Love it! You're asking the right question. I expect you're drastically underestimating the uses for Cycogs that you would discover and want.
As the price declines, you can burn Cycogs on monitoring all the streams of information that are potentially relevant to your life goals, get highly tailored notifications about threats and opportunities related to your goals, preferences, self and loved ones.
Custom news reporting. Customized media consumption recommendations. Custom activity recommendations, things to do in your leisure time that are fun and awesome in all the ways that matter to you. People that you SHOULD meet and who would LOVE to meet you, and that you're going to click with and really enjoy.
Scan all the books, all the articles, all the opinion pieces to find things that are persuasive and well-crafted about the things that you care about.
Not to mention, running businesses for you, taking advantage of your network and reputation and assets to find money-making opportunities for you, so that you can snowball and afford more Cycogs :)
Once we let our minds explore, the possibilities are endless.
But that raises a concern. If indeed there is infinite potential for putting Cycogs to use, why would the price keep dropping? It would seem rather the demand would continue to outpace supply and prices would steadily rise.
I love the concept of the cycog - and the whole idea here overall - but I don't think the cycog is a very well-defined unit, for the same reason that a horse develops around 15 horsepower*.
When the horsepower unit was invented we were interested in having horses do work; ploughing fields, hauling carriageloads of dainty Austenian maidens, etc., so we were interested in measuring the power a horse could develop when it's working at a level-of-effort it can sustain all day long. The horse's peak power output wasn't really relevant or interesting to anybody, so it wasn't reflected in the unit of measurement. But now we're interested in horsepower as a unit to measure the peak power output of a car, so we're using a unit based around all-day sustained effort to measure instantaneous peak effort. What "this car develops 200 horsepower" means is "at its instantaneous peak output, this car develops power at 200 times the rate at which a horse develops power when the horse is working over the course of a day." (Weird to think about, right?)
Analogously, a clever person who scores 130 on an IQ test (viz. a test upon which they're thinking as hard as they can for a brief space of time) probably isn't applying their entire 130 IQ intelligence to their everyday work, except perhaps on rare occasions. This makes the cycog imperfect in various ways (though still terribly clever and still useful for the purposes of orders-of-magnitude level arguments, of course!)
1) We're defining the cycog in terms of peak output (an hour's 130 IQ work) but using it to measure sustained long-term performance (thousands of hours' work). This leads to an ambiguity: do we have the reciprocal of the 15hp horse situation, where your 130 IQ doctor or engineer delivers 1 cycog across** a 1 hour task but delivers (say) 0.6 cycogs per hour when measured across a task that takes thousands of hours? Or is "the doctineer always delivers exactly 1 cycog per-hour" baked-in to the definition (in which case it's difficult to use the cycog unit to compare tasks that take vastly different durations)?
2) An AI that scores 130 on an IQ test probably *can* apply its entire 130 IQ intelligence consistently across its day-to-day output, leaving us with a definition that makes an AI-cycog worth more than a human-cycog.
If instead we tie the definition of a cycog directly to sustained intellectual long-term output rather than to the peak output of a person (a harder job than the horsepower unit guy had, I admit..) we could mostly avoid these problems.
*With a theoretical maximum of about 25hp (presumably for the Geoff Capes of horses..)
**"Across": obviously you connect the cycogometer to the doctor in parallel.
Love it! You're asking the right question. I expect you're drastically underestimating the uses for Cycogs that you would discover and want.
As the price declines, you can burn Cycogs on monitoring all the streams of information that are potentially relevant to your life goals, get highly tailored notifications about threats and opportunities related to your goals, preferences, self and loved ones.
Custom news reporting. Customized media consumption recommendations. Custom activity recommendations, things to do in your leisure time that are fun and awesome in all the ways that matter to you. People that you SHOULD meet and who would LOVE to meet you, and that you're going to click with and really enjoy.
Scan all the books, all the articles, all the opinion pieces to find things that are persuasive and well-crafted about the things that you care about.
Not to mention, running businesses for you, taking advantage of your network and reputation and assets to find money-making opportunities for you, so that you can snowball and afford more Cycogs :)
Once we let our minds explore, the possibilities are endless.
But that raises a concern. If indeed there is infinite potential for putting Cycogs to use, why would the price keep dropping? It would seem rather the demand would continue to outpace supply and prices would steadily rise.
I love the concept of the cycog - and the whole idea here overall - but I don't think the cycog is a very well-defined unit, for the same reason that a horse develops around 15 horsepower*.
When the horsepower unit was invented we were interested in having horses do work; ploughing fields, hauling carriageloads of dainty Austenian maidens, etc., so we were interested in measuring the power a horse could develop when it's working at a level-of-effort it can sustain all day long. The horse's peak power output wasn't really relevant or interesting to anybody, so it wasn't reflected in the unit of measurement. But now we're interested in horsepower as a unit to measure the peak power output of a car, so we're using a unit based around all-day sustained effort to measure instantaneous peak effort. What "this car develops 200 horsepower" means is "at its instantaneous peak output, this car develops power at 200 times the rate at which a horse develops power when the horse is working over the course of a day." (Weird to think about, right?)
Analogously, a clever person who scores 130 on an IQ test (viz. a test upon which they're thinking as hard as they can for a brief space of time) probably isn't applying their entire 130 IQ intelligence to their everyday work, except perhaps on rare occasions. This makes the cycog imperfect in various ways (though still terribly clever and still useful for the purposes of orders-of-magnitude level arguments, of course!)
1) We're defining the cycog in terms of peak output (an hour's 130 IQ work) but using it to measure sustained long-term performance (thousands of hours' work). This leads to an ambiguity: do we have the reciprocal of the 15hp horse situation, where your 130 IQ doctor or engineer delivers 1 cycog across** a 1 hour task but delivers (say) 0.6 cycogs per hour when measured across a task that takes thousands of hours? Or is "the doctineer always delivers exactly 1 cycog per-hour" baked-in to the definition (in which case it's difficult to use the cycog unit to compare tasks that take vastly different durations)?
2) An AI that scores 130 on an IQ test probably *can* apply its entire 130 IQ intelligence consistently across its day-to-day output, leaving us with a definition that makes an AI-cycog worth more than a human-cycog.
If instead we tie the definition of a cycog directly to sustained intellectual long-term output rather than to the peak output of a person (a harder job than the horsepower unit guy had, I admit..) we could mostly avoid these problems.
*With a theoretical maximum of about 25hp (presumably for the Geoff Capes of horses..)
**"Across": obviously you connect the cycogometer to the doctor in parallel.