Pedro 🏴

If AI proves that P = NP and we get algorithms that actually run in reasonable time. The whole structure of the economy would shift because so many of the coordination problems that currently require markets, prices and intermediate institutions would become direct computations instead. One of the clearest places this shows up is in the basic question of whether any group of parties should exchange goods or services at all. Today that decision requires searching through an enormous space of possible reallocations. For even a modest number of people and discrete items the number of ways bundles can move, coalitions can form and transfers can clear grows so fast that exhaustive search is impossible. Checking a single candidate deal is easy once the valuations are written down but finding one that is mutually improving or stable is the hard part. Currency has always been a practical workaround for that hardness: a shared measuring stick that lets people price things locally and discover deals without anyone solving the full combinatorial problem. With an efficient method for the search the parties can simply state their valuations, current holdings and constraints and receive a clearing allocation or the minimal transfers that make the exchange work. The evaluation of whether the goods or services should move is then the output of the computation rather than something that depends on everyone already holding enough of a previously agreed unit. Misreporting what you want and the usual problems of private information remain but the need for a circulating medium whose primary job is to make the existence of a multi-party reallocation discoverable in the first place largely disappears. Exchange then coordinates around the ability to solve the allocation problem directly.