Being such a broad, general term, that is just as difficult as asking what is “good” or “intelligent,” so I will explain here how I use it for purposes of the book, largely because there are various ways people interpret that word. For the most part, while most people in America do not feel rich, I believe the data says otherwise.
In sociological terms, wealth is often defined as relative wealth or absolute wealth. Absolute wealth means that you have enough to buy food or other necessities. E.g. In the US, few people, if any, die in the US today because of starvation, therefore absolute wealth is high.
Relative wealth is the idea that even though I have a decent quality of life, I am relatively poor compared to much higher income earners and asset holders, which is referred to as the Gini index. So, while someone might make 2x as much as the average American, compared to the top 10% of income earners, they are poor in “relative” terms.
A more universal definition of “wealth” as it pertains to the human mind and these writings is: Wealth is the absence of risk for pain/suffering and death, and the degree/frequency of pleasure one can experience.
Simply discussing life in terms of “dollars” and “cost” does not tell you what those dollars can buy as such ignores many cost-free benefits of increasing comfort, such as the ability to gather information and the ability to learn right from within the convenience of your own hand, in nearly unlimited amounts, at any time, via free search engines and websites. How do you put a price on that?
Libraries and digital archiving have millions of books for free. Blogs, news sites, written documents, and social media combined likely contain quadrillions (or more) of pieces of free information. Costless entertainment in movies, television, and video games may be available today at the click of a button. Video-sharing websites collectively contain billions of videos today. Social media is an endless stream of entertainment to boot.
Then there’s the increasing comforts of life. First, we grew and collected food. Then we bought it from a store. Then we bought pre-made meals in a store. At the same time, pre-made food in restaurants grew. Then finally, the delivery of food became more common. Most of this at increasing speeds, and with far more variety and variation to suit our individual tastes.. Now, to get hot food all I need to do is rub a piece of glass and it appears at my doorstep in minutes. Home robots will shorten that time and personalize it even more.
It seems logical then that if “pleasure” is a measure of wealth, then the absence of “pain” is also an equally important measure of wealth. Even if far-off lands have all the food they need, many are still concerned that they live a respectably long life, so high infant mortality in a semi-modernized country is still a sign of poverty.
Medicine has continued to increase lifespans for generations. Anyone with access to a modern healthcare facility is rich. Just look at the infant mortality rates over the last century [].
Treating pain, whether over the counter, in an ER, or at a therapist’s office, is incredible. Something as simple as ibuprofen or acetaminophen are miracles to me and also signs of significant wealth in the modern world.
If you still think that you are not rich, then note that even millionaires feel the same “Only 8% percent [of millionaires with over $1M in investable assets] characterize themselves as wealthy.” (Ameriprise survey). Sure, with a typical home in California costing over a million dollars today due to inflation, a million is not what it used to be, however, it seems logical that many of those surveyed had considerably more than a million. On the other hand, owning a 20-year-old economy car, while living in a heated home, and having the freedom to travel, is very wealthy in my opinion. The perception of what it means to be wealthy is always relative, but more so when we compare ourselves to others.
Lots of changes in wealth are subtle. For example, the average home size has tripled in the last few decades, and yet with far fewer people per household on average. Square footage is not the only thing increasing. The ability for people to live independently has increased for over 100 years. Look at this chart of the elderly who can afford to live alone, instead of a typical three-generation family, which is the norm in many lower-income countries. More on this topic later.
All technology is therefore designed to increase pleasure/ease or reduce pain/effort. This excludes short-term myopic problems from businesses for example, which try to generate more revenues from creating more fiction; because in the long run, in free markets, users will eventually go to places with less friction.
As science marches forward century after century, every generation seems to be wealthier than the previous one, except for temporary declines caused by wars, depressions, and other catastrophes.
If science is able to “end death” and also create pleasurable experiences that are exponentially pleasurable, at a continually lower cost over time, then I do not see how “income” is an effective way to measure wealth. Even food as a problem should fade, given current trends, as we develop biotech to extract energy directly from the sun and even air (e.g. moisture electrical generation) converting it to energy the body can use. Will we be rich then?
Is there a person in America today that is not richer in terms of convenience, comfort, pleasure, and access to knowledge, than perhaps everyone in the world combined just a millennium ago? Salt was once traded in its weight for gold. Ice cream was once the domain of kings. [I cant find that Google story of the king who sent fleets to gain knowledge]. What took entire nations to do learn about the natural world using billions of dollars and man-hours (inflation adjusted) might take just a click of a mouse today.
Coming technologies will make us so rich, we cannot fathom it in today’s terms, yet due to the hedonic treadmill effect, meaning we always get used to our new level of income/wealth, few may even notice these changes. Few people think they are rich simply because they have salt or leavened bread, both luxuries in eras past.
If ease and safety are primary definitions of wealth, then AI (thinking) and robots (doing), ensure we will all be infinitely wealthy soon.
The simplest way to define “rich” is probably in the following. I once asked my wife what that word meant to her. She said “it is having more than you need.” Does that include a TV, a phone, a watch, a second pair of shoes, toys and games, more free time than previous generations? Probably.
Even if most American bank accounts sit near zero for most of our lives, we are likely increasing in wealth at a remarkable rate due to technological growth, comparable to Moore’s law. Moore’s Law suggests that transistor density on a chip increases at 1.4x per year, but as Kurzweil points out, similar rates apply to numerous fields in tech such as data storage rates, DNA decoding, brain scanning resolution, __________
What Will be the Cost to Society for All this Wealth?
Are families more or less stable than they once were?
Are people more or less disconnected from their neighbors than they once were?
Is loneliness increasing or decreasing?
As for mental health, recent studies are mixed, but the general belief is that it is worsening, esp since the time when kids began using social media in the last decade.
Take, for example, the slow steady growth in people living alone over the last century. This is both due to decreased marriage rates and seniors living alone. What adult person does not want to have their own place without the annoyances and inconveniences of others? If you think the perfect world is that you get exactly what you want all the time, unencumbered by the challenges of relationships, while living in your own personal universe, then the future may appear utopian to you. If you believe that human relationships and love are the core of what it means to be human, then the opposite is more likely.
So, it can be seen then that if something as simple as living alone is the result of being rich, then perhaps being rich is the problem, not the solution. Loneliness may be one of the greatest plagues of the world today, and wealth, or material success, is what fuels it.
HumanIT 