>Regardless of any future impacts on the labour market or any hypothesised X-risks
Discovering an asteroid full of gold, with as much gold as half the earth to put a modest number, would have huge impact to the labour market. Anything conductive like copper, silver, mining jobs would all go away. Also housing would be obsolete as we would all live in golden houses. A huge impact to the housing market, yet it doesn't seem such a bad thing to me.
>We're already at a point where we're counselling elders to ignore late-night messages from people claiming to be a relative in need of an urgent wire transfer.
Anyone can prove their identity, or identities, over the wire, wire-fully or wire-lessly, anything you like. When i did go to university, i was the only one attending the cryptography class, no one else showed up for a boring class like this. I wrote a story about the Electrona Corp in my blog.
What i say to people for at least 2 years now, is that "Remember when governments were not just some cryptographic algorithms?" Yeah, that's gonna change. Cryptography is here to stay, it is not as dead as people think and it's gonna make a huge blast.
> Discovering an asteroid full of gold, with as much gold as half the earth to put a modest number, would have huge impact
All this would do is crash the gold price. Also note that all the gold at our disposal right now (worldwide) basically fits into a cube with 20m edges (its not as much as you might think).
Gold is not suitable to replace steel as building material (because it has much lower strength and hardness), nor copper/aluminium as conductor (it's a worse conductor than copper and much worse in conductivity/weigth than aluminium). The main technical application short term would be gold plated electrical contacts on every plug and little else...
Regarding gold, i like this infographic [1], but my favorite from this channel is wolf population by country. Point being, that gold is shiny and beautiful, and it will be used even when it is not appropriate solution to the problem, just because it is shiny.
I didn't know that copper is a better conductor than gold. Surprised by that.
> What i say to people for at least 2 years now, is that "Remember when governments were not just some cryptographic algorithms?" Yeah, that's gonna change. Cryptography is here to stay, it is not as dead as people think and it's gonna make a huge blast.
The thing about cryptography and government is that it's easy to imagine for a great technology to be adapted on the governmental level because of its greatness. But it is another thing to actually implement it. We live in a bubble, where almost anyone knows about cryptographic hashes and RSA, but for most of the people it is not the case.
Another thing is that political actors are tending to try to concentrate power in their own hands. No way they will delegate a decision making to any form of algorithm — being cryptographic or not.
As soon as mimicking voices, text messages, human faces becomes a serious problem, like this case in UK [1], then citizens will demand a solution to that problem. I don't personally know how prevalent problems like that are as of today, but given the current trajectory of A.I. models which become smaller, cheaper and better all the time, soon everyone on the planet will be able to mimic every voice, every face and every handwritten signature of anyone else.
As soon as this becomes a problem, then it might start bottom-up, citizens to government officials, rather than top to bottom, from president to government departments. Then governments will be forced to formalize identity solutions based on cryptography. See also this case in Germany [2].
One example like that, is bankruptcy laws in China. China didn't have any law regarding to bankruptcy till 2007. For a communist country, or rather not totally capitalist country like China, bankruptcy is not an important subject. When some people stop being profitable, they will keep working because they like to work and they contribute to the great nation of China. That doesn't make any sense of course, so their government was forced to implement some bankruptcy laws.
Discovering an asteroid full of gold, with as much gold as half the earth to put a modest number, would have huge impact to the labour market. Anything conductive like copper, silver, mining jobs would all go away. Also housing would be obsolete as we would all live in golden houses. A huge impact to the housing market, yet it doesn't seem such a bad thing to me.
>We're already at a point where we're counselling elders to ignore late-night messages from people claiming to be a relative in need of an urgent wire transfer.
Anyone can prove their identity, or identities, over the wire, wire-fully or wire-lessly, anything you like. When i did go to university, i was the only one attending the cryptography class, no one else showed up for a boring class like this. I wrote a story about the Electrona Corp in my blog.
What i say to people for at least 2 years now, is that "Remember when governments were not just some cryptographic algorithms?" Yeah, that's gonna change. Cryptography is here to stay, it is not as dead as people think and it's gonna make a huge blast.