I agree with the general vibe of the article, but there are places where I do not agree with the conclusions. Let me go point by point.
1. On the idea that there could be a war or revolution and you die so money is pointless, I highly disagree. That picture assumes a flash-in-the-pan event an instantaneous big bang where you have zero time to react. If there is even a year or two of lead time money clearly matters. You can convert cash into safe houses or bunkers. You can move to a country that is strategically unimportant and therefore unlikely to be targeted or to a country so powerful that it is very unlikely to be attacked. You can leave your job and relocate to remote places that are far from plausible targets. In other words unless the conflict erupts and ends in a matter of days and you literally cannot act money buys a higher probability of safety. It widens your option set and speeds up your response. That is not nothing.
2. On the claim that money will have less value because small amounts will buy everything, this takes a giant leap of faith. It assumes a post AGI world in which everyone gets every luxury they want and it assumes this happens quickly. I do not see how that follows. Imagine someone who wants what we would call a luxurious life today, something like the current equivalent of 10M $. Anyone with material aspirations is still going to want a house, travel, a car, maybe a yacht, and so on. Why assume that someone earning fifty thousand dollars a year would not want those same luxuries once they are visible and seemingly within reach. If that desire is widespread, then satisfying it implies an enormous expansion of GDP. current GDP per capita (and thus per capital income) is 15,000 $. We are talking about roads, houses, ports, ships, planes, factories. Even with AGI physical construction cant happen overnight. and we assume robots take time to arrive this will be further delayed. This matters because it creates a transition period. Until the world’s productive capacity scales by something like one hundred times, people’s material desires will not be fully satisfied. During that window scarcity is a factor. It could take a decade, and during that time money allocates access to scarce real stuff. So even if you believe that, far on the other side, money fades in relevance, there is a long middle where it still does real work. In that phase saving money now to navigate the crunch later does not look like a bad strategy at all. It looks like buying flexibility.
I agree with the general vibe of the article, but there are places where I do not agree with the conclusions. Let me go point by point.
1. On the idea that there could be a war or revolution and you die so money is pointless, I highly disagree. That picture assumes a flash-in-the-pan event an instantaneous big bang where you have zero time to react. If there is even a year or two of lead time money clearly matters. You can convert cash into safe houses or bunkers. You can move to a country that is strategically unimportant and therefore unlikely to be targeted or to a country so powerful that it is very unlikely to be attacked. You can leave your job and relocate to remote places that are far from plausible targets. In other words unless the conflict erupts and ends in a matter of days and you literally cannot act money buys a higher probability of safety. It widens your option set and speeds up your response. That is not nothing.
2. On the claim that money will have less value because small amounts will buy everything, this takes a giant leap of faith. It assumes a post AGI world in which everyone gets every luxury they want and it assumes this happens quickly. I do not see how that follows. Imagine someone who wants what we would call a luxurious life today, something like the current equivalent of 10M $. Anyone with material aspirations is still going to want a house, travel, a car, maybe a yacht, and so on. Why assume that someone earning fifty thousand dollars a year would not want those same luxuries once they are visible and seemingly within reach. If that desire is widespread, then satisfying it implies an enormous expansion of GDP. current GDP per capita (and thus per capital income) is 15,000 $. We are talking about roads, houses, ports, ships, planes, factories. Even with AGI physical construction cant happen overnight. and we assume robots take time to arrive this will be further delayed.
This matters because it creates a transition period. Until the world’s productive capacity scales by something like one hundred times, people’s material desires will not be fully satisfied. During that window scarcity is a factor. It could take a decade, and during that time money allocates access to scarce real stuff. So even if you believe that, far on the other side, money fades in relevance, there is a long middle where it still does real work. In that phase saving money now to navigate the crunch later does not look like a bad strategy at all. It looks like buying flexibility.