For the first time in the whole history of humanity, we possess the technological ability to create a life of abundance for absolutely everyone on Earth.
Not merely for the fortunate. Not for those born in the right country, into the right family or with the right opportunities. Not only for the owners of land, capital, factories and machines. For everyone.
We have never had this possibility before.
For thousands of years, human civilization depended upon one part of the population serving another. Slaves served masters. Peasants served landowners. Servants maintained the homes of the wealthy. Workers entered mines, fields and factories because survival required them to sell their labour. The names and conditions changed, but the underlying structure remained remarkably persistent: freedom for some rested upon the labour of others.
Someone always had to do the work.
Someone had to grow and harvest the food, construct the buildings, transport the materials, manufacture the products, clean the streets, collect the waste and maintain the machinery of civilization. Even our modern comfort still depends upon millions of people performing dangerous, exhausting, repetitive and poorly rewarded work because they have little choice.
Human beings have dreamt of liberation for millennia, but we never possessed the means to liberate everyone simultaneously. If one person escaped the burden, it was usually because someone else carried it.
That is now beginning to change.
The Question of Ownership
When I discovered the idea of a resource-based economy through The Venus Project in 2008, humanity was technologically far from where we are today. Artificial intelligence remained primitive by present standards. Robots were mainly rigid machines performing predetermined movements inside factories. The idea of humanoid robots cleaning homes, constructing buildings, harvesting crops or maintaining public spaces still belonged largely to science fiction.
What intrigued me most was not the technology, however. It was the principle of non-ownership.
Growing up, my mother and I benefited from owning a house and renting out parts of it. Naturally, I thought it was a wonderful income for us. But I felt sorry for the tenants who had to use their time to work to pay money to us. I wanted everyone to be able to own a house and receive rental income.
But there was an obvious contradiction.
If everyone owned their own houses, who would be left to rent them?
The owner’s income depends upon the tenant’s lack of ownership. The same is true of many forms of passive income: they can work for some people precisely because they cannot work for everyone. The owners had the privilege. I wanted everyone to have the privilege.
But we cannot make everyone privileged within a system in which privilege depends upon someone else occupying the opposite position. We cannot make everyone a landlord because landlords require tenants. We cannot make everyone an employer because employers require employees. We cannot make everyone wealthy through investments because investment returns ultimately depend upon production and labour somewhere else in the system.
Universal privilege is a contradiction.
Universal Access
If we moved beyond ownership completely, we would not need to make everyone a landlord. We could simply ensure that everyone had a home. A house would no longer need to generate income for an owner or a mortgage for a bank. It would fulfill the purpose for which it was constructed: providing someone with a safe and comfortable place to live.
This is the essential difference between ownership and stewardship.
Ownership says: This belongs to me, and I may use it to advance my own interests.
Stewardship says: This has been entrusted to us, and we are responsible for using and protecting it wisely.
The Missing Answer
The principle was compelling, but one enormous practical question remained:
Who would do the work?
The Robots
If everyone had free access to housing, food, transportation, healthcare and everything else necessary for a good life, who would perform the unpleasant, dangerous and monotonous tasks upon which civilization depended? Who would collect the waste, clean the sewers, work in the mines, harvest the fields and stand beside production lines performing the same movement thousands of times?
In 2008, we could imagine greater automation, but much of the answer remained theoretical.
Today, the answer is beginning to stand up and walk.
Robots are moving out of tightly controlled factory environments and into the human world. They are learning to recognize objects, interpret their surroundings and perform increasingly varied physical tasks. AI can already process complex information, identify patterns, coordinate systems and help us make decisions at a scale no individual human mind could manage.
Soon, robots will not only work in factories. They will be able to assist in our homes, maintain infrastructure, grow and prepare food, construct buildings, sort materials and perform tasks that are dangerous or physically overwhelming for human beings.
They can clean streets and beaches. They can collect waste, repair roads and restore damaged ecosystems. They can enter toxic or unstable environments without risking human lives. They can help remove plastics from rivers and oceans, rescue animals from human-made hazards, regenerate depleted soil and monitor the health of forests.
Technology can become the servant of humanity without requiring a class of human servants.
That is the missing piece previous civilizations never possessed.
And with the shift from ownership to stewardship the robots would be owned by no-one, but accessed by everyone.
The Global Flip
We do not need to construct an entirely new physical world before beginning this transformation. The physical world is already here.
The first step is to change the agreement under which everything operates.
Humanity could decide that the Earth and its resources no longer belong exclusively to individuals, corporations or nations. Nobody created the land, the oceans, the atmosphere, the minerals or the fundamental processes of life. They were here before any deed, border, company or currency existed.
We could recognize the planet as the shared inheritance of all life.
We would shift from being owners to being stewards. Nothing would belong exclusively to anyone because the whole world would be entrusted to all of us. You would use what you use for as long as you needed to use it. When you no longer need it it would go back into the pool of shared items used by everyone or be recycled if it’s worn out.
The New Direction
The foundational decision could be made globally and the shift immediately. The practical transition would naturally require learning, coordination and continuous adjustment, but the direction could change at once.
We would awaken to the same houses, supermarkets, hospitals, factories and streets—but they would operate under a fundamentally different agreement.
A factory would no longer exist primarily to generate financial returns. It would exist to produce something genuinely useful.
A farm would no longer be forced to maximize profit regardless of the consequences for soil, animals and water. Its purpose would be to provide nutritious food while caring for the ecosystems that make agriculture possible.
A home would no longer be an investment vehicle or an instrument for extracting rent. It would be a place for someone to live.
Technology would no longer be developed mainly according to what can be sold most profitably. It would be directed towards what improves life, restores nature and reduces unnecessary human labour.
Nothing physical would need to transform overnight. Yet everything would have changed because the purpose of civilization would have shifted from a focus on profit to a focus on life.
From Competition to Collaboration
Today, we use money to decide what can be done. We ask whether we can afford to feed people, house them, restore forests, clean oceans or provide medical treatment—as though numbers in financial systems create the food, homes, trees, machines and medicine.
They do not.
The meaningful questions are physical:
What do we need?
What resources do we have?
What can we produce and use sustainably?
How can we make it available to everyone?
A Resource Based Economy
AI could help us answer these questions by monitoring resources, needs, production capacity and environmental conditions in real time. Instead of using prices and profitability as crude signals, we could work with direct information about the actual world.
If a particular product were being used extensively, production would be adjusted. If something were barely used, we would stop wasting resources on it. If a material were becoming scarce or ecologically damaging, we could find substitutes, redesign the product or change the method of production.
Is There Enough?
Some will object that technology cannot create abundance because the planet does not contain enough resources for everyone. Within today’s wasteful monetary system, they are right. There will never be enough to satisfy endless growth, planned obsolescence, artificial scarcity, competitive consumption and the accumulation of wealth without limit. But an optimized world would operate according to an entirely different logic. We would produce what people actually need, design products to last, repair and recycle materials, share what is seldom used and direct technology towards eliminating waste. We do not have enough for everyone’s greed within a system demanding infinite growth. But intelligently managed, the Earth contains more than enough to meet everyone’s needs.
Protopia
This would not be a static utopian society governed by one perfect plan. It would be a protopia, a living, learning system—continually observing, adapting and improving.
Human beings would collaborate with one another and with technology. We would still create, experiment, explore, teach, care and contribute. But participation would no longer be coerced by the threat of poverty. Technology would handle an increasing share of the work we perform only because someone has to do it, leaving us freer to undertake the activities that require imagination, empathy, curiosity and human presence.
Abundance
Abundance would not mean producing infinite quantities of everything. That would be impossible on a finite planet. Abundance would mean ensuring plentiful access to what people genuinely need by intelligently managing resources, eliminating manufactured scarcity, reducing waste and sharing what we create.
A Working Definition
As Bashar, channeled by Darryl Anka, defines it, abundance is:
“the ability to do what you need to do, when you need to do it.”
I believe this can serve as a working definition of abundance for the new world. It does not mean possessing unlimited quantities of everything or consuming without restraint. It means having reliable access to the resources, tools, knowledge, transportation, shelter and assistance required to live, create and contribute whenever the need arises. Abundance is not infinite ownership. It is freedom from unnecessary limitation through universal access.
It would be abundance through awareness—not mindless consumption.
Caring for the Whole
The transformation from ownership to stewardship would not merely change how resources are distributed. It would gradually change how we understand ourselves.
When we own a fragment of the world, we are conditioned to protect our fragment—even when doing so harms the whole. A corporation may destroy a forest because the timber belongs to them. A nation may exhaust a resource because it lies within its borders. An individual may accumulate multiple homes while others sleep outside because the properties are legally theirs.
Ownership divides the planet into competing interests.
Stewardship unites our interests.
When we care for the whole planet together, protecting forests, oceans and animals is no longer an obstacle to economic activity. It becomes part of the purpose of our activity. The health of nature is recognized as inseparable from our own health.
Technology could then serve not only humanity, but the whole living world. We could use it to restore habitats, reduce pollution, protect biodiversity and repair the damage caused during centuries of unconscious expansion.
We would no longer be separate owners fighting over pieces of the Earth. We would become one humanity caring for one planetary home.
And when everyone has secure access to what they need, one of the deepest causes of conflict begins to disappear. We no longer need to fight over land, resources, markets, profit or survival. We no longer need to conquer others to secure abundance for ourselves.
We can simply live—and devote our intelligence to improving life.
The Choice Before Us
Technology will not automatically create this future.
Within the present system, AI and robotics may instead concentrate ownership even more, accelerate resource extraction and make millions of people economically redundant while they remain dependent upon employment for survival. Machines capable of liberating humanity could become instruments for enriching and empowering those who own them, making them even richer than anyone could imagine, while the rest struggle to earn enough to live.
That is why ownership is the decisive question.
Whoever owns the machines can command their productivity. But if nobody owns them exclusively—if they are stewarded for the benefit of everyone—their productivity can liberate us all.
Universal Freedom
For the first time, universal freedom no longer needs to be built upon human servitude. For the first time, we can realistically imagine providing every person with a secure and abundant life while reducing our burden upon the planet. For the first time, we have the knowledge, productive capacity and emerging technology to transform the dream into a functioning civilization.
We do not need another ideology telling us who should rule. We need to recognize what is already possible.
Everything is Here
The Earth is here. The resources are here. The knowledge is here. The technology is arriving.
All we need is to open our eyes and choose.
The Perfect World
That choice would not mark the completion of a perfect world. It would mark the beginning of an endlessly evolving civilization—one in which humanity and technology work together to optimize our systems, restore the Earth and improve the lives of all beings.
A civilization no longer organized around ownership, profit and competition, but around access, stewardship and collaboration.
A world of abundance and peace unlike anything humanity has ever known.
For the first time, we can actually create it.
If we want to.
An Invitation
In the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, the reader is invited into such a future—a world beyond money and ownership, where humanity has finally learned to share the Earth. The story starts with thebewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels who desperately chose cryonic preservation of his body in an attempt to escape his cancer. 100 years later he awakens healed and healthy, but there’s one catch: there’s no more money in the world. Afraid and confused he leaves the clinic on his own, trying find out what has happened and to make sense of this new world. Will he make it?
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