and now it's ocean's ONE MILLION

Please do next time!

@jackclarkSF The Mona Lisa line has a bigger upside than it sounds. If n-of-1 goods gain value while everything else gets cheap, abundance turns provenance into the scarce asset. Bet: by 2030 one of the fastest-growing job categories is certifying what's original, and AI makes those people better at it, not obsolete.

Post-singularity, money stops being for survival and becomes for scarcity. Anyone can have a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. Only money buys the original. And if money is just for collecting playthings, how many will be desperate enough to steal one? The heist becomes less likely.

I’ll take it a step further and say it’s my intention to have trained my model well enough that it knows my process and I want it to create works of art in the same manner as my human/ai collab makes today, after I die

Jack, perhaps the subtler post-singularity heist leaves the painting on the wall. The Mona Lisa points toward something that also exists at everyday scale: a child’s drawing, a wedding ring, a friendship. Their significance includes a particular history and relationship. That suggests a further step: some goods acquire their value through our participation. Having a machine play beautifully doesn’t give us the experience of learning to play. So imagining life after the singularity also means imagining people continuing to create histories worth having - even when superior outputs are readily available. Your writing on superpersuasion adds a more intimate question: when AI helps us discover what to love, pursue and treasure, how do we keep that discovery meaningfully our own? We explore this in "Homo Sapiens Dirigens et Significans" bit.ly/dirigens-et-significa… , drawing in part on your writing.

The singularity still can't give all of us the penthouse view.

every time a model paints a better one, the Louvre line gets longer

A perfect copy can reproduce the paint, but it can't have been in Leonardo's workshop. The history of the object is part of what people want.

honestly the singularity solves everything except the guard who still falls asleep at 3am

the year is 20xx, 99% of GDP is openai and anthropic heisting the Mona Lisa from one another

Unique originals keep their premium when copies become free.

That's pretty telling if that was the most useful takeaway there. You people just need to stop. Stop endangering everyone else in pursuit of some "utopia" that nobody asked for and seems very unlikely to manifest.

All hand made goods will be valuable. Anything of significant value today becomes priceless

The future might be strange: infinite copies become cheap, but the original becomes priceless.

how about society’s shared values?

post-singularity economy: infinite abundance, exactly one Mona Lisa, and a heist crew of fine-tuned agents. scarcity always finds a way lol

So these sociopaths *do* know the value of art. Huh.

Strikingly unuseful for the most useful thing you heard at such an esteemed venue

Unfortunately I am not a veblen good

That's obvious if you spend any time on twitter--there's no stealing this network of amazing people

How is this useful?

i've been telling anybody who will listen for months now that there will still be an economy after ai bc people will still want scarce birkins and aps

Ship of theseus seems relevant here

Heist it, yes… But for what purpose, other than personal enjoyment? Who would pay in what kind of currency for it?… What will be the exchange coin in that future?… Follow-up questions for the writing prompt 😊

especially if we tokenize it on the blockchain, just like da vinci would have wanted

Money can work the same way if its supply truly can't be stretched, which is a big part of why I hold ZEC, scarce on purpose and private when I want it.

One of the really weird things that is difficult to imagine is how people will practically trade the goods and services that remain scarce after the singularity. Will people barter? Will there still be fiat currencies, or have they collapsed in a post-labor economy? Maybe there is a return to the gold standard, or perhaps we will see the rise of a compute-backed currency?

The Mona Lisa is worth stealing because there's exactly one, and no model can run off a second copy of what the guards are protecting. Scarcity is the one thing intelligence can't print.

same reason people still pay for a signed copy over a free pdf

Scarcity will still exist in time, place and originality.

Not if the agent guarding the Mona Lisa installs a security system the physics of which no human can understand...