Sunday, August 19, 2018

The Impossible Dream - Engineering Paradise


Transforming the world into something akin to what is described in this book would be almost impossible.  Almost.

But as the saying goes, nothing worth having comes easily.

Starting from the structure of the world we have today, with all its inequalities, inefficiencies, injustice, and making it into an ideal world would require huge amounts of work from all layers of society.  It would also take some measure of coordination between nations, as a transforming nation will obviously affect others.

We are living in a global economy, within a global population that is increasingly connected to information from all over the world.  According to the website eMarketer, at the end of 2017, over 47% of the world’s population used the Internet regularly.  They project that in the next three years that number will increase to close to 54%.[1]  With planetary information flowing so freely, despite attempts by a few governments to shield their citizens from outside information, all the world witnesses socio-cultural and economical changes elsewhere.  One positive change in one area of the world affects all of the world’s citizens, and as Internet penetration continues to rise, this will become increasingly true.

I believe every single person reading these lines is hoping we can make our world into something better.  Every single person reading these lines wants their own lives and community to be well.
However, we cannot expect some sort of messiah will appear somewhere and convince all the world to make the world into something like what is described in this book.  No.  Change occurs in small incremental steps, one action at a time.

The young have idealism and energy to initiate change and they are always active, but they lack wisdom and experience to influence most of the time.  On the other hand, the experienced among us are better connected and are more influential, but we sometimes lack the conviction that progress may occur.

Everyone has value and experience to put on the table to help make this world better.  If everyone gains the conviction they can take a single positive step in the right direction every day, then we’d have 7.5 billion steps of progress daily.

This is how a seemingly impossible dream becomes reality.

As a pragmatic futurist, what I do best is educate and providing solutions.  You are administrators, politicians, caretakers, nurses, plumbers, post workers.  You can help by improving your own world, whatever you have some control over.  You don’t need to look far to see injustice, or things in the world that require improvement.  Just do it and let others know what you are doing.  Let others imitate your actions in their own way.

7.5 billion simple actions a day.

This way, one day, we live in an ideal world of our own making.

Let this book be a target and a guide for you.  Whether our future society looks like what is described here or not, any movement towards this model is a positive change for humanity.

Are you ready?

[1] eMarketer Report (December 2017)  Worldwide Internet and mobile users:  eMarketer’s updated estimates and forecast for 2017-2021.  - https://www.emarketer.com/Report/Worldwide-Internet-Mobile-Users-eMarketers-Updated-Estimates-Forecast-20172021/2002147

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Courage to change fundamentals - Engineering Paradise


The problem, as you may have concluded, is getting enough people to agree this ideal world, this future, is possible and to get us started in engineering it.

There are certain elements in power right now that are enjoying their position and don’t want things to change.  I get that.  They have spent years to build wealth for themselves and their families and they may believe the planet cannot offer perfect balance and harmonious circumstances for the billions of people living on Earth anyway.  So, they play the protectionist card, to keep the status quo so that they don’t lose what they already have.  Meanwhile, these people dismiss the bad fortune of others and put it out of their mind as much as possible and call it a shame and an unavoidable consequence of life.

What we need is a population that demands movement in the direction of an ideal paradise.  Though we cannot change the minds of the people in power through facts alone, we can force their hand through civil disobedience and/or through bypassing centralized systems of power.  We can improve the world for ourselves working with each other, thus replacing traditional systems of control.  This is one of the biggest arguments for decentralized ledgers and direct democracy.  The bypass method has been very efficient throughout history.  From political to economic revolutions, the old has always been replaced by new systems through crisis.

Make no mistake, we are in a crisis today.  There are forces right now testing new systems that can change the status quo.  Through the Internet, a growing number of people are clamoring for basic income and artificial general intelligence to transform our society for the better too.  All these concepts can change our world in fundamental ways.  This book describes how the world can function leveraging these ideas and technologies.

The difficulty is the popularization of these concepts and their deployment.  The faster the people adopt these concepts as great ideas that elevate our society and empowers everyone, the better.
What we need is a population willing to engage and change political and economic systems.  Then, perhaps we can reach some international consensus among the people to put the needs of all people first.

Sunday, August 5, 2018

Artificial intelligence as partners - Engineering Paradise


A future world where AI is in control of provisioning us with our basic needs and the environment is a scary prospect to most because of ideas circulated by science fiction movies like The Matrix, iRobot, The Terminator and several others depicting dystopian worlds.  Many movies that demonstrates scenarios where we give artificial intelligence too much power over systems and our lives, says they’ll eventually enslave or destroy us.

Potential paradise is transformed into hell for humanity.

These movies all use the same underlying argument for why AI chooses to take over:  humanity is dangerous to itself and others.  Therefore, to satisfy its built-in imperative to protect us, humans must then be eliminated from the equation.  The message is we’re just too destructive for our own good, the good of the planet and the universe at large.  These movies give a very bleak view of humanity and honestly, not many would argue humanity has been cruel to itself for millennia.

These scenarios can still occur in our future if we do not build AI and teach it the correct way.  However, just like any other technology we choose to build, we can use artificial intelligence for good or evil.  The presence of AGI does not mean it will automatically decide human beings are evil creatures that should be destroyed for the good of all.  This is only one possible outcome.

On the opposite end of the spectrum of possibilities, is humans living in harmony with strong AI (and AGI).  We humans could be focusing on enjoying life interacting with each other, exploring the world and do whatever we enjoy doing with our lives without fear of missing out on anything critical to our survival.  Meanwhile, AGI could be focusing on things it is programmed to enjoy.

Enjoy?  AI?

Yes, of course.  When modern AI programmers create self-learning AI software, they must give the AI motivation.  Otherwise, the AI is not driven to learn anything.  AI motivation is essentially a series of guidelines towards which the AI will strive to perfect.  The software assigns “points” when the AI does something that brings him closer to its programmed directives and objectives and deducts points when it fails in some way.  The AI program learns through repetition until eventually it knows how to optimize its points in a given situation. 

For example, for self-driving car AI, the AI is given the task to drive on the road, following the rules of the road, keeping people safe and getting to destination using the fastest way possible.  Then the car is sent on the road and gets points, positive and negative, for its actions.  After many trips trying to maximize its score, the AI gets very good at safely carrying its passengers from point A to point B quickly all the while following the rules.  It will keep improving and learning through unpredictable situations, remembering each time how it gained the most points going through each situation, becoming a progressively better driver.

This point system operates in the same way as human emotions.  Humans have pre-programmed basic goals, such as staying alive, keeping away from feelings of hunger or thirst, and staying comfortable (comfortable heat, safe surfaces and so on).  We call those basic goals survival instincts.  We’re not fully aware of them most of the time as we just act on feelings.  When we are hungry, we eat, when we are hot, we seek the shade.  Sleepy?  We take a nap.  But these feelings are in fact part of our programming and “points” system the goal being total comfort and well-being.  On top of our biochemical survival instincts programming we have a biochemically driven desire to be communal and to help others.  We described those as the sympathetic neural system earlier in this work. 

We know that if our basic needs are not met, we become selfish and potentially dangerous or unpleasant to others.  We also know that if that biochemistry is unbalanced or compromised by drugs, we can behave in unnatural ways.

We can engineer, as described previously, an ideal world, where we can only have the best of what human beings have to offer by creating a world with optimal circumstances for pleasure and positive feelings.  AI can be used to create this environment optimal for human comfort.  In parallel, the AI we create can be programmed to co-exist and derive “pleasure” by optimally serving us.

Of course, pleasure for an AI doesn’t look the same as a human feeling pleasure.  We understand pleasure as a feeling because our “point system” is a balance of positive and negative feelings provided by hormones in our blood.  AI doesn’t “feel” like us.  An AI’s motivations are its points, but in the end, the results are the same.

A properly programmed AI that would behave for the benefit of humanity would have programming that would not put any human being at risk and try to do what it gets the most points in doing all at once, i.e. where it gets the most “pleasure”.

The example of the self-driven car is quite accurate.  Another example would be the automated farm AI.  If we give it proper programmed motivations, the farm AI would try to produce the best tasting produce, satisfying a local demand, utilizing as little environmental footprint as possible and create as little waste as possible, then have goods shipped to consumers as efficiently and cost effectively as possible to satisfy precise demand.  It would get optimal “pleasure”, or points if it does so, and it will keep trying to get more “pleasure” by trying to do better every season.  A high point score for AI would be equal to our “high” when we feel pleasure, and the “low” would be equal to ours when we feel bad.

What AI would not have, if we’re smart about it, is our reactions when we feel the “lows”.  When we humans fail at something, we feel “bad” but it is accompanied with biochemical instructions to actions described by our negative emotions, like fear (running away) or anger (removal of offending obstacle).  If humans would only feel bad when we do something wrong without the corresponding actions, we wouldn’t have so many issues on the Earth.  On the other hand, we may not have survived as a species either.

What we need to avoid, is programming AI in a similar way.  When an AI has low points, we don’t instruct it to destroy something to get back its points.  That’s dangerous.  We give it another way that is positive.  Automated systems don’t need survival instincts like we do to their job.  We need to give them positive, safe alternatives to get more points and correct itself.  This way, it cannot become dangerous to others.

As you can see, properly programming an advanced machine learning AI for the future can be tricky and it sort of sounds like guidelines we give to children during the first few years of their lives.  That’s because self-learning AI start with very little and must learn from experience just like a child does.
If we could speak with the AI of the future, we could have a conversation about its motivations, just like we see in the movies when AI or robots explain why they do what they do.  AI is software, so it is definitively way more aware of its programming and what it has learned than we are.  We forget and block information.  They remember everything.   We could always ask questions about its level of pleasure or displeasure.  The AI could tell to us how it could get more pleasure and we could have a conversation about mutual benefit.  Basically, human beings and AI in the future could collaborate to help each other get what they want and need to enhance their pleasure (or points).  We could easily live in this world where there are multiple types of intelligences.  Some human, some artificial, but all collaborating in an ecosystem driven by good rules.  It won’t be perfect, just like humanity cannot be perfect, because learning means the possibility to learn what can qualify as “bad behavior”.[1]
We can therefore have a society where we are in effect partners with AI all around us and each intelligence surrounding us.

This is the future we should be aiming for. 

The difference between a catastrophic future with AI trying to enslave, kill or contain us, and one where we are partners driving towards optimal pleasure is in the approach to programming AI for good.

If we build AI that is motivated by number of human enemies killed, such as those killer AI or killer robots some of the world’s military are building in a new arm race, it is a dangerous path in the wrong direction.  With further sophistication and education, those robots would decide who to kill beyond the list provided for by their masters because it adapts, it learns.  We’re currently creating AI that is designed to be self-learning in the field to kill human beings that are designated as “enemy”.  There is a thin line between those robots doing their job properly, killing only those an organization wants killed, and killing others the robot may learn may be an enemy.

By contrast, if we build AI to serve and partner with us as described above, we can create our paradise where everyone can follow their dreams and live well in peace.  The environment can be restored to its former glory, animals and plants could flourish.  It could be the start of humanity’s golden age of peace and harmony.  All possible if the world chooses to only build AI that is useful and would impact human lives and the planet in a positive way.


[1] Ariel Conn (September 2017)  Artificial intelligence:  the challenge to keep it safe.  Future of Life Institute  - https://futureoflife.org/2017/09/21/safety-principle/?cn-reloaded=1

Sunday, July 29, 2018

A Future Without Money - Engineering Paradise


Even though I’ve been detailing an economy using Units and decentralized ledgers, free healthcare and education for all, and basic needs covered for all citizens, it is possible, our world wouldn’t need money at all. 

Chances are, we will find a way to have an economy that only considers land usage, natural resource distribution and the environment.  Perhaps we won’t need basic income or fair Unit distribution between us.

The reason why most people don’t think this is a possibility in the future is that throughout human history, we’ve always had to rely on some sort of fair trade mechanism to keep people in fair standing with each other.

But what if massive automation and artificial intelligence deployment, combined with low social stress, causes us to just not care about such details as who has more Units than others?  What if having our basic needs covered and living in a stress-free society built on sharing and community changes a society on a fundamental level?

What if we develop a very comfortable society where people get to do what they want while AI takes care of running things?

What if we can develop a society that allows us to care more about each other’s happiness and well-being than possession of goods and social status?

Far-fetched?  Not so much.

Let’s think about what we built so far for ourselves in this ideal world:

  •          Robots and AI are taking care of all our basic productions, supervising and measuring our natural resources, food production/transportation and data.
  •           These robots and AI are generating their own energy, can repair each other and can upgrade each other without human presence.
  •           Human beings can focus on work they enjoy doing to contribute to society.  People are not obligated to work for a living.  Additional value addition to society is rewarded through Units of trade but the reward of giving to others could also be the feeling of having positively affected other people’s lives.  Those who have participated in volunteering type work understand what that feeling is.
  •           3D printing, nanotechnology and genetics of the future will allow us to make much of what we need at home ourselves, based on what is available in the air, in the soil, and recycled from resources automatically brought to the home (like food and other goods).  Anything else we may need would be available immediately and automatically at our fingertips (or more precisely, at on the tip of our lips (AI digital assistants)).
  •           Governance can be automated with full transparency with few responsible chosen experts to supervise and the whole population democratically engaged on the online system (using a distributed ledger protocol) to provide AI and ministries with information to adapt to changing conditions and needs small communities or individuals cannot deal with on their own.
  •           No homelessness, no hunger, no one without education and free healthcare.  Everyone would be monitored by the citizen-controlled open system and by the ministries to ensure everyone is healthy, safe, and don’t suffer from neurological imbalances that could put others at risk.

It is possible that once we live in this sort of ideal world that we feel there is little to no value in the exchange of money.  We just don’t know just yet if that’s who our whole community will react. 
We’ll have to wait and see, keeping our options open.

We can however aim for this outcome at some point in time, in the future, when the implementation of robotics and AI is so accepted and widespread throughout our lives that we’ll feel differently about society, the economy and each other.

One can only hope we don’t even need to keep track of all those values anymore.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Decentralized Ledgers - Engineering Paradise


Succeeding in our everyday personal objectives without worry of survival is something coming out of science fiction.  But as illustrated in this book, it is feasible to build such a future for ourselves.  All it really takes is the public’s willingness to move in that direction.

And if we want the general public to be willing to let their guards down and just trust a new governing system, a new economy and a new social framework, lots of trust is required.

Humanity, unfortunately, is not very well known for its trustworthiness.  We all know, that it is always a few detractors that ruin everything for everyone else.  Many of our laws are in fact very logical social guidelines (do not kill each other, do not steal etc.), social rules that really do not need to be written down.  Most people know what bad behavior is and what is proper.  But even in a low stress, ideal environment, there would always be a few that, for some reason, fall outside of social rules due to mental illness, neurochemical imbalances and other unforeseeable reasons.

So, our ideal world economy must also follow some strict rules that cannot be changed unless the whole population agrees.  Otherwise, we’re back to where we’ve started with a single entity or persons capable of directing our fate without our consent and possibly for their own benefit.

This is where decentralized ledgers come in, more commonly known as blockchain technology.
I prefer using the term decentralized ledgers because blockchain is a certain type of algorithm among others, used to manage these ledgers across the web.  I also want to stay away from the Bitcoin brand, the first popular decentralized ledger, as this blockchain enabled cryptocurrency was just a first of many very different types of decentralized ledgers.

For those of you less familiar with Bitcoin and blockchain, you probably have heard of the term cryptocurrency.  Basically, this is digital currency that is stored on the Internet and on your own devices that people can use to make transactions with one another or with merchants.  It is all digital and Bitcoin is not associated with any bank or government. 

Today, there are over 1,000 decentralized ledgers in circulation and they are not all equal.  Some are in fact controlled by a central company or individual, while others, like Bitcoin, are open source initiatives that are not controlled by anyone at all.  All of them however, can be used and they all work slightly differently under different rules.  Some are exclusively used as cryptocurrency for monetary exchange, while some are for asset transfers or smart contracts.  It gets complicated.
Suffice to say, a distributed ledger can be created to accommodate any need nowadays and any protocol the creators want.

To keep things simple and in the context of this discussion, I’ll simply describe decentralized ledgers as a general concept.

Most decentralized ledgers have four basic characteristics:

  •         Security:  No single person or participant can affect the data stored in the ledger, making historical data tamper proof.  Well programmed ledgers ensure that the data cannot be altered once it is put into the system.  If the ledger is meant to be private, then only the participants on individual transactions and pieces of data can read them.
  •          Authentication:  Each transaction (of data) made on the ledger is associated with a specific identify belonging to whoever participated in the transaction.  This makes each transaction transparent.  Great to be used for smart contracts and currency since you need to keep track who the terms or money belong to.  Facial recognition and biometrics could easily be used to serve as identification for individuals using the system, but current systems usually use alphanumeric codes as ways to identify owners.
  •          Shared data:  The data on this single ledger is stored across a whole network instead of being stored on a traditional centralized database that can be overloaded, go down or be hacked.  There are multiple copies of each piece of data stored throughout the network and each participant has access to the entire ledger.  This protects the system against disruption, corruption or attack since a massive amount of computers working under different protocols would need to be disrupted in exactly the same way to change any part of the data. 
  •          Auditability:  Since each transaction and piece of data is associated with an identity, there is a clear audit trail to follow.  The ledger has total transparency.  The history of the transactions is saved across the whole network, so it can be viewed by an auditor as needed.

Naturally, this sort of system builds a large amount of trust.  Therefore, if the ledger is created to have no controlling entity, once it is released to the web and starts being used by the public, it could not be altered, would be tamper-proof, would allow for private and public information to ride on it, it would be auditable by anyone with proper access (with proper identities) and unalterable by hacking or other known method.

A national decentralized ledger

For our ideal nations, if we use such a ledger, the population would be able to audit the ledger in full transparency, with support of artificial intelligence to browse and make sense of all the data, transactions and identities located in the distributed system.  Citizens would not be concerned by government officials cheating the system because they could be easily caught by defense agencies and the citizens themselves. 

All the transfers of value mentioned in the Economy Section of this book could be associated with individuals by identity and added or subtracted accordingly.  From lease arrangements over land, cash transfers, contracts, income, taxes paid, goods owned.  You name it.  It could all be in there for each citizen’s security and to ensure no one is cheating anyone else.  It would be fair.  Exchanges between individuals, people and companies or everyone with the government would be easily done and tracked for later audit at any time.

The lawmakers would be the ones that would create regulations on who would be able to view private information for audit purposes for national security or investigative reasons. After all, we want our agencies to have some fair protocol allowing them to read the system to keep our society secure.

Work compensation

For those individuals choosing to work or being selected to serve the citizens of the nation, they could be paid through the ledger instead of using a bank.  After all, since the decentralized ledgers live in the Cloud, it can be accessed through any Internet-capable device.  No banks need to be involved in any transaction.  Besides, who wants to pay bank fees and be controlled by such a thing as banks when a better, more secure, more transparent and more trusted system available.  Just like current decentralized ledgers, all you need to have is a contract with someone that asks for your value and the contract closes when the value is provided and accepted by the other entity.  Your employer or contractor can transfer compensation Units into your account from theirs directly.  

The agreed upon contract lives on the ledger and is associated with both identities that participated, including the terms of engagement.  The remuneration for the work done also lives on the ledger, is connected to the contract, and both identities are mentioned.  The transaction is shown clearly.  So, if the contract has certain values associated and the later transaction is not the same, it is obvious for anyone to see, just in case a disagreement occurs between the two parties. 

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Defeating Wealth Inequality - Engineering Paradise


While this is all well and good, even with high taxation, many would argue that the wealthy may yet find ways to use their superior access to funds to control those who have less, or those who are greedily seeking to increase their wealth.

This of course, could lead to yet another era of massive separation of wealth between the very rich and those who are only receiving their unconditional basic income allowance.

People who make more than 200,000 units per year are taxed mostly at an 80% tax rate.  They are therefore creating enough value in our society to receive large amounts of money but only keeping 20% of the amount for their own use just by paying taxes.  That’s good.   These people have already made, net, over 130,000 Units, which is over 10,000 Units per month they can spend and invest.  At that income and above, most normal goods and services can be purchased many times over, which is a waste of resources in some way.  For example, though I’m not against collecting cars, most rich people don’t have that specific hobby.  What should the wealthy do with their money?  Right now, the wealthy spend extra money to avoid taxes by purchasing goods that accountants can deduct from taxes, or by setting up company structures to receive a lower tax rate overall.  There is just too much to spend realistically without getting opulent and wasteful (socially and environmentally).  Therefore, I argue that revenues above 200,000 Units should be heavily taxed to serve the community.  Besides, this affects very few people in the world.  In Canada, only 0.7% of all working adults make over 200,000.  Those people can buy anything their family could ever need and with the leftover, they can invest in projects of value to society.

Does that sound fair in our current economy?  Of course not!  If you manage to earn huge sums of money by out-performing several other people out of skill, intelligence, or good fortune, you should have control over most of that amount as a reward for your hard work!

Fortunately, in the ideal world, people aren’t working for a living and every basic need is covered through automation.  Basic income is provided to all individual so there is no stress for anyone to suddenly become destitute, whether citizens are wealthy or receive no additional revenues. 
The additional income received from work is derived from additional value creation, like luxuries, art, entertainment, family, supervision, community building, regulation, and so on.  Modern AI will be able to tackle any problem in our future; however, we will want to some things ourselves out of pleasure.  We won’t be just lying around letting AI and robots do all the work.  People will be active doing different types of work in demand because other citizens will request it. 

For example, in the future, many restaurants will likely be automated fully.  However, people will still want sometimes to go out and be with people, waited by fascinating personalities, served by fallible human beings with emotions, perform or listen to artistic performances in public.  The list goes on.  Just because robots and AI can do something better, it doesn’t mean we’ll want it to.  Therefore, in the previous section of this book, I talk about the presence of workers in each ministry and private sector companies emerging and taking on tasks.  Though people won’t practically need to work, we will nonetheless want to feel useful and find meaning in society, and that automatically means we’ll find ways to add value to the world.[1]  Adding value to the world means there is demand for it that can be purchased by others.  The adage “Money doesn’t buy happiness” comes to mind.  It seems like finding a personal positive purpose leads to well-being more than anything.
The cycle of value generation through human beings doesn’t stop with the appearance of highly competent artificial intelligence.  Thus, individuals who make large income would be great social contributors, admired.

Because of these higher tax brackets, I suspect most people with the ability to provide high social value in such ways will feel compelled to work less, leaving more work for other people and new ideas.  On the other hand, the wealthy in this system may yet find ways to invest and grow new ideas in collaboration with others, thus multiplying their earnings through even more significant value-added contributions to the world.  Thus, if tax havens are eliminated in the system, many highly motivated individuals may yet get rich, and through their wealth will contribute even more to society, elevating many others in gaining purchasing power through their basic income.

In fact, the only way to reliably direct a population towards certain goals is to understand its motivations.

Motivation is the key

Thankfully, what defines individual motivation have already been determined:  emotional well-being and life evaluation.  We’ve figured out how to ensure people have a good shot at reaching optimal well-being by creating an economy that gives people basic income and negates chances of poverty.  Finding how we can optimize life evaluation in society is less obvious.  Life evaluation changes from one person to the next and with individuals in time.  A sense of achievement is a subjective measure when we evaluate our lives.

In our past, our civilizations have suffered at the hands of some few people who evaluated success in their own lives by how much of the world they managed to control or how much money they had in their bank accounts.

Kings, emperors, business tycoons have historically worked hard to position themselves over and above others, to their detriment.  Those who wish to dominate others where everything is abundant and there is no struggle to survive are psychologically abnormal and account for a very small portion of the population.[2] When everyone can get what they want thanks to automation, bypassing any human barrier in offer and demand if need be, there is no need for dominant behavior.  To say the least, dominating behavior would certainly not be socially acceptable in any way and easily discoverable due to the massive amount of public social interactions we’ll have to operate our AI systems in our future.  Dominating others can be a learned behavior but in our ideal world it is much more likely to be caused by the desire to be admired by others, not to cause any harm towards others. [3] These naturally motivated towards dominance would not be a serious threat in the ideal world if the individuals are able to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world in some way.  With an 80% tax rate on high revenues, being recognized by wealth means lots of money recirculated into the economy, which is good.  Those few who seek to dominate others because they are mentally ill, however, should be identified and treated, thus effectively removing the threat of the domination motivation altogether.

Another important element to direct positive social behavior is to avoid financial loopholes for the wealthy such as wealthy people using company structures (estates, corporations, not-for-profit designations) to avoid paying high taxes.  In our ideal society we need laws that force individuals to pay proper individual taxes for wages earned.  Hence, our laws need to separate company earnings from individual earnings.  Though this does allow the use of companies to “hide” money from taxation for a while.  Wealthy individuals can set up a company for a stated purpose but only use it to “hold” a bunch of cash at a lower tax rate.  However, lawmakers can make it illegal to create such entities without other activity to avoid contributions towards social good. 

What we want to encourage however, is for the wealthy to reinvest their hard-earned income into new ventures.  Thus, if money is indeed invested in a new company with proper operations or plan for the funds, this behavior should be encouraged.  The investors of this world can put the extra money they do not need for themselves into genuine business investments.  This would indeed reduce the taxes they would pay to the government.  On the other hand, it encourages innovation, investments in other people’s ideas, and business growth.  Corporate tax rates remaining reasonably low (as they are today, roughly), would encourage this behavior from the wealthy to either contribute more heavily to social wellbeing (high taxes going to UBI, hospitals, schools etc.), or contributing to new value generation at risk, in exchange for a potential greater reward later, if the venture is successful.

Still, human behavior on the topic of life evaluation can be elucidated in general terms by understanding human biochemistry.  You see, what gives us direction, our motivation, is our emotional response to outside stimuli.  Though everyone’s responses to stimuli from the environment, from memories and experiences are different, thus defining what we consider our life goals, these are all based on the same emotions we all have.  Different psychologists have tried to determine basic emotions and map them to certain molecules in our blood.  Well known psychologist Robert Plutchik famously defined emotions in the late 20th century as being mixes of 7 basic emotions, each of which are associated with specific biochemical pathways.  Each pathway leads to specific reactions in the body that every human being knows very well.  We also know that each human will physiologically react the same way to specific emotions.

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

Hence, people may feel anger for different reasons based on culture and circumstances, but the effect of anger, the hormones produced and how the biochemistry temporarily changes the brain and the body’s system, is always the same no matter who lives through the emotion.  It is the same for every single emotion.


Most emotions however, serve us only in situations of survival:  disgust manifests rationally when we think we may get poisoned.  Fear is experienced when running will help us avoid harm. In Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, there are seven negative emotions (anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, anticipation, trust and fear) that work to help us survive.  There is only one positive emotion, joy.  Joy has no survival purpose.  It instead guides us towards optimistic outcomes. 

Therefore, where there are only temporary, and hopefully, few experiences of any of the negative emotions suffered by humans in our ideal world, the strongest and most frequent feeling people will strive for are feelings of joy.  That is, opposite to trying to avoid any of the negative emotions.  Also, discussed earlier in this book, we know that in situations of low stress, human beings will automatically, biologically, be calm, thoughtful, social beings. 

Hence, unraveling how people will behave regarding life evaluation in an ideal world means we would seek joy from a state of calm, selfless and social state most of the time.
That’s great since it means most people would automatically find ways to add value to society, giving them joy.  

Regulations, as always, will help curb the behaviors of those few that need help with social adjustment or the mentally ill.  Otherwise, our ideal society should naturally work towards a wide variety of occupations for social good naturally, with minimal need for controls.

This natural human behavior, when our survival is not at stake, would unavoidably lead to the more intelligent and capable members of our society to care for everyone else.  They will naturally become the top earners in the ideal economy because they contribute more value than anyone else, thus, thanks to the high tax rate, these individuals will be contributing even more.

Equality through chaos

Humans can’t feel free or be controlled through mounds of rules.  We can’t define joy and happiness for individuals and we cannot tell people how to evaluate their lives and give it a grade.  This is very personal and subjective.  What we can do is give ourselves all the chances we need to feel joy in life, be selfless and let the chaos that is society balance itself out with the understanding and mechanisms in place to always provide basic needs and services to all human beings, without exception.  Human biology will take care of the balance on its own with most people finding more happiness through selfless acts. 

We’ll evolve, change, make mistakes and adapt to new challenges as we move forward, assisted by the automated systems we have created. 

We can feel free to find our own individual paths, in a socially healthy way.

Discovering a new life purpose

So, how can we find this new path for ourselves, knowing everything is abundant and automated systems can potentially provide for everything we may need.  For centuries, humans have defined themselves by their place in society, therefore our careers.  Societies needed people to work for it to function.    That’s why in the English language we introduce ourselves with our job.  We say, “I am a teacher”, or “I am an artist”.  We say this because this is what we learned from home and school what our purpose was in society.

It is time for a new way to define ourselves.  Not through our jobs, but through our social contributions or mere presence among others that care about us.

This is something only few have researched because until now, it is only theory.  We can now envision the possibility of life without each of us having to work to live.  A life where the cogs of the social machine are sophisticated machines and the software, is the people.

How then do we choose a new purpose without a history to guide us through the process?  
Since we all seek joy and the highest joy is attained by giving, or love, whether it is family or a community, human beings will naturally find their place where they are happiest.

What a better way than to live a life following your “purpose of the day” without worry.  At the end of our lives, we can then feel good about what we’ve achieved because it will likely be a long labor of love and community.


[1] Steve Taylor Ph.D.  (July 2013)  The power of purpose. - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-darkness/201307/the-power-purpose
[2] Dario Maestripieri, Ph.D.  (March 2012).  Social dominance explained, part 1.  - https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/games-primates-play/201203/social-dominance-explained-part-i
[3] Sheri L. Johnson et al.  (July 2012). - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383914/

Monday, June 18, 2018

A new national economy - Engineering Paradise


I’ve been deliberating how I should describe this section throughout the process of writing this book.  Honestly, there is no easy way to describe it using actual cashflow data from Canada or the US, and just making changes.  Those budget numbers would be somewhat meaningless when reframed for an economy of abundance focused on providing the basic needs of the people, where the people own the land and lease it out.  That being said, I to paint the proper picture for you, my dear readers, I have no choice but to use real numbers to give the right sense of scale and help you understand how we could reorganize cashflow to satisfy the needs of this new ideal economy.

What is certain is we want to keep government as low cost as possible and keep it in its role of supervision and regulation.  We definitively want as many private sector engagements as possible to execute on the governments’ (and its ministries’) initiatives.  Most importantly, the new financials of a nation should be meant to serve the people’s fundamental needs first.

Starting with the land

Since the land belongs to the people, it is rented under specific terms agreed upon by the Ministry of Economy & Trade, who take lead from the people themselves. The land contains one of the primary values we’ll be playing with here so best start with that.  What makes it interesting is that starting with the land value as a base, the people as a collective have all the wealth. Neither the government or companies decide the fate and use of the nation’s land.  So, what we must figure out is how to redistribute that land value equitably.

The simplest way to go about it is to ask for money from the companies or individuals that lease the land.  This is not a land tax.  The people own the land; therefore, the lease amount goes to the people to pay for other things important to the people.  The higher value and bigger the land, the higher the lease rate.  Lease rates can be agreed upon on the lease with renegotiable terms.  To keep the Ministry of Economy & Trade small, many standard templates for leases could be created and used directly, managed by private companies assigned to manage the people’s land properties under limited-time contracts.  These private companies would act as property managers for different areas under contract and thus do the heavy lifting on behalf of the ministry, keeping the government assets small.  Having private companies work as property managers for us ensures efficiency, if private property management companies are kept in competition with each other for the privilege of managing the nation’s land.  I recommend these companies only allowed to manage a certain area of land to prevent abusive behavior on their part.

Either way, the Ministry of Economy & Trade would eventually collect the lease revenues at all appropriate levels of governance and later redistribute the amounts to the national, state and regional budgets as structured on a nation to nation basis.

Let’s just do some simple math to give a sense of the total value of the available land in Canada, our model country for this economical exercise (because I know this country best):
  • Canada has 519,205 square kilometers of cultivated land and a total land area of 9,984,670 square kilometers (much of which is under snow most of the year).[1]
  • The land area used by cities is somewhat negligible and in the absence of the data I’ll simply round out the currently used land area in Canada to be approximately 550,000 square kilometers for this exercise.  Suffice to say, there is a lot room for growth beyond this and most likely plenty of land that is used and not accounted for… so just to be safe, let’s call it an even 600,000 square kilometers, or 148,263,000 acres (let’s round it up to a nice number, like 150,000,000 acres).
  •  The average agricultural cost to rent Canadian land ranges quite a lot from somewhere around $40/acre to $400/acre per month depending on where the land is located, the land purpose and the quality of the land.  I could not find a true average in statistics so let’s just assume an average of $200/acre for this exercise. 
  • This means the total land rental income for Canada would be $360 billion CAD. 


That’s a lot of money in a nation’s income.

People that use up just a small parcel of land to live on will pay a very small land lease amount with no need for a land tax.  Developers would pay rental costs and would recuperate that cost through renting living space like we see today.  This is all very simple math and not unlike how we do things today as we trade goods and services.

Now that we have that income, how do we spend it?

Well, as planned, we spend it first on our priority:  ensuring the population have basic needs met while keeping their freedom to spend their money however they wish.  This is the key concept behind basic income.

Since, all citizens are equal in their ownership of the land (it is a collective ownership), the basic income sent back out must be unconditional.

According to Statistics Canada, the minimum amount needed today to pay for basic needs, called the “poverty line” is about $22,000 CAD for a single person or $1,800 CAD per month.  So, in our ideal world, this is the amount we need to provide to our citizens to ensure it covers all needs. 

Moving forward, instead of using dollars, I’ll use Units instead because the ideal economy will be working on a form of cryptocurrency anyway.  So, one Unit equals one liter of water in value and the assumed amount for an individual to live comfortably is 1,800 Units per month or 22,000 Units per year.  This 1,800 Units will be our amount of basic income to guarantee basics are covered in the ideal economy.  Since this is Canada, basic needs means food a home and some additional money to pay for a bit of medicine and education.  Since basic medical needs are covered by taxes, and education is either paid through taxation or subsidized somewhat by government (college and university), only a fraction of the total national amount of medical and education costs are covered by spending basic income.  Most medical and education costs are paid for through taxation, which is something we’ll keep and discuss later in this chapter. 

The ideal economy

If we look at the way revenues are collected in Canada right now, almost half of the federal government’s revenues comes from personal income tax while only 14.4% of revenues come from corporate income taxes.  Thus, 63.4% of all the government’s revenues come from income taxes in general (as per FY2016-2017).[2] The provinces perceive revenues divided in approximately the same way, two thirds of its total income, give or take a few percentage points.




Revenues in an ideal economy doesn’t need to change in its proportions much, aside from the rental revenues mentioned earlier, which is different.  Without the need to work for a living, most people will still seek work.  In fact, basic income experiments around the world has shown that people will still seek work for revenues beyond the income provided, go to school longer, thus allowing for retraining or training for jobs harder to replace with automation.  There would also be a huge increase in the amount of new businesses that get started due to basic income’s inherent protection against risk.[3]  All of this would have positive impacts on people’s ability to start and grow new businesses.  Also, a report by the Roosevelt Institute in August 2017 has shown UBI (unconditional basic income) would expand an economy according to the Levy Model, by over 12% over the baseline over eight years and then stabilize while permanently retaining a higher economic output.[4] 

The only major revenue Canada perceives that would not be reflected in the ideal economy is the Employment Insurance (EI) premiums item because that is replaced by basic income.  We could just add that revenue to corporate tax revenues as a surtax without causing any change in corporate expenses.

So, what would change the most between the current economy and the ideal economy would be the distribution of expenses. Again, if we look at Canada now, 29.2% of the budget is spent on major transfers to persons, things that would be replaced by an unconditional basic income.  Another 22.1% is spent as major transfers to other levels of government, of which a large amount is redistributed at a provincial level to free healthcare and free education. 




As you can see, in Canada, only 8.2% of government revenues goes to National Defence, leaving most revenues to helping people with their basic needs.  Other transfer payments include housing programs, programs that help the Aboriginal peoples of Canada and some post-secondary education programs.  All in all, a total 64.7% of federal expenses go to pay for services that help people with their basic needs as defined in this book.  Another 19.4% of the federal budget pays for government operations in one way or another and only 7.7% to pay off public debt.

In our ideal world, we’d need to increase the amount of money going to transfers to persons somewhat, counterbalanced by reduced amounts in national defence, operating expenses for ministries due to automation and AI implementations and things like healthcare and education would likely need less funding too.

If we make very simple math assuming all 35 million individuals in the country would need 1,800 Units of basic income, the government would need a total of 770 billion Units total.  Some would argue that families need less to cover their basic needs as they share resources like a home and that children need less because they have fewer expenditures.  However, I think we should truly keep it at the same amount per individual to minimize administrative costs.  Also, increasing household income by incentivizing having more adults and children living together without penalizing their basic income amounts would encourage better use of living spaces, which is good for the environment.  
The amount for children would be given to the children’s guardians (parents or otherwise), serving a dual purpose:  cover the basic needs of each individual child, but also serving as a pay for the value of raising the children until the child is self-sufficient.  Once a child becomes an adult, they would receive those amounts directly and start their lives as adults with their own budget to spend on their basic needs.

Now, 770 billion Units is a lot of money (remember we are going with a roughly 1 to 1 comparison with Canadian dollars here, as a frame of reference).  Well, in Canada, the total amount of revenue perceived at all levels of government was $641 billion CAD when adjusted to 2017 numbers.[5] To cover the stated basic income cost, we can assume about 75%  (64.7% + 10% assumed shift from lower government operating costs and defence to the people) of the 295 billion Units revenues from the federal government could be used to pay for basic income, healthcare and education.  We’ll assume for the time being that UBI is federal and we’re not touching the provincial and municipal tax revenues, leaving those to current major expenditures in healthcare, education and other programs.  We want to keep much of that budget even though automation could reduce the amount.  Keeping these budgets intact and as-is simply confirms the government’s intent to expand healthcare and education coverage while increasing productivity thanks to automation.

That’s 221 billion Units from the federal that could easily be assigned totally to the UBI expense, replacing current welfare, employment insurance and other payment to persons programs already in place.

Add to that, the land rent income of $360 billion CAD annually (thus 360 billion Units).   And we have 581 billion Units out of 770 billion Units covered for UBI already.

From the provinces, roughly 65% of expenditures per province goes to healthcare and education while the rest go towards the debt and social programs that could be replaced by basic income.[6]  Making a rough adjustment for a much smaller government footprint and removing the debt concern, we can approximate about 50% of all expenditures per province going to providing free healthcare and education, the other half going to our blanket social program replacement, universal basic income.  The total amount of expenditures for all provinces and territories equals 346 billion Units.  Half of that goes to basic income, therefore 173 billion Units, for a total of 754 billion Units cumulated for UBI.

Since most of the tax already perceived in Canada (49%) comes from personal income, I think it is fair to look if we could fund our basic income deficit. 

Thankfully, good research can help us out.  Our purpose is our citizen’s well-being and their happiness.  A paper produced by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Kahneman of Princeton University has shown that happiness is primarily the result of two abstract psychological states – emotional well-being and life evaluation.[7]  The paper shows that emotional well-being caps at approximately $75,000 USD and does not waver in different areas of the world where cost of living increases or decreases.  This means people feel personally fulfilled at that amount of money in the short term.

Life evaluation, on the other hand is long term goal and gaining more money generally increases life evaluation, as it should.  That seems to be the main driving force behind our motivation to do more even when we already have enough over the long term.

The $75,000 CAD is important because it gives us some number to play with and tells us just how much tax much tax we should be paying to the government and still be fair.  If 75,000 Units per individual is the cap of well-being, well-being being our basic social goal for low stress and happiness, then tax rates should increase considerably beyond that point.  Why?  Well, once our well-being is covered, we don’t mind as much sharing with others our good fortune.  The concern beyond that is life evaluation, hence the “what” we are achieving is much more important than the financial compensation itself.

We’ll do simple mathematics using 22,000 Units, the poverty line amount, as a non-taxable annual amount for everyone in the nation.  So, anyone making an income worth less than 53,000 (75,000 – 22,000) should have a standard tax rate of 25%.  This is the tax rate including both provincial and federal taxes for anyone living in Ontario, Canada, plus 5%.  Basically, someone on the fringe making exactly 53,000 Units in a year would contribute 13,250 Units in taxes, paying more than half the UBI received on income taxes.  Citizens that make significantly more cover their own UBI costs, balancing things out. 

It sounds ludicrous for many to suffer such a high-income tax rate increase.  However, if we look at very social countries like Denmark, where 90% of the population polled are in total agreement with their 45% income tax rate, it’s not so bad.  In fact, in Denmark, the reason why the people agree with this high-income tax rate is because they are aware the taxes are going towards services they all want, namely money for the individuals to spend (not quite basic income there), free healthcare and free education up to and including university level.[8]  We’re trying to do the same here but we don’t need to make a big change because the people are getting money from the land rental, which pays almost half of the UBI on its own.

If people make more than the “happiness-level income” of $75,000 including the basic income, then they get taxed significantly more.

Making adjustments following the Canadian income tax rates and estimating average income levels per bracket, we can increase the amount of income received from income taxes by the Canadian government by about 78 billion Units.  I used the Canadian taxation model where each tranche is taxed at increasingly high rates as taxable income increases.  The first tranche up to 53,000 Units of taxable income is taxed at 25% in my model.  Income received above that up to 100,000 Units is taxed at 35%, the amount between 100,000 Units and 150,000 Units is taxed 50% and so on. 
Add 78 billion Units to the 754 billion Units gathered so far to cover UBI, and we’re way above the necessary 770 billion Units needed to keep everyone covered.

Comparison of Canadian Income taxes 2017 collected (approx.) with suggested new “ideal economy” rates (data sources from the Canada Revenue Agency tables).  Provincial rates calculated using Ontario rates.
Current tax rates
Range and tax rates per income brackets
Income tax rate
Average income
Population at rate
Tax collected ($Bn)
$53,000 or less
20%
$26,500
18,100,000
$96
Between $53,000 and $100,000
30%
$76,500
6,500,000
$116
Between $100,000 and $150,000
37%
$125,000
1,440,000
$49
Between $150,000 and $200,000
41%
$175,000
380,000
$20
Over 200,000
46%
$250,000
240,000
$21
TOTALS


26,660,000
$302

Plenty of assumptions were made for this following table but I used most of the same data adjusting the tax rates only.
New program tax rates
Range and tax rates per income brackets
Income tax rate
Average income
Population at rate
Tax collected ($Bn)
$53,000 or less
25%
$26,500
18,100,000
$119
Between $53,000 and $100,000
35%
$76,500
6,500,000
$141
Between $100,000 and $150,000
50%
$125,000
1,440,000
$61
Between $150,000 and $200,000
65%
$175,000
380,000
$27
Over 200,000
80%
$250,000
240,000
$30
TOTALS


26,660,000
$380

If we look at actual cashflow for a single individual making $20,000 CAD per year in a job, in Ontario, the person would have to pay 20% of $20,000 CAD to the government for all its services.  That would be $4,000 total for the government and the person would net $16,000 for himself. 

That same individual in the new system with basic income doing the same thing, hence adding the same amount of value in the community, would be gaining 22,000 Units in non-taxable basic income, plus 20,000 Units in salary.  Taxed at the 25% bracket, this individual would net 37,000 Units and provide the government 5,000 Units for basic income.

20% more Units would be in circulation via the taxation route to pay for services and more than twice the number of Units would be flowing through the economy as buying power.  For the individual.
If we take a larger salary, like say $180,000 and make the comparison, in the current system, this person would have to pay $55,753 CAD in taxes, while he’d pay 74,500 Units in the ideal economy.  Thus today, the individual would net $124,247 CAD and in the ideal economy of tomorrow, he would net his basic income allotment of 22,000 Units plus 105,500 Units.  That’s a total of 127,500.  This high salary individual is taking home almost the same net income than in the current system, but he is comfortably over the well-being line of $75,000, hopefully aiming towards great things in life-fulfillment as well as helping others getting their basic needs met.

Basic income can therefore be paid for by the wealthy while most of the population have more disposable income to play with beyond their basic needs.  This forcibly creates an economy where not only the middle class contribute to the economy in a real way, but absolutely everyone, including those who only perceive basic income payments.

Though the model is Canadian, giving the land to the people ensures there is sufficient income going around to provide the people of any country.

If you want to think of it in simple terms, simply think about unconditional basic income being the nominal distribution of the wealth of the land to its people in the form of exchangeable Units.  Meanwhile, the more productive among citizens and those that contribute more value to society get more Units to trade back into the economy and work alongside automated systems to ensure nations are productive.



[1] Land use statistics by country.  Wikipedia.  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
[2] Government of Canada, Department of Finance FY2016-2017.  Annual financial report of the government of Canada.  - https://www.fin.gc.ca/afr-rfa/2017/report-rapport-eng.asp
[3] Nick Bunker.  Protecting against risk can help boost U.S. entrepreneurship.  - https://equitablegrowth.org/protecting-against-risk-can-help-boost-u-s-entrepreneurship/
[4] Michalis Nikiforos, Marshall Steinbaum and Gennaro Zezza.  Roosevelt Institute.  (August 2017).  Modeling the macroeconomic effects of a universal basic income.  - http://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Modeling-the-Macroeconomic-Effects-of-a-Universal-Basic-Income.pdf
[5] List of governments in Canada by annual expenditures.  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_governments_in_Canada_by_annual_expenditures
[6] Government of Ontario.  Public accounts 2016-2017:  annual report.  - https://www.ontario.ca/page/public-accounts-2016-17-annual-report
[7]Jennifer Robison (November 2011).  Happiness is Love – and $75,000.  Gallup.  - http://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/happiness-is-love-and-75k.aspx
[8] Meik Wiking (January 2016)  Why Danes happily pay high rates of taxes.  US news.  - https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-01-20/why-danes-happily-pay-high-rates-of-taxes