Ask HN: What is a rational business model for a digital society? - discocrisco
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banmeagaindan2
Opinion

In the next hundred I believe the answer is already known and the universities
will be thought of as a negative - think of the guilds - once the heart of
craft production. Computers drive the cost of information processing to zero
so it is a bad idea to be in information processing unless you are a computer,
own the production or you doing something complimentary to information
processing that is not information processing.

I believe most people in our society are like being a farmer in 1700 -
understanding tractors and fertilizer means higher production and then
concluding this means 2000 will be intensely agricultural. What happens is the
relative importance of food declines and while it never disappears the social
status and economic importance of food production goes away.

This is true if the information revolution is successful. If the price of
information became high in a digital society it would be seen as a lucrative
trade but as socio-economic transformation it would have failed.

If this is correct there are measurable ways we would know.

Wages for trades would start an inexorable rise. The universities not
sponsored by capital owners would go bankrupt. Middle class wages would
decline - or hold steady while the absolute number of workers declines if
there is gatekeeping.

I walked by an old farm. They had the old machinery nobody remembers, strange
devices where ingenious men obviously put sweat and tears and intelligence
into. It was melancholy - though I'm sure they had their moment in the sun
they would have been quickly superseded. A lot of the pleasure we experience
in our life with food and food lifestyle came on the backs of men like these
real innovators - and though I'm anti-communist it pains me to see the war
against human toil forgotten and disrespected by 2020 culture which has
contempt for those who sacrificed for us. Much gets made out of race and class
superiority in the culture war - but my strongest belief has been that the
biggest contrast is between the dead and the living - we are moral midgets and
they were giants. The only person I can think might deserve a statue is Elon
Musk - who does not coincidentally come out of a time dilation at the
frontier.

