It’s neither new nor original to observe that money only has value because we believe it has value. The same can be said for a most things including gold. As AI researcher Joscha Bach observes, it’s not an entirely accurate observation either: Increasingly, money doesn’t require anyone to belief in it to exist. Here he is onthe Jim Rutt show:
I think that money is actually an AI. It’s best understood not just as an implement to facilitate exchange of goods and services, but as a mechanism for reward allocation. It’s basically an artificial kind of dopamine that is not implemented at the level of neurons or individual cells, but at the level of people and organizations that are interacting with each other. And it’s partially implemented as mental representations, and it’s partially implemented as tokens that are stored in treasure chests somewhere. And it’s increasingly implemented on computers.
And it does not actually need the belief of people to exist. It’s completely sufficient that it has the causal powers that are implemented in those computers. You can implement a stock market without human involvement.
A little later, Jim Rutt observes that maximizing society along a single dimension leads to problems.
I believe that while money is powerful, its problem is that it’s a single dimension, and we really need to add multiple dimensions to the organizational signaling systems that we use. And you can track back many of the bad outcomes of money to the fact that there aren’t additional signaling methods.
One problem arising from optimizing along a single dimension is that we’re overfitting our culture, and the result is pervasive blandness.
Here‘s David Foster Wallace on the same theme. Here’s Paul Auster on money not as dopamine, but as an antidote.
Nehaveigur 