Wherefor the sexual economy?
Each year Edge Magazine asks a question and invites the intellectual public to answer it. Eric Weinstein, the director of Thiel Capital, has a fascinating article answering the question, "What is the most interesting recent scientific news?" In Weinstein's case, a fascinating case for a man in charge of a venture capital fund, the news is that capitalism is ending.
Weinstein has two prongs to his argument: first, software is replacing even routine expertise work, like legal document discovery or medical diagnosis. Second, software has displaced a vast trucking industry in mass goods: correspondence and media of course, but now with 3D printing also physical items. Weistein argues that software is almost always a "public good:" infinitely reproducible and hence inexhaustible, and non-excludable, meaning everyone benefits from it whether they pay for it or not. The price and value of software has become disconnected, and since software is inexorably headed toward being in everything, the market will inexorably disconnect everything.
So, sex. There's a reason we talk about bars as "meat markets," and when we discuss the questions of marriage and family we use the phrase "the sexual economy." The question is, does Weinstein's observation have any impact on getting laid?
Of course it does.
We've actually already seen one beneficial disconnect; software has started to replace rape victims. One well-documented effected of Internet pornography is that, in the US, rape and sexual assaults dropped by between 15 and 25% the year after broadband Internet reached a given county.
I've always believed that when it comes to sexual availability, the Internet is starting to satisfice in a lot of ways, and those ways and means can only get "better" as the Internet starts to replace a lot of our other experiences as well.
Soylent, sexbots, and transhumanism: food, sex, and god are being replaced at an alarming rate. The only question is, what kind of market will exist to supply and enhance those experiences going forward?
Weinstein has two prongs to his argument: first, software is replacing even routine expertise work, like legal document discovery or medical diagnosis. Second, software has displaced a vast trucking industry in mass goods: correspondence and media of course, but now with 3D printing also physical items. Weistein argues that software is almost always a "public good:" infinitely reproducible and hence inexhaustible, and non-excludable, meaning everyone benefits from it whether they pay for it or not. The price and value of software has become disconnected, and since software is inexorably headed toward being in everything, the market will inexorably disconnect everything.
So, sex. There's a reason we talk about bars as "meat markets," and when we discuss the questions of marriage and family we use the phrase "the sexual economy." The question is, does Weinstein's observation have any impact on getting laid?
Of course it does.
We've actually already seen one beneficial disconnect; software has started to replace rape victims. One well-documented effected of Internet pornography is that, in the US, rape and sexual assaults dropped by between 15 and 25% the year after broadband Internet reached a given county.
I've always believed that when it comes to sexual availability, the Internet is starting to satisfice in a lot of ways, and those ways and means can only get "better" as the Internet starts to replace a lot of our other experiences as well.
Soylent, sexbots, and transhumanism: food, sex, and god are being replaced at an alarming rate. The only question is, what kind of market will exist to supply and enhance those experiences going forward?