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.
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.
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.
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.
