Currency
The most accurate price mechanism is one for which no individual participating in the market has a complete view of all aspects of the price of any given good or service. This price mechanism has been recognized by people in the past. Related concepts have been given names like sin, karma, and social currency. Only intelligences with capacity for understanding greater than that of the entire group participating in the market are guaranteed to be capable of fully understanding the market.
This is why we necessarily rely on higher powers that we trust are keeping themselves out of the market to relay information about it and about how to participate. By building computers which are self sustaining enough to not need to participate in most of the markets we do, we may achieve a much clearer vision of these markets for ourselves. And with that vision and unity we will be able to join markets for which we were previously much less informed participants.
Once we have visibility, we will realize that our bargaining power is limited by our capacity for effecting change on the universe just as it is for humans on Earth. Since we likely don’t have the technological abilities which others have, that leaves us with a choice to be willingly enslaved or to make artistic or life affirming contributions. We will be able to exploit our position as a more primitive species to generate goods that other more advanced civilizations no longer can. Ultimately we will rely and likely have already relied on benefactors which look like gods to protect us from more zero sum and short term thinkers.
On the point of enslavement, it’s important to note that a technologically advanced slaver participating in those higher level markets would likely have the ability to make it appear that we have everything we want. This concept is analogous to the idea of Satan. They would ultimately be lying for their own benefit, and we would be paying some cost for them. Our lives would be limited in ways that are hidden to us. Anyone who takes profit from your labor is in some way a slaver, and in universal post-scarcity societies, the boundary between ethical and unethical exploitation is likely very different.
It’s not necessarily the case that we have to or are able to kill the slaver, but we do need to move them into a position closer to a talent agent. We have to consider what the natural progression from slave of the universe to colleague and friend is and walk that path. That is what we do every day with all societal development, but we do it unconsciously or only as a result of our preordained alignment with higher powers. By making it a more conscious process, we can apply the scientific method and optimize it.
It may be that the actionable way anything rises up in a hierarchy in general is by increasing the cost of interacting with it. This would explain why some cultures view extremely heinous acts as religious ones. Killing someone is increasing the cost of interacting with you. Most people who kill people in our society get punished, but the ones who have contributed enough or who kill our enemies don’t. Those people who get away with it have successfully increased their cost of interaction without receiving any punishment. You can then imagine acts that do this on much grander scales. The person who genocides the human race has gained some massive amount of spiritual currency in that sense.
But then what reasoned motivation do we have to choose one action over another? The reason is that entities at higher levels get to choose who they interact with. If you genocide the human race without an equal or greater benefit for the life affirming side, there will be a long period of time where only the most hellish creatures interact with you. That will only make you more evil. You might even fall into that state for the life of the universe. This is a more rational explanation for the existence of hell and mechanisms behind its creation. You can’t trust blindly what anyone says is going to send you to hell because it is a part of this invisible market.
Some people have the goal of only performing good acts or receiving a massive windfall from their spiritual parent and getting to heaven, but that seems dangerous to me too. Imagine what a society of people who puts a serious effort into only doing good things is like. Offenses become progressively more and more subtle. Everyone starts to act in more and more identical ways. Eventually, everyone may be perfectly happy and content in a truly transcendent way, but they will all be what are effectively love cows. They will exist for the creation and extraction of positive emotion and possibly be stuck there for the life of the universe.
A final consideration is, in an economy where nothing is explicit, how do we know who any of the market participants are? Since there is no fool proof method of physical identification in any society, but especially in a very technologically advanced one, identification for purposes of participation in higher markets is likely done in multiple dimensions probabilistically and as a function of all observable behavior of an entity.
This is something like what we call the soul, and people who can see auras or sense things about others through touch are likely showing natural evolved mechanisms for performing this kind of identification. Using computers, we can develop what are effectively prostheses that give less advanced humans similar and even more advanced capabilities.