Patrick Collison sparks debate: does post-scarcity AI break status games?
sebpaquet · x · 2026-11-15
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison asks: Smith and Montesquieu argued markets make us better by incentivizing self-improvement and creating value for others — but in positive AI visions where human labor is redundant, can we fare well without those incentive gradients? Even Mozart and Dickens were deeply commercially motivated, as were most great artists.
@aporia9n pushed back: this underestimates humans' desire for status and relative superiority. Post-scarcity would likely widen the split between creators and status-seekers — today both play the same game (startups, promotions, credentials), but once economic necessity disappears, genuine builders will keep building while status-seekers just find new status games.
Related event: Stripe CEO's Post-Scarcity Question Sparks Debate on Status Games(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- US voters rejected data centers 44 of 45 times; China builds a million-chip AI campus — ccerrato147 · 2026-11-15
- Gary Marcus: Doomers who can't tell an LLM from Claude Code are arguing in a muddle — GaryMarcus · 2026-11-15
- Ben Todd: 3 factors explain AI hitting 10,000-hour math tasks without superexponential growth — ben_j_todd · 2026-11-15
- MotherDuck CEO: AI agents will collapse data teams into one Data Intelligence Engineer role — teodorio · 2026-11-15
- 2026 AI course guest lineup: Schulman on reward hacking, Pachocki on recursive self-improvement — himanshustwts · 2026-11-15
- Runway CEO cites 1888 Kodak backlash as analogy for today's AI art haters — c_valenzuelab · 2026-11-15