Here is a plausable futuristic scenario for you to consider: If your backyard nuclear battery needs to be refueled, do you A) use your replicator to make radioactive fuel for your unit (thus making your replicator itself radioactive – and unusable for any other purpose thereafter) or B) use your replicator to replicate itself and then make replacement fuel (making your replicator unavailable during the process and permanently tying up the materials used for the replica) or C) buy some nuclear fuel from someone else (which transaction will require some analog of “money” if not the historically recognisable artifact itself)?

Hint: google “nuclear battery” for yourself to determine just how plausable this scenario is.

Money is the mechanism we use to make this and a million-and-one other ordinary judgement valuations every day. Just because we may someday (soon, I hope) be able to make all we want for ourselves doesn’t automatically mean that doing so will be our first or even thirty-first best choice. Individual circumstance both varies and fluctuates over time; money is the mechanism we use to adjust our capabilities as these variations in circumstance requires – either directly or as a valuation mechanism between potential response options.

This is not my first consideration of this problem; ask Phil .

I don’t see a functional world where people don’t need some measure for the value of their time/labor.

I do think that at a certain point coinage and paper money will vanish. This will occur (I think) when replication tech is widespread. Money at that point may take the form of software directing the replicators to build specific things.

But, as we near Kurzweil’s technological Singularity, (again, I think) even that kind of “money” will be superceded as that kind of software become ubiquitous in whatever future version of the Internet comes to pass.

Bear in mind that money serves us as a means of managing countless numbers of scarcities. As you recall from Economics 101, money is a store of value, a measure of value and a medium of exchange.

It would be too much to get into here, but I think that all of these will be rendered unnecessary by the unimaginable abundance in all aspects of life made possible by the Singularity.

But then again there may be some need for some very highly esoteric accounting system in the Singularity.

I’m guessing, not.

Exactly. And a number of the greatest SF writers have also made this same mistake. This is how 50s SF writers managed to depict future space-based societies with spaceships, space stations run by vacuum tube computers. :O

“It is misleading to assure them that we will still have an economy with Social Security, pensions, companies, even money, because with the trends I detailed above, we can project to a time when we won�t have any of these things, and make a very good argument for this possibility.”

You had me nodding along in agreement right up ’till you got to the “even money” bit. While refined metals and intricately designed paper-based currency might well vanish from future human social structures, the function that money performs in human interaction will remain for at least as far into potential human development as we can plausably foresee as of yet. If you want to make the argument that money vanishes due to technologic advancement then you will need to devise some (at least as) equally effective alternative mechanism that fulfills the numerous functions that money currently provides for human transactional processes (not least of which are remote valuation, asset inventory and projected demand assertation and cross-cultural communication/translation amongst others). I don’t doubt that alternatives are possible, but remain unconvinced that greater practicality and efficieny will result.

I look forward to reading your essay.