one gets it?

  • limited by people having various access to funds - when people have different-sized starting purses it distorts the model.
210

I was referring to the hypothetical post-scarcity, all-work-is-done-by-robots scenario, where anyone could sit around producing art all day if they liked. But yes, right now it’s definitely better to pay them for it so they don’t have to scribble their novels on napkins in between waiting on tables or something.

211

Sure, but think about how many people in this post-scarcity utopia are going to opt for ‘sitting on a couch, eating Cheetos and playing computer games’, instead of being artistic or whatever. Sure, there will be some driven people who will go out and create just because they want to, but for the majority they get into things because of the expectations of fame, fortune and groupies. Certainly the last thing will still be out there (though if we are going to have sex robots for that, perhaps even network engineers and IT geeks will be able to get laid), and fame is always good…but the real motivator will just not be there. If you become a big screen star or a best selling novelist or whatever you will still have the same ‘stuff’ as everyone and be living in the same shack as everyone else…'cept me of course, since I got dibs on that beach house in Maui, so :p!

-XT

212

Well, it does happen - I write recreationally. I’m working on book 2 now.

Haven’t published, though, and wouldn’t publish under the “no money” model. Why should I?

213

Sure, it happens. But, at a guess, you have another job, and you write for enjoyment. Suppose, though, that you didn’t have to work OR write, but could sit around and do anything you want…or nothing at all…all your needs and wants taken care of (except for your deep desire for my house in Maui, alas, unfulfilled). Now, you may be one of those rare people who will self motivate, and take the chance of all that leisure time to write the great American (or whatever) novel, new hit single or formula for beer using E=MC2 as it’s basis. IOW, you might be the rare individual who is both talented in the extreme AND self motivated and able to set aside comfort and security to get off your butt and DO something constructive.

Sadly, I am not such an individual, and having all my needs and wants met and seeing no pressing need to exert myself, I would gladly fuck off, to put it bluntly. Oh, I might take up martial arts in a bigger way, but even there I’m not sure if I’d have the energy to exert myself if I really didn’t have to. And I seriously doubt I’d be alone in this. I think it would be guys like you, talented and self motivated who would be in the vast minority. The rest would fall into the ‘talented but lazy’ or ‘motivated but untalented’ categories…IMHO anyway. I could be wrong, but I’m to lazy to really find out…

-XT

214

Why are you guessing? I just said I write recreationally. :dubious:

I do have a job, and if I didn’t have to do it, I wouldn’t - which would result in me doing more writing. And reading, and watching movies, and computer gaming. That just stands to reason - in a post scarcity world where nobody has to work if they don’t want to, their additional free time will be divided amongst their other unpaid pursuits. In fact I’d speculate that the amount of recreational writing and the like done would actually increase over and above what you’d expect if you just scaled all the recreational activities up in proportion with one another; I speak from experience that writing can take a heck of a lot of time, particularly if you’re taking time and care with it. (I concede that there are those like Peirs Anthony who can whip out a 400 page novel over his lunch break, but I maintain that such people are rare.) Given the much larger chunks of free time provided by a slothful and coddled lifestyle, barriers against time-consuming things like writing and four hour per day marital arts regimens would be reduced.

On the other hand, though there’s a snag introduced by using me as an example of a self motivated talented* individual who will support the moneyless world’s ongoing artistic development: I don’t publish. What does that mean? Specifically, all that give-stuff-away-for-free business that characterizes internet publishing and is (obviously) the foundation of the opinion that arts would continue without money? I really don’t do that. No way. Now, paid publishing I might be able to get into - largely because then I’d have a critical publisher’s word that my work is fit for publishing consumption (though the money would be nice too). I haven’t sought a paid publisher, though, mostly because I’m too lazy to go through the effort and I’m not confident my work is fit to be read by strangers and I fear rejection. Also, I’m lazy. Besides which I’m lazy. And I’m lazy too. (I hear getting published is work!)

So. People already (self-)publish on the internet for free - but the vast majority of that stuff is drek. People also currently publish for money. Is there any reason to think that the people who publish for money would still publish their work if you didn’t incentivize it with payment of some kind? Sure, a few would. A few have - some established artists have released material for free. (Of course, such instances might have a PR incentive that would vanish if the artists weren’t also producing paying work.)

Myself, I think that most of the artists who sell things for money are at least to a degree doing it for the money, so I’d naturally expect there to be a sharp drop in output from them, despite their increased free time. And I’d expect the efforts of editors and the like to go to zero - which might have a direct effect on the quality of output from the currently publishing authorial community. You’d also lose cover artists, typesetters, publishers, printers, and bookstore owners - I’m fairly certain that all of these people are in it for the money too.

The sci-fi fallback, of course, is that some of the more menial tasks could in theory be done by a computer AI. But editing is more than just fixing typos, I hear - you make qualitative suggestions to authors, right? And cover artists? If computers can make cover art, then I think we’re in the range where they can write the books too, in which case who needs humans anyway? We’d be the inferior species and’d be in zoos (or rather, preserves) within eighty years.

  • aw shucks thanks, but I’d be wary of lavishing praise so hastily. It’s not like you’ve read my stuff, after all.
215

I think the world would be better off if most people did sit on a couch watching TV and didn’t pretend to be able to write.

216

I think the value of art follows critical attention and access to galleries, and doesn’t precede it. There was “self-publishing” in the art world long before the literary world, and for every van Gogh there are a million incompetent daubers. The gatekeepers are different, but there are still gatekeepers.