I'm all for this, as long as we programmers continue to capture a reasonable amount of the value we create.

The danger doesn't come from some immutable law of nature, it comes from humans organizing. Some people want to be able to hire programmers cheaply, programmers want to continue to be expensive (maybe get more expensive because now we can deliver more value?).

It will be up to us, the people living in this moment, to determine what balance is struck.

I don't really know what "value" means in a post scarcity world. We're probably going to have to rethink it.

It made a lot of sense when we were all worried about the same things, e.g. not starving. In such a world, anything you could trade for food was objectively valuable because you could use it to fend off starvation--and so could everybody else.

But if efficiencies improve to a point where we can easily meet everybody's basic needs, then the question of whether progress towards a particular goal counts as value becomes less clear, especially if it's a controversial goal.

I imagine that whether we write the code or not will have more to do with how we feel about that goal and less to do with how many shiny pebbles we're given in exchange.

We're a long way from a post-scarcity world. In the meantime, I want to be able to pay my mortgage.

Even if we had the blueprint for one right now and a blueprint for robots that could make everything 1000x faster than humans, we're still talking decades because it is going to take time for concrete to set and for molten steel to cool and for all kinds of other construction/manufacturing processes (limited by the laws of physics) that will be on the critical path to building whatever it is that brings us to post-scarcity.

And even if the technology exists, how do we make sure we have a Star Trek future instead of a Star Wars future? Technology is very useful for improving living conditions, but you can't invent your way out of the need to organize and advocate for justice.

We already have the technology to feed the whole planet today, we just don't do it.

The idea behind the market economy is that people still will always strive for more. Some examples of commodities that aren't strictly necessary, but can always be improved:

- video games with more beautiful or realistic graphics

- food that tastes better, costs less, or is healthier

- wedding dresses that are cheaper and look nicer

- houses that are comfortable and affordable

- to be able to take more education (some people I know wish they could take more classes unrelated to their major in college)

And what's considered the minimum standard of having one's needs met is subjective, and varies by person. For example, some people wouldn't consider raising children without buying a house first, but it's not strictly necessary for survival; my parents rented a house until I was 19.

I don't think that a world where all software problems are easy problems is one where we stop wanting more. I just think that what we will see a change in what people want more of such that "capturing value" is a less relevant concept.

We will want more of things for which the production of goods does not scratch the itch.

If I want more clean air and you want more rocket launches, and we're both willing to work to get what we want, then whether we get it is less about how much value we capture and more about how aligned our work is with our goals and who in particular values the outputs of that work such that they're willing to support our endeavors.

> If I want more clean air and you want more rocket launches, and we're both willing to work to get what we want, then whether we get it is less about how much value we capture and more about how aligned our work is with our goals and who in particular values the outputs of that work such that they're willing to support our endeavors.

That sounds like another problem of allocation of inherently scarce resources. Do you mean that weĺl just focus more on getting those resources, since other goods will be "post-scarcity" and therefore they won't be as much of a focus?

I picked those two as an example because they put us in conflict. Only one of us can get what we want, the other has to go without. It's not like we can just manufacture more earths so that there's now plenty to go around. That's the dynamic I'm after: cases where we can't satisfy the drive for more by making more. Instead of being cherry-picked scenarios, they'll be all that's left. Scarcity-based economics will have done its job.

(I know that clean air and space exploration are not mutually exclusive, strictly speaking. There's probably a better example out there.)

> Do you mean that weĺl just focus more on getting those resources

I don't think we'll be focused on owning those resources. Breathable air isn't really something you can barter (unless you have it in a tank, I suppose), nor is space exploration. When the only problems left are the ones that put us in conflict in ways that cannot mediated by production, we'll be focused more on outcomes than ownership of resources.

It's not that there won't be scarcity, it's just that scarcity will not be at the center of our economics anymore. I imagine we'll trade in abstractions that act as proofs of having contributed to widely desired outcomes. Perhaps I'll shop at stores that don't accept space-coin and you'll shop at stores that don't accept earth-coin or somesuch. Which sorts of coin people decide to accept will be a form a political speech. Participating in some organization's economy as a form of consent for its actions.

I know I'm getting pretty far out there. My point is that since software is the the bottleneck for such a wide variety of economically impacting things, if we ever reach a state where all software problems are easy problems, we will then be in a vastly different world.

Worrying about what we, the experienced software creators, will do for a job in that world is a little bit like worrying about what to wear to a close encounter with aliens. Let's just get there and wing it. We'll be no less prepared than anybody else.

The alternative is to backpedal and refuse to automate ourselves out of a job, despite having shown no qualms about automating everyone else out of a job, but I think that completing the automate-everything task and forcing a new economics is the better move.

Who's paying those programmers to solve those problems you've identified the market doesn't care about?

It sounds like that would require an economic shift more than "just add chatgpt"

Well, the market cares a little, it just doesn't care a hire-a-full-time-software-engineer amount.

It'll probably be the people who are already being paid to solve those problems, but who couldn't afford to hire a software engineer for them. They'll be able to automate their jobs without having to hire that person after all.

I'm not saying that chatgpt alone will cause this. I'm saying that if software becomes so easy to make that a vastly reduced set of software engineers can do the same job, then it will get easier for everyone else too, and an economic shift will indeed be upon us.

Why do you think this is post-scarcity?

The assumption (from the comment I was replying to, and which I'm taking for granted here) is that software will be drastically easier to make. When things become easier they become cheaper. When things become cheaper we end up with more of them.

Also, things that are currently too complex to be worth bothering with currently will become viable because taming that complexity becomes easier. Together these things mean that a greater percentage of our problems will be solved by software.

So what kinds of problems does software solve anyway? Well, it's things that we already know how to do but would prefer not to spend time doing: Drudgery.

Our concept of value is coupled to scarcity. Even if two people have vastly different perspectives, they can both trade a scarce thing for progress towards their goals. We used to use gold as that scarce thing. Now, the scarce thing is intervals of time where a human is willing to tolerate drudgery.

So in a world where the scope of software is maximized, the existence of drudgery is minimized. That breaks our scarcity based economic system, so unless you have an idea for some third thing--not gold, not willingness to endure drudgery, but something else whose pursuit can be used to underpin "value", the conclusion is that we'll have to come up with something else to do. Something other than blindly chasing value without a thought about whose agenda were furthering by doing so.

It can't happen soon enough, because our scarcity based system is currently causing us to do a lot of really dumb things.