Humanity is remarkably good at disagreeing.
We disagree about politics, economics, religion, borders, culture, ideology and almost everything else we can possibly find to disagree about.
And yet, quietly underneath all this disagreement, we have managed to agree on an astonishing number of things.
International Coordination
A meter is a meter everywhere on Earth. A second is a second. A minute contains sixty seconds, an hour sixty minutes, and a day twenty-four hours. We organize our lives around days, weeks, months and years, and most of the world uses the same civil calendar. We have internationally coordinated time standards and time zones. We use latitude and longitude to describe where we are on the planet. Scientists use common units, symbols and terminology. Ships navigate using international standards. Aircraft cross borders using internationally coordinated systems. Computers communicate through common protocols. Shipping containers are built to standardized dimensions so they can travel from a truck to a train to a ship and halfway around the planet.
Even our electrical civilization runs overwhelmingly on the same basic principle: AC – Alternating Current. We haven’t quite managed to agree on the voltage, frequency or plugs everywhere—apparently that would have been asking too much—but the fundamental technology became nearly universal.
Why?
Not because humanity held a giant meeting and everybody finally agreed to get along.
Practical Advantage
Because these things had one thing in common: the practical advantage.
That may be one of the most powerful forces behind universal adoption.
The Universal Adoption
When something makes life easier, safer, more efficient or simply more practical—and particularly when everybody benefits from using compatible systems—it has an extraordinary tendency to spread.
And there is another universally adopted system that we rarely think about in this way.
Money.
The Money Standard
We don’t have one universal currency. We have dollars, euros, pounds, yen, yuan, kroner, pesos, rupees and many others.
But the underlying concept of money has become universal.
Why did humanity adopt this pervasive system so comprehensively?
Again, the answer may be remarkably mundane.
Practical advantage.
The history of money is of course more complicated than the familiar story that people once wandered around trying to exchange chickens for shoes. Early monetary systems were also connected to debt, accounting, taxation and commodities.
But the fundamental advantage remains.
Money made economic accounting and exchange enormously easier.
Instead of every transaction depending upon a direct exchange between two people who happened to possess exactly what the other wanted, value could be represented by a commonly accepted medium.
That was an enormous practical improvement.
Brilliant.
And that is precisely the point.
Money didn’t become universal because it was sacred. It became universal because it worked.
It was a technology.
Perhaps one of the most successful technologies humanity ever invented.
The Other Side
But money also did something else.
Once access to resources became dependent upon purchasing power, possessing more money meant gaining access to more resources.
And that created an extraordinary incentive to accumulate it.
Money did not invent greed. Human beings were perfectly capable of greed long before the modern monetary system existed.
But money gave greed a remarkably efficient instrument.
Unlike physical needs and resources, monetary accumulation has no natural endpoint.
There is only so much food a person can eat. There are only so many clothes anyone can wear. There is a practical limit to how much housing, transportation and material comfort a human being actually needs.
Money has no equivalent limit.
Once wealth can be expressed numerically, accumulation itself becomes measurable—and potentially limitless. More can always become more.
And because money represents purchasing power, greater accumulation means greater potential claims upon the resources, products and labor of the world.
The result is the extraordinary inequality we see today. Some individuals control fortunes larger than the economic output of entire countries, while other human beings struggle to obtain adequate food, shelter, clean water, education and healthcare.
But this article isn’t really about condemning money.
It is about something much more interesting:
What if the same process that made money successful eventually makes it obsolete?
Practical Advantage
Think again about why standards spread.
We didn’t standardize measurement because meters are morally superior to feet.
We didn’t adopt international aviation standards because pilots suddenly developed a common political ideology.
We didn’t standardize shipping containers because rectangular steel boxes represent a higher state of human consciousness.
We did these things because they worked.
Standardization offered a practical advantage.
And that raises a fascinating possibility.
What happens when a moneyless system begins to offer a greater practical advantage than a monetary one?
Because the world in which money emerged and the world we are entering are radically different.
For most of human history, producing things required enormous amounts of human labor. Information traveled slowly. Transportation was difficult. Knowing exactly what millions—or billions—of people needed was impossible. Knowing what resources existed, where they existed and how efficiently they could be distributed was equally difficult. In came the the monetary system.
The Solution to Distribution
Money and markets provided a remarkably effective mechanism for coordinating much of this complexity. Although far from perfect, the monetary system at least provided one possible way to refine and distribute resources and products. Money became the solution to distribution. If you had money you could buy everything you needed.
But Look at What is Happening Now
Artificial intelligence can process quantities of information that no human administration could possibly handle. Automation can manufacture products with progressively less human labor. Robotics can increasingly build, harvest, transport, sort and distribute. Global communication is effectively instantaneous. Satellites, sensors and databases can monitor resources and infrastructure. Modern logistics systems already coordinate astonishingly complex global supply chains.
We are building something humanity has never possessed before:
the technological capacity to coordinate resources directly on a planetary scale.
And if that becomes easier and more fair than coordinating them through money, something very interesting happens.
Money loses its practical advantage.
The Complicated System
We tend to assume that a moneyless civilization would require some impossibly complicated system.
How would we keep track of everything? How would we know what people need? How would we know what to produce? How would we distribute it?
Fair questions.
But perhaps we should first look at the system we already have.
Consider the extraordinary infrastructure required merely to keep money functioning: governments, banks, payment processors, accounting departments, tax authorities, auditors, insurance companies, debt collectors, stock exchanges, currency exchanges, mortgage systems, credit-rating agencies, investment funds, financial regulators, billing departments and payroll departments.
Every business has to keep track of revenue, expenses, salaries, taxes, profits, losses, invoices, debts and payments.
Every individual has to have a job, work, earn money, receive money, store money, spend money, save money, borrow money, repay money and frequently worry about whether enough money will remain at the end of the month.
We have constructed an astonishingly complicated global technological system whose purpose is largely to keep track of who owns what and who owes what to whom.
And the problem is not merely that this system is complicated.
Look at what it has helped us do to the planet.
We have extracted resources at enormous scale because resources can be converted into products, products into sales and sales into money. We have cut forests, mined mountains, depleted fisheries, burned enormous quantities of fossil fuels and manufactured billions upon billions of products—not simply according to what humanity actually needs, but according to what can be profitably produced and sold. And we have to constantly consume, consume and consume more to keep the system alive. Only a small drop in global consumption threatens to collapse the whole system.
We have created products designed to be replaced, enormous advertising industries dedicated to making us want more, and an economic system in which reducing consumption can itself become an economic problem.
The consequences are all around us: polluted air and water, plastic in the oceans, toxic waste, depleted resources, destroyed habitats, biodiversity loss, greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change.
And then there is the human cost.
Throughout history, people, companies, kingdoms and nations have competed for land, resources, trade routes, markets, wealth and economic power. Money is certainly not the only cause of conflict and war, but struggles over resources and economic interests have repeatedly been woven through human conflict.
At the individual level, billions of people spend enormous portions of their lives trying to acquire enough purchasing power simply to maintain access to food, housing, transportation, healthcare and the other necessities of life.
Some accumulate extraordinary fortunes.
Others have almost nothing.
And somehow we have become so accustomed to all of this that when somebody suggests replacing the system with direct, intelligent management and sharing of the world’s resources, our immediate response is:
But wouldn’t that be complicated?
Complicated compared to what?
Perhaps the monetary system isn’t merely complicated.
Perhaps it has become the biggest threat to the survival of humanity.
And perhaps today’s technology finally allows us to replace all this indirect monetary accounting with something far more relevant:
direct accounting of the planet itself.
Accounting for Reality
Accounting doesn’t have to disappear.
We simply change what we account for.
Instead of primarily accounting for monetary value, we account for the physical reality underneath it.
How much food is available? How much energy? How much water? What materials do we have? What is being consumed? What needs to be produced? Where are shortages developing? Where is there excess capacity? What can be repaired, reused or recycled? What do people actually need? What can the planet sustainably provide?
Those are the numbers that ultimately matter.
Resources.
Production.
Availability.
Demand.
Need.
Ecological impact.
An advanced technological system could continuously optimize the relationship between them.
We have already agreed upon all the different measuring systems we need: Distance, weight, time, location.
Now we only have to agree upon the best production and distribution system.
This doesn’t require infinite resources.
There will always be limitations. There is only so much land on Earth. Certain minerals are scarce. Certain locations are desirable. Environmental boundaries are real.
But scarcity doesn’t automatically require money. Maybe before but not today.
Scarcity requires allocation.
And perhaps an advanced technological civilization can allocate limited resources more intelligently by looking at availability, sustainability and actual need than by asking who happens to possess the greatest purchasing power.
The Next Standard
Imagine a global system where requesting something you need becomes as ordinary as using the internet.
You need transportation. You request it.
You need food. You obtain it.
You need materials for a project. The system checks availability.
You need somewhere to live. Available housing and resources are matched with actual requirements.
Behind all of this, AI and automated systems continuously monitor production, resources, demand, environmental impact and distribution.
No price needs to be calculated. No credit card needs to be charged. No invoice needs to be generated. No salary needs to be deducted. No VAT needs to be calculated. No bank needs to approve anything.
The important questions become:
What is needed?
What is available?
What is the most intelligent and sustainable way of connecting the two?
At some point, that may become considerably simpler than money.
And if it does, we may witness something that initially sounds revolutionary but is actually deeply consistent with human history.
Humanity has repeatedly adopted new systems for the same remarkably simple reason. It was more practical.
The Summit for a New Standard
Here’s a couple of examples of how humanity solved global coordination in the past.
Bretton Woods
In 1944 at Bretton Woods, central bankers and economists gathered to build the modern monetary system out of financial chaos after the war.
The Meridian Conference
Sixty years earlier, at the 1884 Meridian Conference, a very different group—diplomats, astronomers, and engineers—met to fix conflicting clocks and maps, establishing 0 longitude at Greenwich simply because global transport required a shared baseline.
The Third Gathering
Now imagine a third gathering: a modern planetary summit.
This time, the delegates are not central bankers managing inflation, nor navigators mapping oceans. They are systems engineers, logistics architects, and computer scientists. Instead of debating currency pegs or interest rates, they develop a single agreement: to retire indirect monetary accounting entirely and transition planetary resource coordination to an automated, intelligent network.
It sounds like a radical leap. But every time humanity has replaced a fragmented, friction-heavy system with a universal standard, it felt revolutionary right up until the moment it became obvious.
But of course, unlike the top-down summits of the past, a transition of this scale today would not be decided behind closed doors, but chosen directly by the global population through modern tools of direct, real-time digital democracy.
Easier Than Money
Money solved an enormous problem.
We should give it credit for that.
But technologies don’t remain useful forever simply because they were once useful.
Transformative Technologies
The horse transformed transportation. The steam engine transformed industry. The telegraph transformed communication. Paper maps transformed navigation.
And when something better came along, we moved on.
Money deserves the same question.
Not:
Is money good or evil?
But:
Is money still the easiest and most intelligent way to coordinate the resources of an advanced technological civilization?
For thousands of years, the answer may reasonably have been yes.
For the future, it may increasingly become no.
Because the great irony could be that humanity doesn’t eventually abandon money because everybody becomes enlightened, altruistic or politically united.
We may abandon it for exactly the same reason we adopted it.
Practical advantage.
Perhaps the next great universal standard will not be another currency.
Perhaps it will be the realization that we no longer need one.
In the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, humanity has made that realization and abandoned money entirely.
Follow the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels when he wakes up in this world after 100 years of cryonic preservation..
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