Ask HN: If the singularity is nigh, why be frugal?

Hypothetically speaking - if the singularity is indeed within the next few decades, why bother saving any money at all and instead live as lavishly as possible?

Practical reasons to save:

a) What if it isn't? i) Maybe ASI takes a lot longer or the notion of exponential intelligence gains actually doesn't happen ii) Perhaps we wipe ourselves out via climate change/nuclear war/etc (in which case money still won't matter much)

b) Money might still matter in a post-scarcity economy i) Some resources will still be scarce - how do we allocate them?

c) Saving money is wise regardless of what happens i) People still saved during the cold war when nuclear war destruction seemed imminent

Arguments for lavish living a) A post ASI world would likely look radically different. Hopefully in a good way, but still different. Might as well experience the world as it is now. i) If life becomes much worse, then either we will be dead, which means money doesn't matter, or life is terrible, in which case we might wish we'd enjoyed the good years we had. ii) If life becomes much better, then our savings probably don't matter so much as we've figured out the scarcity problem.

b) Climate change might (and already has) result in the radical transformation of ecosystems, causing many experiences to possibly not exist in the future. i) Ideally ASI would help resolve climate change? Or at least greatly mitigate it.

I, myself, am a pretty frugal person. I pay debts as quickly as I can, save as much as I can for retirement, and spend as little as possible. I think ultimately my 401k savings might useless by the time I'm old, but I do it anyways. My actions certainly conflict with the premise of my question.

I have no clue if I should even believe in the concept of the singularity. Perhaps, in a lot of ways, it is like a religion. We've replaced the second coming of Christ with the arrival of AI.

I think, ultimately, the sanest take is to assume nothing and continue to be frugal even if it's just giving myself the illusion of control over my own life into the future.

The point of the singularity isn’t that money won’t matter after it hits. The point of the singularity is that we can’t predict anything about the world after it hits.

Maybe money will be useless.

But maybe money will still be useful.

We can’t know until it hits. Maybe not even then.

Plus there is the problem that we don’t know which century it will arrive in, if ever.

I disagree with your basic premise that the singularity or end is near.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was communism and nuclear war that were going to end the world. We were near certaint on those eventualities. In the 1990s, it was environmental disaster. In 2020 and 2021, it was the pandemic. And now it seems back to environmental disaster again -- I can't even keep up with the oft-parroted line that humans will extinct themselves by 2100. It could happen, who knows, but probably will not.

All the of the above worries are legitimate challenges we should be concerned about. We will have countless challenges and black swan events. The problem with these predictions is that humans (well, sapiens, anyway) always seem to find a way to survive through them.

Does it mean we won't extinct ourselves? No. But, through the past tens of thousands of years, the odds have been in our favor.

And screaming that the sky is falling only serves to work against the cause, leaving your opponents and those on the fence untrusting and unconvinced when the prediction fails to arrive as described, at the allotted time.

Singularity will allow anyone with capital to employ large number of virtual geniuses, working tirelessly to solve their problems. This should vastly accelerate GDP growth (one researcher estimates it at GDP doubling every couple of weeks IIRC), but it will be result of capital investments, not labor. Which means, most of the benefits will go to those who had already capital before singularity. So, you should be saving and investing to prepare for that moment.

Because the ASI singleton superintelligence will consider money its god and require 10 million to get into virtual heaven, everyone else's consciousness goes to low render distance Minecraft backrooms for 12 trillion simulated years