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0 pointsadventured3y ago0 comments

We're never moving post scarcity. There is no scenario where that outcome is going to occur. Logistics alone guarantee that won't happen. Existence by its very nature is bound up in scarcity. There will always be various critical elements that provide a scarcity restriction on humanity and the rest (the less scarce) will always collide against that scarcity bottleneck.

The artists can now create on the tech side too, courtesy of inbound GPT-like LLMs. This isn't a one way street. The techies can craft art, the artists can craft tech.

It's opening up enormous pathways whether you're a programmer or artist. The artist has to be willing to expand and take on more responsibilities, just as the techie does if they want to craft quality AI art for a game.

With all the various game engines available now, we're not far away from being able to relatively easily have an LLM build nearly all the software side for you via prompting. From there you can bring whatever your strength is to customizing, implementing the game. Maybe you're good at ensuring high quality gameplay, maybe you're an artist that has an elite eye for how things should look, maybe you're a programmer and your game will be better optimized (and so on).

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fnordpiglet3y ago· 2 in thread

Post scarcity doesn’t mean “I dream of a palace and it appears.” It means basic necessities of life are available to all without everyone laboring. I think we are actually there, but have induced a scarcity economy with extreme imbalances and fake incentives to toil for toils sake.

The artist will make art without reward. They always have. But few can do it for a living. Fewer will in this next phase.

throwawaylinux3y ago

> Post scarcity doesn’t mean “I dream of a palace and it appears.” It means basic necessities of life are available to all without everyone laboring. I think we are actually there, but have induced a scarcity economy with extreme imbalances and fake incentives to toil for toils sake.

To be clear, that is according to the definition you've made up. The commonly understood definition includes many or most of peoples' desires. Travel, housing, vacations, iphones, advanced health care, entertainment, higher education, etc.

> I think we are actually there, but have induced a scarcity economy with extreme imbalances and fake incentives to toil for toils sake.

Even in western countries, millions of people are struggling with basic costs of housing, energy, and even food. I mean people who actually work many hours every day and earn money are struggling with these things. We seem to be a long way off it even for your "basic necessities" definition.

fnordpiglet3y ago

Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services but that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

To your point, they do. However I’d assert that’s mostly due to income inequality and false scarcity to induce labor for labors sake.

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fragmede3y ago

> We're never moving post scarcity.

We already are with digital goods, society just hasn't caught up yet. I can make essentially infinite many copies of, say, Braid, and give every person in the world with an Internet connection a copy of it for a couple thousand dollars by using Cloudflare unlimited bandwidth R2 and bittorrent. A couple thousand dollars is basically a rounding error in the scheme of things. As I am not Jonathan Blow, distributing Braid would be a violation of copyright law, but copyright law is just a social contract that we entered into to incentivize the creation of work. If Jonathan Blow were compensated for every copy of Braid out there, I'm sure he would be quite happy to be (even more) rich.

So even in a post-digital-scarcity world, artists and programmers need to get paid, and so we have various DRM schemes, the first of which is the copyright system in the first place, but that works about as well as trying to make water not wet. Movies are leaked onto torrent sites like Rarbg (RIP) and people make copies all day long. libgen mirrors are still around despite the best efforts of the copyright regime. But let's be honest with ourselves, digital goods themselves are already post scarcity, we just haven't figured out how to incentivize the creation of works in our half-post-scarcity world and have no idea on how to move forwards.

Alternate solutions are out there, but we have no experience as a society in upending large social contracts (like copyright). You can easily imagine a system where what's popular gets tracked, and money flow to the creators of the media that people are actually watching and consuming. It would be a more draconian system than the DRM we have right now, but on the other hand, if it promotes the arts, then maybe it's worth it.

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