Machine Money vs. Human Money

Discussion

Tim O'Reilly:

"In a recent conversation, Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and now a partner at Y Combinator, said something really provocative: “There may need to be two kinds of money: machine money, and human money. Machine Money is what you use to buy things that are produced by machines. These things are always getting cheaper. Human Money is what you use to buy things that only humans can produce.” Paul continued: “The key thing that humans offer that machines do not is ‘authenticity’. You could buy a machine made table from Amazon for cheap, or a hand crafted table from a person for much more (and for real authenticity, we want it to come from a local artisan, not an anonymous factory worker on the other side of the world). In the long term, the price of the former (in machine money) should trend towards zero, but the latter will always cost about the same in human money (some quantity roughly proportional to the number of hours required to make it).” (https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/machine-money-and-people-money-29b497eeb9d0#.5q2ptwbyn)