I have always wondered if we need to change currency for transactions if machines and automation can do everything humans used to do...for example, reputation can be form of currency..health is another form of currency..can you create transactions based on one or more forms of common / human universal values?
This is a really stupid idea, because basically it will open up loopholes of moral relativism, and you’ll see them exploited through arbitrage.
How might this prove worse than what already happens? Simply put, amoral transactions are weakened by risky barter trades.
A codified exchange means that a more exacting moral relativism is hardened, and the capacity for pettiness goes up. Sort of like how vacation days work, but now, we’re talking about prostitution in exchange for starvation, based on whether web browsing habits indicate a propensity for racism, which carries a cost to one’s reputation index.
Then we get into political re-education, to boost credit score, and so on. Defensive driver credits improve insurance prices, but what if your IQ qualifies your decision making to a degree that authorizes participation in targeted political assasination for the greater good. The smartest among us are the best people to entrust in killing those who are of potentially devastating cost to society, no?
So, what if we needed to kill people now, to prevent the next potentially horrible election? Would we entertain the thought of murder to cleanse the ballot of absurd votes?
But it makes me want to go back and question 1. Why does moral relativism exist? 2. Is it naturally selected for the population and culture?
Let us consider an ‘idea’. It can be 1. Moral 2. Immoral 3. Amoral. The evolutionary fitness of an idea places it on a scale with one end being moral and the other end being immoral. So any idea is somewhere on the spectrum.
It’s a human universal that murder is ‘wrong’ but it is ‘less wrong’ if it was in self defense. It will be bordering ‘not wrong’ if it was to save one or more innocent lives.
I think any society has its own laws and values are on a sliding scale already. We are simply creating a reputation system. Reputation systems have always existed. In fact, the erosion of reputation tracking and shunning of moral relativism by assuming that all ‘morals’ have a static value is likely worse for our modern times.
I would request you to consider the alternative. That everyone follows the same moral code..and how that would go down if we made it a global rule. Every culture is an unique ecosystem in a petri dish...society is always poking and prodding and experimenting as times change.
I would even suggest that the economic construct we call ‘money’ has altered morals and values over time and continents and cultures.
People are diverse...why can’t morality be on a sliding scale. It seems absolutely plausible to me.
The more I think about it..a reputation system is a self correcting mechanism in the eco system it is contained.
That’s as far as I have thought this out. I will have to think more about this.
There was an idea proposed by someone (the name escapes me) that currency bifurcates into two currencies: one for goods and services provided for by automation, and one for goods and services only humans can provide.
That is also something I have wondered about and I think that’s a great idea.
One could also base it off the Maslow pyramid for multiple currencies.
There are many possibilities. We don’t have to stick to this system of money/currency.
Being healthy..being a ‘good’(in as far as there is a community prescribed moral code one is following), being educated..being young/not old are also attributes. But this would shake the notion of fairness and it might smack of discrimination. I have to think about that.
For example, if your parent had accumulated good reputation, can you inherit it?
I am also aware that this kind of system is closer to what the Chinese have implemented in a bizarre ‘life imitating art’ parody of that episode of Black Mirror with their social credit experiment. So yea..
