How to Create Dopamine out of Nothing

Humans have been trading goods with each other for around six thousand years, starting in ancient Mesopotamia. In the earliest days of civilisation, when people didn’t have money, they relied on bartering. If you had extra crops and your neighbour had more tools than they needed, you could exchange your food for their equipment. This system worked well—if you both wanted what the other had to offer.

But bartering had its challenges. What if your neighbour didn’t need more of your grain, or their apples started to rot? This made trading complicated. Enter money: a clever solution for lugging around heavy things all day in exchange for something useful. Unlike apples or goats, money doesn’t spoil, and you can carry exactly what you need to buy stuff without dragging around your entire herd of goats. Money was a consistent way to measure value, making trading simpler and more efficient. Money became the bridge that allowed people to exchange goods and services easily, no matter what they needed—or didn’t need—at the time.

Money revolutionised trade by making it easier to buy and sell goods and services without the limitations of bartering. Instead of relying on direct exchanges, money allowed people to put a fixed value on their products, speeding up transactions and making them more convenient. No longer did someone need to find the perfect match of goods to trade; they could simply use money to get what they wanted. This helped markets grow and economies flourish.

However, money had its limits. A person or business could only use the money they had saved, restricting how much they could invest in new opportunities. This meant that while money facilitated trade, it couldn't always help a country or its businesses expand as much as they wanted.

Enter the idea of credit, a powerful mechanism that allows people to borrow money for future investments. This ability to borrow and repay later, with interest, allowed individuals and companies to grow beyond their current means. Let's explore this idea by talking about sandcastles.

Imagine playing a game where you want to build the biggest sandcastle. But you don’t have enough buckets to carry all the sand you need. Your friend lends you a bucket, and suddenly, you can build a much bigger sandcastle, faster than if you only had your own bucket. In the same way, when people or businesses borrow money (credit), they can do bigger things—like opening new stores, building houses, or creating new products. This makes the whole economy 'bigger' because more economic activity is happening simultaneously, just like your sandcastle getting bigger with the extra bucket.

After your friend lends you the bucket and you build a bigger sandcastle, you need to give the bucket back, right? But maybe you agree to give them a little extra, like a shiny seashell, as a thank-you for letting you use their bucket.

In the economy, it's similar. When people borrow money (like when they take out a loan), they promise to pay it back later with a little extra, called interest. They use the borrowed money to do something that helps them earn more—like opening a shop or making something to sell. Once they’ve earned enough, they pay back the loan with interest.

After the money is paid back, the cycle can start all over again. People can borrow money again to do new things, the lender earns interest, and the whole economy keeps growing, just like how you can borrow the bucket again to build even more castles!

Social credit

Imagine you're back at the beach, but this time, instead of building a sandcastle, you're sharing a cool idea for building one—something you heard from another friend. You tell everyone, "Look, here’s the best way to build a giant sandcastle!" People love your idea and start cheering for you, giving you high-fives. You feel really good, even though it wasn’t originally your idea.

Now, let’s say the friend who came up with the sandcastle-building idea sees all the excitement and cheers you’re getting. They feel great too, because it was their idea to begin with. So, both of you are getting lots of praise and feeling happy, but the idea originally belonged to just one person.

This analogy is like social media. When you share a meme or quote that someone else made, people like it and give you social validation, which makes you feel good (the dopamine and serotonin kicking in). If the person who created the meme sees how much people love it, they feel validated too. So, both of you get a happiness boost from something that only one person originally created—almost like making good feelings appear out of nowhere! Just like borrowing (on credit) a friend’s bucket lets you build a bigger sandcastle, borrowing someone’s idea lets both of you feel good, creating a cycle of social validation.

Similarly, in the world of social media, when you share a meme or idea created by someone else, both you and the original creator receive social validation. This creates a shared boost in happiness, even though only one person came up with the idea. It's almost like generating feelings out of thin air—an artificial way of making the pie bigger for everyone.

Now, with AI entering the picture, this dynamic is expanding even further. AI generates content, predicts trends, and amplifies ideas, allowing more people to benefit from things they didn’t originally create. AI’s role in scaling productivity, creativity, and even social validation is becoming another powerful tool in making the 'pie'—whether economic, creative, or emotional—bigger than ever before.

The question is: What pie is AI going to make bigger?