The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

While nanotechnology will allow the alleviation of many kinds of physical scarcity, economic scarcity is also partly driven by culture—especially when it comes to luxury goods. For example, to the naked eye, artificial diamonds are already indistinguishable from natural diamonds, but they sell for about 30 to 40 percent less.[91] This component of the price has nothing to do with the ornamental beauty of the diamonds, but rather with our cultural conventions that assign more value to diamonds that formed naturally. Likewise, paintings by the old masters aren’t really any better at sprucing up a living room than high-quality reproductions, but because people value their status as originals, they may sell for roughly a million times more.[92] So the nanotech manufacturing revolution won’t eliminate all economic scarcity. Historic diamonds and Rembrandts will remain scarce. But over the scale of generations, cultural values do change. Who’s to say whether the people who are now children will choose different values when they are adults? Or their own children?