John Hawkins

So again, that wouldn't make any sense if there was no money.

It seems like it is very hard to run an economy, even a fictional one, without the use of money in some form or another.

Oh, absolutely.

So they've got a few hundred rules that govern our society and they're all about making money.

So the things like employees are the rungs on the ladder of success.

Never hesitate to step on them.

Because he has no emotions, or at least he suppresses his emotions, and really claims to be making all these decisions purely on logic, so not with any emotion, not really taking into account how other people are affected, looking after his own sort of self-interest.

So it's what economists sometimes call homo economicus, this perfectly rational, self-interested, patient person

person who makes the best decisions they can and therefore doesn't regret them.

And so it's very much unlike what other people are like, what Bones is like, what Kirk's like, which is much more similar to what you and I are like.

Because we've probably all dealt with people who are like him.

Yes.

I mean, even Adam Smith is taken as the sort of father of laissez-faire conventional mainstream economics, commented that people in the same trade never join together even on a social occasion, but they come up with some conspiracy to rip off the public.

And so that's the sort of behaviour which we see all too often.

Yeah, so some people have made a distinction between two sort of possible futures that technology could bring, one being the sort of Star Trek future where the technology seems to give people a good life, where they've got a lot of leisure time, it provides all their needs and so on, and the other more sort of like Terminator-type future where the tech leads to computers trying to kill us all off or enslave us.

Well, it sort of gets rid of scarcity in one sense, in that you're not stopped from producing something by not having enough money.

But there's still scarcity in other ways.

So you've still only got 24 hours in a day, and so any decision to spend time doing one thing means there's something else you don't do.

So people still have to face those basic sort of economic decisions, even in a world where replicators can generate all these things.

Yes.