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  From political to economic revolutions, the old has always been replaced by new systems through crisis.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.

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.