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rootlocus | on: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
As someone with very little knowledge of economics, I played with the idea of writing a kind of wealth simulator, where money acts as voltage and keeps the economy running. It would allow you to eliminate jobs and replace them with AI and see how the circuit starves population groups which in turn cascade to other segments of the economy.

I never got to design a good representation of the entire ecosystem to simulate (external pressure, debt, military and technological advancements, international soft power, etc.).

oalae5niMiel7qu | parent
Money as voltage is an interesting idea. I've determined that "wealth" is really just low entropy (both in terms of energy and information), and economics is really just thermodynamics underneath it all.

"Technological advancement" could just be a decrease in the amount of thermodynamic waste created by an economy (or a particular company) as it converts oil/uranium and calories into useful work.

There's another layer of thermodynamics where wealth acts like heat. Moving jobs from a rich (hot) country to a poor (cold) one is like attaching a thermal conductor. Eventually, the two countries reach equal temperature and it's no longer possible to extract useful work (profit) from the heat transfer. AI is probably like an infinitely cold heat sink that can absorb all the heat you pour into it until your heat source reaches absolute zero.