Knives. It all started with a random video on my YouTube feed that the algorithm had suggested to me for an unknown reason. In it, a cutlery enthusiast did an experiment by buying a knife from a dollar store, and then used his skills and sharpening equipment to see how sharp he could make it. By the end, it could cut tomatoes into paper-thin slices.
I’d never thought about knives before, and the video piqued my interest (hat tip to the YouTube algorithm). Why didn’t everyone just use dollar store knives? The question led me down a research rabbit hole, which made me aware of the different kinds of kitchen knives that existed (chef’s knife, santoku, cleaver…), along with the differences in manufacture methods and metallurgy that made some better and costlier than others. I learned about different brands and about the basics of telling high-quality from low-quality knives.
Being a cheapskate, I wasn’t going to buy any expensive knives for myself, but I decided it was worth looking in local secondhand stores for them. After all, if I couldn’t tell the difference between a $10 Farberware and a $100 Wusthof, why should I expect the sorters working in the back of the local thrift store to?
Lo and behold, I started finding expensive knives, priced for pennies on the dollar. I haven’t assembled a complete set yet, but after a few months of stopping in at the thrift stores whenever I was near for something else, I’ve cobbled together a respectable array of quality knives from higher-end manufacturers.
This made me wonder how many other things in the secondhand stores are not being sold for what they’re worth. The enormous racks of clothing are all a blur to me since I care even less about them than kitchen knives, but surely there are many bargains to be found if you know about clothes brands and can analyze stitching and fabric quality.
Then I realized that the bargains won’t be there forever. As I wrote earlier, they only exist now because thrift stores employ low-skilled people who lack the time and knowledge to sort through every item they receive, look up the correct market price, and attach a custom price tag to each. However, that won’t be true in 20 years, when robots and AI are cheap enough and advanced enough to do it. In fact, image recognition algorithms already might be good enough to do this now, by taking photos of objects presented to them, searching the internet for photos of matching objects, and then searching eBay and other e-commerce websites to find the market value. In fact, in 20 years, the machines might have accumulated such a large, detailed database of images that they will be able to recognize any kind of man-made object at a glance, and find its value online or estimate it with high accuracy. (There will come a day when no person or thing is unknown to an intelligent machine.)
While this will be a bummer for bargain-hunters like me someday, it will actually be a healthy development overall since it will make markets more efficient. Capitalism is good at allocating resources only if all participants have accurate information about the things being sold. In this case, machines would let the thrift stores price their merchandise more appropriately: The high-end knives I now collect would get more expensive, but the low-end knives would get cheaper (right now, they’re the same price).
But why assume that only thrift stores will have that level of technology? Won’t average people eventually own household servant robots that could also recognize objects and ascertain their values instantly? Wouldn’t that cut off the flow of expensive and useful objects like high-end knives being donated for free to thrift stores?
I think it will work like this: After buying your robot butler and letting it loose to do chores around your house, within days it will have gone into every room and opened every closet, cabinet and drawer. It would silently create an inventory of every object on your property and each object’s condition. With that kind of information, the robot would warn you if you were about to throw away something valuable, like a nice knife. It would also let you know if you had any particularly valuable things, like unmarked paintings that were probably made by famous artists.
Additionally, over time they’d observe which possessions their human masters never used (in my case, my excess kitchen knife collection), and the robots would recommend they sell or recycle them, and they’d handle every aspect of the transaction. So many of us have boxes of old clothes, cameras, or other disused items laying around our houses that we’d like to sell, but don’t because holding a yard sale or creating online ads is too much work. Robot butlers would eliminate this hurdle, and make selling off personal items as simple as saying “OK.”
Household robots and personal assistant AIs would also manage the converse process of watching out for unmet human needs that could be satisfied by purchasing goods. They would tell their human masters to buy specific things that would make their lives easier or better. For example, a man who was concerned about his diet would be encouraged to buy a blender to make fruit and vegetable smoothies, and convinced through data analysis that the money spent on the machine would reap noticeable health benefits. The large number of used, high-quality blenders for sale through secondhand channels would also lower the prices for such machines, making it even easier for the man to get one.
Though this all sounds weird and unimportant, I think it’s actually a logical outcome of the technology, and that it would improve economies and improve human welfare by lowering the prices of many goods enough for poorer people to afford them. The overall utilization efficiency of the stock of manmade goods would also increase as disused things were put in the hands of people who needed them. This would also benefit the environment since fewer new things would need to be manufactured.
Disused objects that had very low or no value could be recycled, and the materials would make their way back into the manufacturing stream. Through the actions of household robots, peoples’ houses would slowly empty of clutter, and billions of old glass bottles, metal containers, and tons of paper would be gradually sent off to be refashioned into something useful.
And to think, this whole chain of thoughts sprang from one YouTube video about a cheap knife!