{"id":41583,"date":"2018-01-06T05:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-01-06T10:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41583"},"modified":"2018-01-05T14:59:58","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T19:59:58","slug":"maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-meets-the-blockchain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/01\/06\/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-meets-the-blockchain\/","title":{"rendered":"Maslow’s hierarchy of needs meets the blockchain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Worstall<\/a> explains why sensible economists aren’t worried about robots taking all our jobs:<\/p>\n

CryptoKitties is also so new that it needs explanation. It works on blockchain, so it\u2019s sexy (Bitcoin!), although there\u2019s no great reason why it should. It\u2019s simply a collectible, as much as cigarette, football or baseball cards were. AN Cat exists digitally, others do too, they can breed and, as in a pretty standard Mendelian model, attributes are inherited to varying degrees.<\/p>\n

People are willing to spend real money on gaining the attributes they want. All the blockchain element is doing is keeping track of who owns what \u2013 a pretty good use for blockchain even if a payment system might not be, an ownership registry being a different thing.<\/p>\n

Apparently, 180,000 people are into collecting CryptoKitties now, having spent some $20m of real-world resources on their fun.<\/p>\n

And this is why economists aren\u2019t worried about automation leaving us with nothing to do. Partly, it\u2019s this inventiveness on display, the things that humans will find to do. Breeding digital cats? But much more than that, it\u2019s about the definition of value.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here’s where Maslow enters the discussion:<\/p>\n

there\u2019s something called Maslow\u2019s pyramid, often known as Maslow\u2019s hierarchy of needs. We humans like our sleep, water, food and sex \u2013 and in roughly that order too. Only when one need earlier in the chain is at least partially sated will we get excited about finding more of the next. In a modern society most of these are well catered to, which is why we also desire, even demand, things further up the pyramid, such as TV shows, ballet, Simon Cowell, collectibles and so on.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also true that economists insist this value is personal. It\u2019s whatever value the individual places upon the whatever, market prices being the average of those summed. Just as we cannot say that one form of production creates more value than another, we cannot say that \u00a310 of value in a collectible is lesser than \u00a310 in food. We can, as in the pyramid, say that if the food desire isn\u2019t partially sated then the collectible won\u2019t be thought about, but order of desire isn\u2019t the same as value.<\/p>\n

All of which leads to \u201cno worries she\u2019ll be right\u201d about automation. Say the robots do come in and steal all our jobs, and the algorithms do all the thinking \u2013 we\u2019re not going to be left starving and bereft with nothing to do.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll not be starving because the machines will now be doing everything. If they fail to do something as obvious as growing food, then we\u2019ll all have jobs growing food. In fact, given the machines are making everything so efficient, we\u2019ll all be stunningly rich \u2013 for all production must be consumed, that\u2019s just an accounting identity.<\/p>\n

But what are we going to do if we\u2019ve not got those jobs? One answer is that we\u2019ll start producing things further up the pyramid. More ballet, more poetry, more trifles like that. Why not? That\u2019s what we\u2019ve done every other time we\u2019ve beaten the scarcity problem with more basic items, it\u2019s the basis of civilisation. Only once we don\u2019t need 100% of the people in the fields growing food can we have some portion of everyone off doing the civilisation bit.<\/p>\n

But doesn\u2019t this mean that we\u2019re all going to end up doing terribly trivial things? Yep, it sure does. There are people out there making a very fine living from kicking a ball around, something that four centuries ago would have been considered total frivolity compared to growing food or chopping heads off enemies. The machine-driven future will have people doing what we today consider to be frivolous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Worstall explains why sensible economists aren’t worried about robots taking all our jobs: CryptoKitties is also so new that it needs explanation. It works on blockchain, so it\u2019s sexy (Bitcoin!), although there\u2019s no great reason why it should. It\u2019s simply a collectible, as much as cigarette, football or baseball cards were. AN Cat exists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,15],"tags":[1167,139,36],"class_list":["post-41583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-technology","tag-blockchain","tag-psychology","tag-robots"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aOH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41584,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41583\/revisions\/41584"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}