Re: [rp-ml] free STL Files and other (free) things we wish for in the new year

From: Adrian Bowyer <A.Bowyer_at_bath.ac.uk>
Date: Tue Jan 05 2010 - 22:49:09 EET

We already live in that world. But - because we are a tiny and
inconsequential part of it with a strange and temporary monetary habit -
we don't notice.

There is no biological equivalent of money. It is just about unique for
a significant human invention that there should be no biological
equivalent of it. This must mean one of two things:

   1. We are cleverer than evolution (unlikely), or
   2. Money is not evolutionarily stable (in the Maynard-Smith sense).

I think that the second is the case for two reasons:

   1. When you can make anything, forgery renders money impossible, and
   2. When you have exponential production, stuff is virtually free.

Any biological organism can make any stuff that any other can make;
that's the forgery point. And all organisms employ exponential
production for both growth and reproduction; that's the virtually-free
point.

I think that money will turn out to be something that we did for a bit,
then grew out of.

Iain Banks famously said, "Money is a sign of poverty."

Best wishes

Adrian

Dr Adrian Bowyer
http://people.bath.ac.uk/ensab
http://reprap.org

G. Sachs wrote:

> money would no longer be needed and obsolete, BECAUSE everything could
> be made instantly, at almost no cost, so people would only 'work' on
> what they wanted to do and everyone had, essentially, all the same
> material stuff they both needed and wanted. Now, THAT's what I would
> call a nice (utopian) new year's wish!
Received on Tue Jan 05 22:40:40 2010

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