Tag: PROTOPIA

  • The System of Scarcity 

    The System of Scarcity 

    Europe’s gas storage is low. Gas prices may rise. Electricity prices may rise with them—even in Sweden.

    This is presented as if Europe is running out of energy.

    Meanwhile, the sun continues to pour an incomprehensible amount of energy onto Spain and the rest of southern Europe every day. The wind continues to blow across the Earth. Rivers continue to flow through Scandinavia. We already possess the technology required to capture, store, distribute and intelligently combine all of these sources.

    The gas may be scarce.

    Energy is not.

    What we are witnessing is not merely an energy problem. It is a perfect demonstration of the system of scarcity.

    The Actual Need

    Europe does not need gas.

    Europe needs energy.

    Gas is only one possible means of providing heat, electricity and industrial power. Yet because enormous investments, markets and infrastructure have been built around gas, a shortage of gas is treated as a shortage of energy itself.

    This is extraordinarily narrow thinking.

    The Clean River

    Imagine someone standing beside a clean river and declaring that there is nothing to drink because the shop has run out of bottled water. The person has confused one commercial product with the underlying need that the product was supposed to satisfy.

    We do this throughout the economy.

    We do not fundamentally need oil.

    We need transportation, heat, materials and industrial processes. We do not need one particular metal. We need whatever function that metal performs. We do not need concrete in every conceivable construction. We need safe and durable buildings. We do not need one particular crop from one particular supplier. We need nutritious food.

    The Sane Civilization

    In a sane civilization, we would always begin by identifying the actual need. We would then examine every available resource, technology and method capable of meeting it.

    If one resource became scarce, we would not run around like headless chickens announcing the end of civilization. We would look for alternatives. We would substitute materials, redesign products, recycle components, improve efficiency or find a completely different way to achieve the desired result.

    A particular resource may be scarce without the solution being scarce.

    But that is not how our present system thinks.

    Market Thinking

    Unfortunately we don’t live in a sane civilization at the moment.

    The monetary system does not primarily ask how human needs can be met with the resources available. It asks what can be owned, traded and sold profitably through the system that already exists.

    Europe has built a market around gas. Companies own extraction rights, pipelines, terminals, storage facilities, power plants and contracts. Governments have designed policies around this structure. Financial markets trade expectations about its future availability. Millions of incomes, investments and institutional interests have become attached to maintaining it.

    Consequently, when gas becomes scarce, the response is not simply to move as quickly as possible toward whatever abundant alternatives are available. The shortage becomes a market event. Prices rise. Traders speculate. Households worry. Industries demand support. Governments compete for supplies.

    The system has mistaken its own dependency for a law of nature.

    In Sweden, electricity prices can be affected by European gas prices even though very little Swedish electricity is generated from gas. Electricity is traded through interconnected markets, and expensive gas-generated electricity elsewhere can influence prices far beyond the place where that gas is actually burned.

    The Labyrinth

    Spain may simultaneously receive an abundance of solar energy. But instead of regarding this as part of Europe’s shared energy capacity, we place a labyrinth of markets, ownership structures, pricing mechanisms, national interests and insufficiently coordinated infrastructure between the sunlight and the people who need energy.

    Then we point to the resulting bottleneck and call it scarcity.

    We have created a monetary maze between the resource and the need. When the resource cannot pass efficiently through the maze, we conclude that there is not enough.

    Scarcity Within

    The deepest scarcity, however, is not found in a gas storage facility. It is created in the human mind.

    It begins with the belief that there cannot possibly be enough for everyone. It is the narrow, frightened and egoic conviction that human beings are separate competitors trapped in a struggle over an inadequate world. If I do not acquire as much as possible for myself, someone else will take it. If others gain access, I must be losing something.

    From that belief, we created institutions based on ownership, competition, accumulation and exclusion. Those institutions then restrict access to resources and produce deprivation. Finally, the deprivation is offered as proof that the original belief was correct.

    The scarcity mindset creates the scarcity system. The scarcity system restricts access. Restricted access reinforces the scarcity mindset.

    It is a closed loop operating inside a world of extraordinary natural wealth, technological capability and human ingenuity.

    This does not mean that every resource is infinite. Earth is a finite planet. Some materials are genuinely rare. Ecosystems have limits, and reckless extraction can destroy the very foundations of human life.

    But physical limits do not require a civilization based on permanent scarcity. They require intelligence.

    They require us to know what resources exist, understand the rate at which they can safely be used, eliminate unnecessary waste, recover materials, develop alternatives and design products around what is sustainably available.

    The belief that physical limits force us to compete, hoard and exclude one another is not realism. It is a failure of imagination.

    Money Needs Scarcity

    Money does not merely help us manage scarcity. The monetary system depends upon scarcity in order to function.

    If something is genuinely abundant and freely accessible, there is little reason to buy or sell it. Nobody can build an enormous fortune selling something that everyone can already obtain freely whenever they need it.

    For trade to remain necessary, there must be a barrier between people and the things they require. Sometimes that barrier is a genuine physical limitation. But it can also be created through ownership, prices, patents, restricted distribution, deliberate underproduction or the destruction of surplus.

    If there were true abundance, we would not need money or trading.

    This creates a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the monetary system. It claims to pursue abundance through economic growth, innovation and increased production. Yet genuine abundance threatens the very prices and profits upon which the system depends.

    If housing were freely available to everyone, housing would cease to be an enormously profitable investment vehicle. If clean energy were universally available, energy empires could no longer collect fortunes from controlling access to it. If nutritious food were produced in abundance and distributed according to need, hunger could no longer coexist with mountains of discarded food. If knowledge and technology were openly shared, artificial monopolies built around controlling them would disappear.

    The system therefore does not merely distribute what exists. It determines who is permitted access.

    That is why food can be destroyed while people go hungry. Houses can remain empty while people are homeless. Factories can remain idle while essential needs go unmet. Medicines can exist while patients are unable to obtain them. Renewable energy can surround us while families fear their next electricity bill.

    These are not always shortages of the things themselves. They are shortages of permission, purchasing power and access.

    Proof of Abundance

    Despite the extreme inefficiency of the present system, we are, amazingly enough, still here. We extract vastly more resources than necessary because of the profit motive, manufacture disposable products, transport goods absurd distances, destroy unsold food, demolish usable buildings, discard functioning technology and bury valuable materials in landfills. 

    Yet Earth has continued to provide for billions of people in spite of all this waste.

    That alone is evidence of the extraordinary abundance our planet has to offer.

    But under the monetary system, this abundance is available primarily to those with enough money to access it. Some people can command more food, land, energy, housing and manufactured products than they could possibly use, while others are denied the essentials of life. What we call abundance today is therefore an abundance built upon extreme inequality, relentless extraction and enormous waste.

    It is not an abundance we have created intelligently. It is an abundance we have plundered selectively.

    And this cannot continue for much longer—not if we expect humanity to continue for much longer on this planet. The fact that Earth has survived our inefficiency until now does not mean its capacity is limitless. It means we have been given an extraordinary margin of abundance and have mistaken that generosity for permission to waste it.

    Manufacturing Waste

    The present system extracts far more resources than humanity actually needs—not because people require everything being produced, but because companies must continue selling in order to survive and generate profit. A product that lasts for fifty years is less profitable than one that must be replaced every five. A device that can be repaired and upgraded indefinitely creates fewer sales than one that is sealed, unsupported and eventually declared obsolete.

    The result is an economy built around continuous turnover. Countless competing companies manufacture slightly different versions of the same products, duplicate factories and distribution networks, cover everything in disposable packaging and spend enormous resources persuading us to replace things that still work. Unsold food is destroyed, usable clothing is discarded, buildings remain empty, machinery stands idle and valuable materials are buried in landfills because providing access without payment would undermine their market value.

    Humanity now extracts approximately 100 billion tonnes of materials from Earth every year, while the global economy remains only about eight percent circular. There is no precise calculation of how much extraction would disappear without the profit motive, but a reduction of twenty to forty percent is entirely conceivable once products were designed for durability, repair, sharing, standardization and complete material recovery. The same resources could provide a far higher standard of living while placing dramatically less pressure on the planet.

    This means that removing the profit incentive would not create deprivation. It would effectively create abundance.

    We would no longer need to extract enough resources to satisfy human needs and keep billions of products flowing continuously through the machinery of sales and profit. We would produce what was actually needed, make it as durable as possible, share rarely used equipment, repair what broke and recover its materials when it finally reached the end of its useful life.

    Abundance does not require producing an infinite number of disposable things. It means ensuring that everyone can access what they need. By removing the commercial requirement to manufacture, sell, discard and replace as much as possible, humanity could create greater abundance for everyone while extracting considerably less from Earth.

    Extreme Wealth

    This also explains why extreme billionaires could not exist in a world where everyone had enough.

    A billion euros is not a billion pieces of food, houses, cars or solar panels. It is a claim upon real resources and productive capacity. It gives one person extraordinary power to command land, materials, technology and human activity.

    That power has meaning only because access is unequally distributed.

    If everyone could obtain excellent housing, food, healthcare, education, transportation, communication and energy without payment, currency would lose  its practical power. A billionaire might still possess a vast numerical fortune, but there would be little that fortune could command which everyone else could not already access.

    Extreme wealth is therefore not evidence that society has created abundance. It is evidence that access to abundance has been concentrated through the ingenious monetary system. Ingenious for the billionaires, that is.

    The greater the distance between the billionaire and the person who cannot afford electricity, food or shelter, the more successfully the system has manufactured scarcity for one person while manufacturing almost unlimited purchasing power for another.

    The fortunes at the top and the deprivation at the bottom are not unrelated accidents. They are two results of the same system.

    Another Logic

    A sane world with a global resource-based economy would begin from a completely different question.

    Not:

    What can be sold?

    Not:

    Who can afford it?

    Not:

    Which shortage will produce the highest price?

    But:

    What do we need, what resources do we have available, and how can we use them intelligently for everyone?

    If humanity needed energy, we would map all available energy sources and build the most effective combination. Solar energy from sunnier regions could be integrated with wind, hydroelectricity, geothermal energy, storage and an interconnected grid. Production would be planned around physical reality rather than profitability.

    If a particular material became scarce, a global resource inventory would reveal that fact before it became a crisis. Products would be redesigned. Alternative materials would be developed. Existing components would be recovered. Wasteful uses would be discontinued, while essential uses received priority.

    There would still be limits. There would still be engineering challenges, ecological constraints and difficult decisions. But we would face those challenges as one civilization trying to solve them—not as competing owners attempting to profit from them.

    The greatest abundance available to humanity is not any single resource. It is our capacity to think, adapt, invent and cooperate. There are usually many ways to meet the same underlying need.

    Yet we suppress that abundance when we trap every solution inside the question of whether it is profitable.

    Europe worries about the gas in its storage tanks while an immense fusion reactor shines above us every day. That image captures the entire insanity of the present system.

    We are not living in a world without solutions. We are living inside a system that repeatedly overlooks them because they do not fit its narrow logic.

    The ultimate scarcity is not a lack of sunlight, resources, technology or human capability.

    It is the scarcity inside our thinking.

    And the moment we leave that thinking behind, we may discover that the world was far more abundant than we had ever allowed it to become.

    The Abundant World

    In the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, billionaire Benjamin Michaels awakens in 2115 to discover that humanity has finally abandoned the system of scarcity. Money, trade and ownership have been replaced by stewardship, intelligent resource management and optimized sharing. The world did not become abundant because Earth suddenly produced infinite resources. It became abundant because humanity stopped wasting what it already had.

    Discover the world that became possible when humanity finally chose abundance over scarcity here.

  • For the First Time

    For the First Time

    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?

    Discover his story

  • The Insanity of Humanity

    The Insanity of Humanity

    This might be the most important article I have ever written.

    A Russian drone has reportedly killed three civilians in Ukraine after using artificial intelligence to select its own target.

    Read that sentence again.

    The Terminator

    A human being programmed and  launched the weapon and gave it a general mission. But according to investigators, the drone then navigated and selected the precise object it would attack without further human intervention. It appears to have targeted propane tanks at a petrol station in Zaporizhzhia. Instead, it struck beside an apartment building and exploded, killing three people, including a 19-year-old student.

    This is not a scene from The Terminator. It is not a warning from a dystopian novel about something that might happen fifty years from now.

    It has happened.

    Drones For Death

    We have entered an age in which machines are being given the authority to decide where lethal force will be applied. Software observes the world through cameras and sensors, compares what it sees with a programmed target profile, selects something to destroy and attacks.

    There may still be human beings behind the mission. Humans manufacture the drone, define the target category and launch the weapon. But at the decisive moment—when one object is distinguished from everything surrounding it and marked for destruction—the machine may act alone.

    This is a threshold humanity should never have crossed.

    Yet, instead of stopping the insanity, every major military power will now feel compelled to move faster. If one country develops autonomous weapons, another will say it must do the same for its own protection. If one side deploys a hundred, the other will need a thousand. The drones will become smaller, cheaper, faster and more difficult to detect. They will learn to coordinate in swarms, recognize increasingly complex targets and continue operating when communication with a human controller has been lost or jammed.

    The military justification will always be the same: if we do not build them, somebody else will.

    That is how insanity becomes policy.

    Where Does This End?

    We Must Stop it

    Where does an autonomous arms race ultimately lead?

    Does the country possessing the largest number of killer drones eliminate everyone it considers a threat and then live happily ever after without all the bothersome others?

    Of course not. After all, we are dependent on each other for survival on this planet. Even the most selfish and fearful leaders see that.

    But autonomous weapons will not remain exclusively in the hands of a few powerful governments. The essential components already exist within the civilian economy: processors, cameras, navigation systems, motors, batteries and increasingly capable artificial intelligence. As the technology becomes cheaper, versions of these weapons will spread to smaller countries, militias, extremist organizations, criminal groups and individuals.

    We must stop this before it is too late.

    Nobody Will be Safe

    Eventually, nobody will be safe.

    Political leaders can be hunted. Dissidents can be hunted. Journalists, scientists, engineers and activists can be hunted. A person may be marked because of a uniform, a vehicle, a telephone signal, facial characteristics or simply because an algorithm incorrectly decides that the person matches a target profile.

    Machines do not understand mercy. They do not recognize fear in another person’s eyes and lower their weapons. They do not see a wounded soldier and decide that enough people have died. They cannot refuse an immoral command because something inside them says it is wrong.

    They process information and execute instructions.

    A world saturated with autonomous weapons would not be a world controlled by one victorious superpower. It would be a world in which power itself had become uncontrollable. Nobody would necessarily know who launched a particular drone, who programmed it or whether its behavior had been altered. One automated attack could provoke another. Retaliation could begin before human beings even understood what had happened.

    Wars could escalate at machine speed.

    And these weapons would not necessarily remain on distant battlefields. The same systems could be used by governments against their own populations. A dictator would no longer need soldiers willing to fire upon their neighbors. Machines do not disobey, protest or experience remorse. A government controlling millions of autonomous weapons could make resistance almost impossible.

    This is not security.

    It is the automated imprisonment of humanity.

    No One Wins

    If these weapons ever become genuinely uncontrollable, they will continue killing until their targets disappear or the industrial systems supporting them collapse.

    Power stations will fail. 

    Transport will stop. 

    Food distribution will break down. Hospitals will become inoperable. People will be unable to gather, travel or work safely. 

    Eventually, most of the machines will also stop as batteries degrade, components break and replacement parts disappear.

    Human civilization and its killer machines may collapse together.

    That is the glorious destination of the arms race: humanity hiding underground while machines patrol the surface of the planet we ruined through our own fear.

    Kill or Create

    We have developed artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, global communications and extraordinary scientific knowledge. We possess technology that could help restore ecosystems, clean the oceans, cultivate food, construct homes and release humanity from dangerous and exhausting work.

    And what do we do?

    We teach machines to kill.

    This is the insanity of humanity.

    The Insanity of Separation

    But beneath this insanity, humanity is not insane.

    Beneath the fear, conditioning and the constant story of separation, there is an awareness within every one of us. In that awareness exists love, compassion, understanding and intelligence. It is the part of us that recognizes another human being not as an enemy, a competitor or an obstacle, but as another expression of the same life.

    A Ukrainian child, a Russian mother, an American soldier, a Chinese engineer and an Iranian farmer are not separate forms of life with different fundamental values. They feel pain. They experience fear. They love their children. They want to live.

    There are no Others

    We have placed a frightened layer over this awareness. The ego divides the world into us and them. From it’s fear it constructs nations, armies, threats and enemies. It tells us that we can achieve safety only by possessing greater destructive power than everybody else.

    Each side insists that it is merely defending itself. Each new weapon is justified as a response to the weapons of another. Everyone pursues security, yet everyone becomes progressively less secure.

    Now we are taking this ancient insanity and embedding it in software.

    We are giving fear cameras, wings and explosives. We are teaching artificial intelligence to recognize the enemies created by our own minds and destroy them with increasing efficiency.

    The machine has not invented separation.

    We have programmed it.

    The Other Direction

    The alternative is not to abolish technology. It is not to close every data center, abandon artificial intelligence or return to some imagined pre-industrial past.

    The alternative is to give our technology another purpose.

    The New Purpose

    The same machine vision capable of recognizing a military target can recognize plastic in the ocean, an animal caught in an abandoned fishing net, the first signs of a forest fire or a person buried beneath earthquake rubble.

    Autonomous machines can remove pollution, restore forests, repair infrastructure, cultivate food and monitor the health of ecosystems. Artificial intelligence can help humanity understand what resources exist, what people need and how production can be organized without destroying the living world..

    The Choice is Ours

    We can use artificial intelligence to compete more effectively against one another, or we can use it to build a civilization that works for everyone.

    We can automate killing, or we can automate caring.

    The technology is not making that choice.

    We are.

    A Message to World Leaders

    To every head of state—and especially to the leaders of the world’s military powers:

    Stop.

    Refuse to authorize machines to select and attack human beings. Begin immediate negotiations for a binding global prohibition against autonomous weapons. Establish meaningful human control over every use of automated lethal force.

    Do not wait for your rivals to move first, because they are waiting for you.

    Somebody must interrupt the logic of fear. Somebody must possess the courage to say that humanity will not construct its future upon machines deciding who shall die.

    True courage is not developing the most efficient killer drone. It is stepping out of an arms race when everyone around you insists that stopping is impossible.

    You are not protecting your people by creating a technology that will inevitably spread and eventually be turned against them. You are not building peace by removing human conscience from the decision to kill. You are not demonstrating strength by surrendering life-and-death decisions to software.

    This is one planet. 

    We share one atmosphere, one biosphere and one future. No country can make itself permanently secure in a world where everyone else lives in fear.

    The security of one nation cannot be built upon the insecurity of all others.

    Share Another Future

    I urgently beg you. 

    I insist.

    Please share this article.

    Share it not for me, not for a political party or organization, and not because I want to sell books. Share it because humanity urgently needs to recognize the choice now before us.

    Because the recent incident in Ukraine is not to be taken lightly. 

    We are close to the ultimate choice.

    The choice to perish as humanity or the choice to prosper together.

    So please send it to friends. Send it to journalists, researchers, engineers, politicians, military commanders, technology executives and heads of state. Translate it. Republish it. Discuss it. Challenge it if you must—but do not ignore the direction in which we are moving.

    Share not only the warning. 

    Share the possibility of another future.

    People cannot choose a possibility they have never been shown.

    If the only futures presented to humanity are endless economic competition, military supremacy, automated warfare and survival against one another, we will continue constructing precisely that world.

    We must make another civilization imaginable: a civilization based upon stewardship instead of ownership, cooperation instead of competition and intelligent access to abundance instead of an endless struggle for money and power. A world in which AI and robotics serve humanity and the whole living planet—not profit, domination, fear and war.

    Somewhere within every government, military institution and technology company are human beings who still possess conscience and compassion. They must hear from us before fear makes the decision for them.

    One article will not stop the machinery of war. But silence guarantees that the machinery will continue.

    We do not need every human being to awaken at exactly the same moment. We need enough people to speak, share and demonstrate another direction. We need enough people to insist that the future does not belong to fear. We need enough people to remind those in power that there is still something within them deeper than the frightened voice demanding more weapons.

    Humanity Stands at a Threshold

    Down one road, nations surround themselves with increasingly autonomous instruments of death until every human being becomes a potential target and the entire planet becomes a battlefield controlled by machines.

    Down the other road, we recognize that there are no others. 

    We allow the intelligence, compassion and awareness within us to determine how our technology will be used. We stop preparing to destroy one another and begin building a world in which everyone can live.

    This is not a distant philosophical choice.

    It is happening now.

    Please Share

    Please carry this message as far as you can and as high as you can. Let it reach people with the power to change our direction. Let it remind them that another future remains possible.

    We cannot base humanity’s future on killer drones.

    Humanity thanks you.

  • Beyond 9 to 5

    Beyond 9 to 5

    I was never a huge Dolly Parton fan. But I had—and still have—immense respect for her. This is a little tribute to her, may she rest in peace.

    Larger Than Life

    Behind the deliberately larger-than-life exterior, the extravagant hair, the glittering clothes, the infectious laughter and the wonderfully disarming humor was a songwriter with something serious to say. 

    Dolly Parton came from poverty. 

    She understood hardship, work, inequality and the dignity of people who keep going despite receiving far less than they give.

    Her joy did not conceal the depth of her work so much as carry it.

    She could sing about poverty without asking for pity. She could expose exploitation without sounding like a political lecturer. She could deliver a remarkably sharp criticism of the economic system through one of the most joyful and infectious songs ever recorded.

    She made millions of people dance to a song about spending their lives making somebody else rich.

    A Rich Man’s Game

    “9 to 5” was released in 1980, written for the film of the same name. It became a huge global hit and remains instantly recognizable more than four decades later.

    But beneath its irresistible rhythm is a devastating description of working life.

    You get out of bed and pour yourself a cup of ambition. You struggle through the morning traffic. You arrive at work and surrender your time, your energy and your intelligence to someone who controls what you do and whether you advance. You are promised that your efforts will eventually be recognized, yet somebody else takes the credit. You work hard enough to build another person’s dream while barely finding the time or resources to pursue your own.

    “It’s all takin’ and no givin’.”

    That is not merely a complaint about one unpleasant employer. It is a description of the structure itself.

    Millions of people exchange the largest and most active part of their lives for the money they need to survive. Their work generates wealth, but much of that wealth flows upward. The worker receives enough to return the following morning and do it again. Meanwhile, those who own the company, the land, the machinery or the financial assets accumulate the rewards created by everybody else’s effort.

    Dolly Parton compressed this entire arrangement into a cheerful country-pop song that people could sing in the car on their way to work.

    That was its brilliance.

    The Dream of Escape

    The song recognizes the injustice clearly. It also expresses the familiar hope that one day circumstances will change. The worker’s ship will finally come in. The tide will turn. A better life is waiting somewhere beyond the present struggle.

    That dream keeps many people moving.

    The Purchase of Freedom

    We hope for a promotion, a better-paying job, a successful business, a lucky investment, an inheritance or a lottery win. We imagine reaching the point where we will finally possess enough money to control our own time. Then we will be able to rest, travel, create, spend time with the people we love and decide for ourselves how our days should be lived.

    But notice what this means.

    We have created a civilization in which freedom is treated as something we must purchase.

    Those without enough money must sell their time. Those with sufficient money can buy the time and labour of others. The ultimate dream is to accumulate enough wealth that we are no longer compelled to participate from the vulnerable side of that exchange.

    The End of The Game

    The song exposes the rich man’s game, but like most social criticism of our time, it stops short of imagining the end of the game itself. It dreams of a better life within the system. It hopes that the worker might finally succeed, escape or receive a fairer portion of what they produce.

    That would certainly be an improvement. But it leaves the machinery intact.

    For every person who escapes the 9-to-5 struggle, millions remain inside it. And those who do escape are still dependent on those who remain to do the actual work.

    The Rich Man

    Do most people really dream of becoming the rich man?

    Some undoubtedly do. Our culture teaches us to admire those who accumulate fortunes, own enormous properties and rise above everyone else. Wealth is presented as evidence of intelligence, discipline and success, regardless of how it was acquired or how many other people’s labour made it possible.

    But I do not believe most people truly want power over others.

    Freedom

    They do not dream of exploiting workers or hoarding resources. They do not need ten private islands, servants, fleets of cars or billions sitting in financial accounts. What they want are the things that wealth appears to provide: freedom, security, dignity, time, comfort, and the ability to pursue their interests without constantly worrying about survival.

    They want to know that they will have a home. They want nutritious food, healthcare and education. They want time with their children. They want to create, explore, learn, travel, rest and contribute according to their abilities. They want to wake up in the morning knowing that their lives belong to them.

    They do not necessarily want to become the rich man.

    They want a world in which nobody has to be poor.

    The Fear of Freedom

    There is a strange and revealing paradox in listening to “9 to 5” today.

    The work people resented and dreamed of escaping in 1980 is precisely the work many are now terrified of losing.

    Artificial intelligence and robotics are becoming capable of performing more of the repetitive, exhausting and monotonous tasks that generations of workers longed to escape. This should be wonderful news. Humanity has spent centuries inventing tools so that human beings would not have to carry every burden with their own bodies and minds.

    Yet every new advance now arrives as both a promise and a threat.

    People are not necessarily frightened that a machine will answer emails, drive a truck, operate a warehouse, process paperwork or perform some mind-numbing task. They are frightened that when the machine takes the work, the monetary system will also take their income, their home, their security and their place in society.

    They do not fear losing the work itself.

    They fear losing everything attached to it. The relative freedom and life it gives.

    We have therefore reached an absurd position. We are defending the work that exhausts us because our right to live remains attached to performing it. We demand that companies preserve unnecessary jobs because no job still means no money, and no money still means no access to the necessities of life.

    Technology offers liberation, but the economic system translates liberation into unemployment.

    That is not a technological failure. It is a systemic failure.

    The sensible response to automation would be to shorten the working day, share the remaining necessary responsibilities and give everyone access to the abundance that machines help create. Instead, we preserve a system in which people must compete against technology for the right to earn enough money to survive.

    The original dream was to be released from compulsory labour. Now that release is becoming technically possible, we experience it as a nightmare.

    The problem is not that machines can do our work.

    The problem is that we have built a civilization in which human beings lose their livelihood when their work is no longer needed.

    The New World

    What if the dream was never to win the rich man’s game? What if it instead was to end the game—and create a new world in which everyone possesses the freedom that money currently reserves for the fortunate?

    Technology is rapidly changing the conditions under which we live. Machines can perform an increasing share of the repetitive, exhausting and dangerous work once imposed upon human beings. Artificial intelligence can help us understand needs, resources, production and distribution on a scale no earlier civilization could manage.

    We now have the ability to ask a question that would have sounded impossible when “9 to 5” was written:

    Why should human survival remain dependent upon selling human time?

    If food can be cultivated with a fraction of the labour, homes can be constructed efficiently, energy can be produced abundantly and goods can be distributed intelligently, why should access to these things continue to depend upon wages?

    Why automate the work while preserving a system that requires everyone to have a job?

    Why continue placing all the necessities of life behind prices when our productive capacity can provide those necessities for free for everyone?

    A truly advanced civilization would not merely promise workers better treatment. It would make compulsory labour unnecessary. It would use technology to liberate people rather than make them economically redundant. Resources would be held in stewardship rather than ownership, production would respond to actual needs, and access would replace ownership.

    Human beings would still contribute. They would still create, solve problems, care for others, conduct research, grow food, make music and build extraordinary things. But contribution would no longer be coerced by the threat of poverty.

    We would not abolish human purpose.

    We would finally separate purpose from survival.

    More Than Hardship

    Dolly Parton understood more than hardship. She understood how to speak about it without surrendering her spirit to it.

    That may be one reason she reached so many people. She did not appear burdened by the seriousness of her message. She remained playful, glamorous, warm and unapologetically herself. Her humor invited people closer, and once they were listening, her lyrics could say something much deeper than the presentation initially suggested.

    Her joy was not evidence that she failed to understand suffering. It was evidence that suffering had not defeated her.

    There is something profoundly hopeful in that.

    The Beautiful Life

    It is easy to describe exploitation with anger. It is harder to expose it while reminding people that life can still contain beauty, laughter and possibility. Dolly Parton managed to do both. She did not simply sing about working people. She preserved their humor, dreams and humanity.

    “9 to 5” gave voice to something millions already knew: the modern working arrangement takes too much of our lives and gives too little in return.

    Corporate Wealth

    More than forty years later, the song remains relevant because the underlying system remains largely unchanged. We may have laptops instead of typewriters, video meetings instead of office memos and digital platforms instead of factory floors, but human time is still being converted into corporate wealth. People are still waiting for their ship to come in. They are still dreaming about the life they might begin once they finally have enough money to live it.

    And now, just as technology is becoming capable of releasing us from much of this labour, we cling to it in fear because we have not yet changed the system surrounding it.

    We can honour Dolly Parton by celebrating her music, her humour, her generosity and the joy she brought into the world.

    But we can also listen to what she was telling us.

    Then we can carry the thought one step further.

    The Future

    The future does not have to be a world in which everyone struggles for the chance to become rich. It can be a world in which the security, freedom and opportunity associated with wealth are available to everyone—without anyone needing to be rich at all.

    That is the world Benjamin Michaels discovers when he awakens in 2115 in the novel Waking Up – A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity. The rich man’s game has finally ended. Humanity no longer spends its life putting money into somebody else’s wallet.

    Life itself has become the common wealth.

    And it is shared by everyone.

    You can discover this story here.

  • The Practical Advantage

    The Practical Advantage

    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..

    Discover his story

  • Beyond Ownership: Why AI Will Render the Concept of Ownership Obsolete

    Beyond Ownership: Why AI Will Render the Concept of Ownership Obsolete

    When tech leaders and titans of high finance debate the future of artificial intelligence, they inevitably reach the same tantalizing conclusion: intelligent automation and robotics will soon unleash an era of unprecedented global expansion. In this near-future world, the cost of producing goods, energy, and services drops toward zero.

    Yet during a high-profile exchange at the World Economic Forum in Davos between Elon Musk and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, a critical fault line emerged. While Musk pointed to exponential productivity as the solution to global poverty, Fink zeroed in on the structural question mainstream visionaries routinely gloss over:

    Larry Fink: 

    “Elon, can that expansion be broad? Or is it narrow? And how can that be created? How can it broaden the global economy?”

    When asked directly how it broadens the economy, Musk answered that economic output will scale exponentially with robotic labor:

    “The way to think of it is that if you have a large number of humanoid robots, the economic output is the average productivity per robot times the number of robots.”

    He argued that in a benign scenario, automated production will eventually saturate all human material needs to the point where people won’t even be able to think of new tasks to ask a robot to perform.

    But Fink’s point strikes at the very foundation of our economic system, wondering if this expansion will benefit everyone or just a few. If automated systems become the sole engine of wealth creation, who actually owns the engine? A few hyper billionaires, or humanity as a whole?

    The Flaw in the Market Solution

    Musk’s answer to Fink’s concern relies on traditional market dynamics: scale, open-source competition, and plummeting marginal costs. In Musk’s view, because tech companies naturally seek the largest possible customer base, market competition will force AI and robotics out to billions of people, making abundance broad by sheer volume.

    However, this logic contains a massive blind spot.

    Lowering the cost of production does not solve the fundamental problem of access if the underlying mechanisms of income, capital, and private title remain unchanged. If a tiny fraction of corporate entities and private individuals own the algorithms, data centers, energy grids, and robotic factories, then even hyper-cheap abundance remains bottled up behind a legal gatekeeper.

    Traditional market thinking tries to patch this hole with ideas like Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Universal High Income(UHI). But these are merely temporary band-aids—scaffolding designed to pump financial purchasing power into the hands of consumers so they can continue buying goods from capital owners and thus pump the financial power back to the capital owners. It attempts to maintain the illusion of a market exchange long after the necessity of human labor in production has evaporated.

    Furthermore, these universal income models assume a tax base that is rapidly disappearing. In our current framework, state tax revenue relies completely on citizens—through income taxes, payroll taxes, and wage-driven consumer spending. But if AI and robotics displace human labor at scale, the primary engine of public revenue dries up. Where does the state draw the funds to distribute a UBI or UHI if the taxable working class no longer exists? Proponents point to “robot taxes” or corporate AI levies, but this creates an absurd circular loop: taxing corporate capital to fund state payouts, so citizens can hand that money right back to the corporate capital owners. The logic completely falls apart. The only true resolution is to stop trying to patch a broken loop and instead replace the monetary system itself, making the shift from ownership to stewardship our main foundational change.

    If we want true, broad abundance, we cannot simply adjust the distribution of money. We have to fundamentally rethink the concept of ownership itself.

    From passive Ownership to Active Stewardship

    Our current economic framework is anchored in private property rights—a system designed to manage artificial scarcity by granting an owner the legal right to exclude others, extract rent, and maximize short-term capital returns.

    When applied to an automated world, exclusive ownership becomes an even tighter artificial bottleneck that enforces artificial scarcity.

    Crucially, our economy is fundamentally powered by human activity, not machines. The entire monetary engine—from taking out and repaying loans to paying taxes, settling monthly bills, and earning wages—relies on billions of people earning an income to cycle capital back through the system. If intelligent automation and robotics displace human labor at scale, the conventional flow of money collapses; without workers earning, there are no consumers spending or taxpayers funding public infrastructure. The rise of AI does not just present a disruption to jobs—it forces an inescapable reality upon us: when human labor is no longer the foundational fuel of production, the entire monetary system breaks down, compelling us to fundamentally rethink the necessity of money, trading, and ownership itself. Thus, UBI/UHI would not last very long or be much of a point at all as soon as the technology has come far enough. 

    To bridge the gap between technological capacity and universal human flourishing, society must transition from a paradigm of Ownership to a paradigm of Stewardship.

    1. Access Over Exclusion

    Under stewardship, the goal of economic infrastructure is not asset appreciation, but functional access. When AI and automated systems manage agricultural yield, energy lproduction, and goods manufacturing, the legal right to “own” the production capacity becomes redundant. Assets are treated as shared public infrastructure—much like the air we breathe or open-source protocols—where access is granted based on need and utility rather than account balances.

    2. Sustainable Abundance with Ecological Limits

    The word “abundance” on its own can imply reckless, endless consumption. Coupling it with sustainability requires stewardship. Private ownership incentivizes the rapid liquidation of natural capital because balance sheets do not account for planetary depletion. Stewardship bakes ecological boundaries directly into the system, using AI non-monetary to monitor resource pools, closed-loop recycling, and carrying capacities in real time.

    3. Dissolving the Gatekeeper Class

    So long as capital accumulation dictates who survives, technological advancement will run the risk of creating an ever-narrower elite. Replacing ownership with stewardship removes the leverage of the gatekeeper class. No one own anything. We all optimize and share everything based on need. When production assets are managed as a trust for all humanity, technology stops being a mechanism for extracting wealth and becomes what it was always meant to be: a tool for human liberation.

    The Horizon Beyond Money

    The debate between Larry Fink and Elon Musk reveals that even the highest tiers of global finance and technology recognize that a massive transition is underway. Yet they remain bound by the language of the old world—debating how market mechanisms or asset portfolios will adjust.

    True sustainable abundance is not just about producing more stuff faster with robots. It is about outgrowing the archaic game of tokenized exchange altogether.

    By shifting our foundational logic from who owns the world to how we responsibly steward our shared resources, we pave the way for a true post-scarcity future—a world where technology serves human purpose rather than financial accounting.

    Beyond the Paradigm of Ownership

    It is crucial to recognize that transitioning from ownership to stewardship is not a push to revive 20th-century state-collectivism or government control. Replacing private ownership with state ownership merely transfers exclusive authority from a corporate board or private individual to a bureaucratic government. Both models operate on the exact same underlying logic: the assumption that someone—an individual, a company, or a state—must possess the Earth and dictate access.

    Transcending Ownership

    Stewardship transcends the concept of ownership altogether. In nature, no forest owns the rain, and no river issues an invoice for its water; ecosystems operate through open, interconnected relationships rather than title deeds. Transforming our mindset means recognizing that humans are not masters or owners of the planet, but temporary caretakers.

    When we step away from “mine versus state-owned” and move toward stewardship, access is no longer mediated by legal title or purchasing power. Instead, societal assets, technological infrastructure, and natural resources exist to be maintained, optimized, and shared directly for human well-being and ecological health. It is not a shift in who owns the property—it is the maturation of human consciousness past the need to own at all.

    Operationalizing Stewardship: How Non-Monetary Resource Management Works

    If money is no longer used as a proxy for access, and state bureaucratic allocation is rejected, how does a society actually coordinate the flow of goods, energy, and raw materials?

    In a stewardship model, non-monetary resource management replaces speculative market pricing with real-time physical feedback loops and dynamic allocation protocols.

    1. Direct Physical Feedback Over Price Signals

    Under traditional economics, price is an indirect, highly distorted signal that measures purchasing power rather than actual human need or environmental health. In a non-monetary stewardship framework, interconnected sensor and AI networks track direct physical parameters—crop yields, regional water tables, energy grid storage, material depletion, human input and atmospheric boundaries—in real time. Supply chains shift from chasing financial profit margins to maintaining biological and operational equilibrium.

    2. Algorithmic Commons and Universal Access

    Instead of purchasing goods through monetary debt or tokenized exchanges, access is coordinated via an open algorithmic commons. Essential foundations of human welfare—clean energy, nutritious food, shelter, healthcare, and educational tools—are provisioned unconditionally as public infrastructure. When physical constraints arise for localized or rare resources (such as prime physical locations or unique craftsmanship), allocation is governed by transparent scheduling, shared usage cycles, or community-agreed priority frameworks rather than financial bidding wars.

    3. Thermodynamic and Ecological Accounting

    Monetary balance sheets record financial growth while treating environmental destruction as an “externalities” line item. Non-monetary resource management relies on strict physical accounting: tracking energy efficiency, material recyclability, and ecological carrying capacity. Automated manufacturing systems are programmed to execute projects only when raw materials can be sourced, used, and recycled within planetary boundaries.

    4. Polycentric, Transparent Governance

    To prevent automated networks or administrative boards from becoming centralized gatekeepers, governance is structured polycentrically. Local communities retain direct democratic authority over their immediate environments and social priorities, while open-source, auditable protocols coordinate larger-scale logistical distribution across regions.

    By grounding economic coordination in tangible physical reality rather than symbolic monetary exchange, non-monetary stewardship replaces structural scarcity with a system designed for real sustainable abundance.

    Experience the Future Beyond Money

    If you want to explore what this transformation looks like in practice, the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity paints a vivid picture of a world where ownership, money, and trade have truly become relics of the past. Seen through the eyes of Benjamin Michaels—a bewildered billionaire who wakes up into this post-scarcity reality—the story allows readers to experience the daily life, culture, and human dynamics of a society grounded entirely in stewardship and abundance. The book is not a manifesto or instruction manual. Rather, it is a story meant to inspire and show what can be possible in a future like this. For Benjamin, waking up after 100 years in cryonic preservation is of course a shock. But what will he experience in this new world? 

    Will he survive? Will he thrive? Or will he succumb to the temptation of another wake-up trying to bring the world back to what it was…? Back to money, war and ownership…?

    Discover his story 

  •  Nothing Matters More Than Money

     Nothing Matters More Than Money

    Nothing matters more than money.

    Not forests.

    Not clean rivers.

    Not fertile soil.

    Not a stable climate.

    Not peace.

    Not equality.

    Not even the future.

    At least not if you judge civilization by what it consistently rewards.

    Business as usual

    The world carries on as usual.

    Investing. Expanding. Trading. Discussing interest rates, inflation, wages, savings and loans as if this way of organizing civilization is simply how the world works—and always will.

    On the surface, everything appears normal.

    Markets rise and fall. Companies are worth trillions. Governments celebrate economic growth. Economists debate the next quarter. Investors search for the next opportunity. Smartphone companies create their next smartphone.

    Business as usual.

    Shiny Surfaces

    But look beneath the money. Beneath the shiny surfaces of Apple, Samsung, Morgan Chase and Citibank. 

    Climate change.

    Environmental degradation.

    Deforestation.

    Soil erosion.

    Polluted rivers and oceans.

    Mass extinction.

    War.

    Poverty.

    Crime.

    Stress.

    Loneliness.

    Growing inequality.

    A world on the brink of social and ecological breakdown.

    No Connection

    Yet we rarely connect these crises.

    Climate is discussed over here.

    Poverty over there.

    Crime somewhere else.

    War in another room.

    Economic growth in yet another.

    Every problem gets its own debate, its own conference, its own expert panel.

    But almost nobody asks the obvious question.

    What if they are not separate problems?

    What if they are different expressions of the same underlying system?

    Because the monetary system doesn’t ask what is best for humanity.

    It doesn’t ask what is best for nature.

    It doesn’t ask what will still work a hundred years from now. Or a thousand.

    The monetary system is designed for only one thing:

    Increase monetary wealth.

    It asks only one question:

    Can it generate more money?

    If the answer is yes, the activity is rewarded.

    If the answer is no, it struggles to survive.

    That logic doesn’t only influence corporations.

    It shapes governments.

    It shapes scientific research.

    It shapes media.

    It shapes education.

    It shapes our careers.

    It shapes our daily decisions.

    Even when we know the consequences.

    We often speak as if environmental destruction, inequality and endless consumption are unfortunate side effects of an otherwise successful civilization.

    But what if they are not side effects at all?

    What if they are exactly what a civilization built around monetary growth naturally produces?

    That would explain why every attempt to solve one problem seems to create another.

    We become more efficient, and consumption grows.

    We invent cleaner technologies, yet total resource use continues to increase.

    We promise green growth while extracting more from the Earth than ever before.

    The system keeps demanding more more more and more.

    Not because people are evil or stupid.

    Not because politicians don’t care.

    But because the system reward expansion, competition and accumulation.

    The tragedy is that we have become so accustomed to this system that we mistake it for a law of nature.

    It is not.

    It is a human invention.

    And what has been invented can be reinvented.

    The real wealth of humanity has never been money.

    It has always been fertile land.

    Clean water.

    Healthy ecosystems.

    Knowledge.

    Technology.

    Human creativity.

    Cooperation.

    Money cannot replace any of these.

    It can only assign numbers to them.

    And when the numbers become more important than the things they represent, civilization begins to consume the very foundations that keep it alive.

    Because more money does not create more resources, more fertile land, clean water and clean air. Quite the contrary. More money only makes more people compete for the same resources, effectively creating scarcity where abundance was the starting point.

    Perhaps that is where we are today.

    Not facing a climate crisis.

    Or an economic crisis.

    Or a political crisis.

    But a civilizational crisis.

    One that cannot be solved by changing governments, adjusting interest rates or creating another financial incentive.

    It requires something much deeper and groundbreaking.

    A new foundation.

    One where humanity finally organizes itself around protecting and intelligently managing real wealth instead of endlessly accumulating symbolic wealth.

    It may sound impossible as we are so ingrained in the monetary system. It may seem impossible to get out. 

    No Choice

    But what if we have no choice? What if our civilization is collapsing unless we get out of the quagmire of the monetary system? 

    Doing this demands vision. Enough people being able to imagine something else. 

    A Different World

    This is exactly what has happened in the novel Waking Up – A journey towards a new dawn for humanity. Humanity woke up and started imagining a different world. A world that works for both people, nature and the planet. 

    And this is exactly the future the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels wakes up to in the story.

    A world where money is no longer the operating system of civilization, because humanity has finally realized that life itself is worth more. Follow the bewildered billionaire into this world as he wakes up after 100 years of cryonic preservation trying to escape his cancer. He had planned to expand his empire, but instead he finds a thriving world without money…

    Discover the story

  • Ecosystem or Egosystem?

    Ecosystem or Egosystem?

    From Nature’s Balance to Human Separation

    Nature spent billions of years creating an ecosystem.

    Humanity created an egosystem.

    The Web of Life Without Ownership

    Look closely at the natural world. 

    Forests, rivers, oceans, insects, birds, bacteria, fungi, and mammals all participate in an intricate web of life. Countless species compete at times, cooperate at others, and continuously recycle the same resources over and over again. The system itself has no concept of ownership. No tree claims the sunlight alone. No river demands payment for its water. No forest builds fences around the rain.

    The Rise of the Ego

    Then came us.

    Gifted with extraordinary intelligence, imagination, and self-awareness, we also developed something else: the ego. The persistent feeling that we are separate from one another, that survival depends on securing more than everyone else. The fear of not having enough. 

    Gradually, the ecosystem became an egosystem.

    From Stewardship to Ownership

    Instead of saying, “There is enough for all of us if we care for it wisely,” we began claiming pieces of the Earth as our own. We built fences, borders, and walls. We fought over land, minerals, water, forests, and eventually even ideas.

    Ownership replaced stewardship.

    Trading replaced sharing.

    Competition replaced cooperation.

    Money became the language through which access to the Earth’s resources was decided.

    The Birth of the Monetary Mindset

    The monetary system did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged from minds that increasingly viewed the world through separation rather than connection. Once enough people believed that “mine” mattered more than “ours,” a system built on ownership, trade, and accumulation became almost inevitable.

    Living Inside the Egosystem

    Today we still live inside that egosystem.

    We measure success by monetary wealth rather than well-being. We compete for jobs, status, and possessions while surrounded by astonishing technological and natural abundance. We have learned how to produce enough to feed billions, yet millions still go hungry because access depends more on purchasing power than on human need.

    The Ego in Action

    The ego continues to shape our world in subtle and obvious ways. Nations arm themselves not only for protection, but out of fear of losing power. Corporations prioritize profit over planetary health, extracting resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate. Individuals compare, compete, and consume, often chasing identities built on status rather than substance.

    We see it in conflicts that could have been avoided through cooperation and communication. In food wasted while others starve. In oceans filled with plastic while we continue to produce even more. In the relentless pursuit of growth, even when that growth undermines the very ecosystems that sustain life.

    A Different Question

    Nature asks a different question.

    Can the whole system continue to flourish?

    Our egosystem asks another.

    How can I get more?

    Signs of Awakening

    And yet, something is changing.

    Across the world, signs of awakening are emerging. People are beginning to question the assumptions that built the egosystem. Movements for peace, sustainability, and social justice are growing and have been doing so for decades. Communities are rediscovering cooperation, and work together to grow healthy food. Renewable energy is replacing fossil fuels more and more. Forests are being restored. Cities are being redesigned with nature in mind.

    More and more individuals are recognizing that personal well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of others, or from the health of the planet itself.

    The Great Shift

    This is the beginning of a shift.

    Not a sudden revolution, but a gradual remembering.

    A remembering that we are not separate from nature, but expressions of it.

    A remembering that true security comes not from accumulation, but from collaboration and connection.

    Returning to the Ecosystem

    Perhaps the greatest transition humanity will ever make is not from one technology to another, nor from one political ideology to another.

    It is from the egosystem back to the ecosystem.

    Not by abandoning civilization, but by bringing civilization back into harmony with the living world that made it possible in the first place.

    A New Way of Living

    When we finally understand that we are not owners of the Earth but rather temporary stewards of it, everything changes.

    In that awakening, the world begins to transform. Systems once built on competition evolve toward collaboration. Resources are managed for collective well-being rather than individual gain. Technology is guided by wisdom, not just profitability. The boundaries between “mine” and “yours” soften into a shared sense of responsibility.

    The World We Can Create

    This is the world imagined in the book Waking Up – A journey towards a new dawn for humanity.

    A world where humanity has remembered its place within the greater whole.

    A world where the egosystem has given way to an ecosystem of consciousness.

    Perhaps humanity’s future depends on nothing less than this choice. Choose to continue the egosystem until we perish or choose to turn completely back to the ecosystem… 

    Follow the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels when he wakes up after 100 years in cryostasis, only to find a world that has embraced the ecosystem. The egosystem he relied on of money, trading and ownership is gone. His dream of expanding his empire is shattered, but maybe a new dream is born in him…?

    Discover his story

  • Living Off the Land

    Living Off the Land

    In a traditional and survivalist context, living off the land means becoming entirely self-reliant by growing your own food, foraging, harvesting natural energy (like solar or wind), and building your own shelter. This is the traditional view. But maybe it actually means something more? Something much deeper and truly life altering for the whole of humanity?

    For countless people around the world, a quiet revolution has already begun.

    Some are buying small farms. Others are transforming ordinary backyards and frontyards into thriving food forests. Lawns are becoming vegetable gardens. Empty plots are filling with fruit trees, herbs, berries, and flowers that attract bees and butterflies instead of lawnmowers.

    Many of these people aren’t doing it to become rich.

    They’re doing it because something deep inside tells them there must be another way to live.

    One YouTuber joked that the easiest way to make friends is to grow too many tomatoes. Suddenly neighbors stop by. Conversations begin. Surplus is shared. What started as gardening quietly becomes community.

    Others have discovered unexpected benefits. Front-yard gardens reduce soil erosion. Trees provide shade for pedestrians during increasingly hot summers. Birds, insects, and pollinators return. The neighborhood itself becomes more beautiful and alive.

    None of this happens because someone is chasing profit.

    It happens because nature works through abundance.

    More Than Gardening

    At first glance, living off the land might appear to be little more than a hobby.

    In reality, it is something much more profound.

    It is a demonstration that many of our most fundamental needs can be met without passing through the monetary system at all.

    The tomatoes don’t ask for money before they grow.

    The apple tree doesn’t charge rent.

    The bees don’t send invoices for pollination.

    The soil doesn’t negotiate prices.

    Nature simply produces.

    Our role is to care for it.

    A Different Relationship

    Modern society has taught us to see almost everything through ownership.

    My land.

    My house.

    My harvest.

    My products.

    But perhaps that perspective is backwards.

    What if we really are not owners at all?

    What if we are simply temporary stewards of a tiny piece of Earth?

    A steward doesn’t exploit.

    A steward nurtures.

    A steward leaves the land healthier than it was found.

    When enough people think this way, abundance begins replacing scarcity.

    Beyond Money

    If you struggle to imagine a world without ownership, money, or trade, look at these gardens.

    They already exist.

    People exchange seeds, or give them freely when they have an abundance.

    They share knowledge freely.

    They give away excess vegetables.

    Neighbors help each other build greenhouses.

    Children learn where food actually comes from.

    Without realizing it, they are already participating in an economy based less on transactions and more on relationships.

    Not because anyone forced them.

    Because it simply feels natural.

    The Real Wealth

    The old monetary system depends on money.

    People do not.

    Nature certainly does not.

    Forests grew for hundreds of millions of years before the first coin was ever minted.

    Rivers flowed.

    Seeds sprouted.

    Life flourished.

    Money is a human invention.

    Life is not.

    The more we reconnect with the living systems that sustain us, the less dependent we become on artificial systems built around endless consumption and constant economic growth.

    A New Way Forward

    Living off the land does not mean everyone must become a farmer.

    Cities will still exist.

    Technology will continue to develop.

    Science, medicine, engineering, and countless professions will remain essential.

    But the principles behind living off the land can spread everywhere.

    Community gardens.

    Food forests.

    Edible parks.

    Fruit trees along streets.

    Rooftop gardens.

    Shared orchards.

    Regenerative agriculture.

    Every square metre returned to life becomes another step toward a healthier planet.

    From Gardens to Civilization

    Looking back, it all seemed so obvious.

    The seeds of the new world had been there all along.

    They were growing quietly in backyards, community gardens, small farms, balconies, rooftops, and food forests. Millions of people had already begun demonstrating the principle that would eventually transform civilization. They simply didn’t realize how profound it was.

    They weren’t just growing tomatoes.

    They were growing a new way of thinking.

    The tomatoes ripened.

    There were more than enough.

    A neighbor walked by.

    “You want some tomatoes?”

    “Sure!”

    “Take as many as you need. We have a surplus.”

    No negotiation.

    No invoice.

    No transaction.

    Just one human being helping another because there was more than enough for everyone.

    Humanity eventually realized that this simple interaction contained the blueprint for an entirely new civilization.

    If tomatoes could be shared because there was an abundance, why not everything else?

    Need a shovel? Here you go.

    Need building materials? Of course.

    Need a wheelchair? Certainly.

    Need a robot to help in the garden? Why not? We have plenty.

    As long as humanity had the resources, the knowledge, and the ability to produce something sustainably, it simply produced what people needed and shared it directly.

    The same philosophy that had quietly flourished in gardens expanded into neighborhoods.

    Neighborhoods inspired cities.

    Cities inspired nations.

    Eventually, the entire planet awakened to the same simple truth.

    We never actually needed money to satisfy human needs.

    Only the monetary system did.

    Once we understood that, everything changed.

    We stopped producing what generated the highest profit and started producing what created the greatest well-being.

    We stopped measuring success by accumulation and began measuring it by how much life flourished.

    We stopped exploiting the Earth as owners and began caring for it as stewards.

    Technology continued to advance faster than ever before, but now it served humanity instead of an economic machine. Artificial intelligence optimized production and distribution. Robotics handled the repetitive work. Resources were carefully monitored, restored, and shared. Ingenious inventions were spread globally instead of patented. Waste fell dramatically while abundance grew.

    For the first time in history, humanity had aligned its technology with nature instead of against it.

    We took only what we truly needed from the Earth.

    We restored what we used.

    And generation after generation started to leave the planet richer than they had found it.

    Perhaps the future was never waiting for some miraculous invention.

    Perhaps it began the moment we understood that the philosophy of living off the land was never really only about food.

    It was about learning how to live together.

    That is the journey Benjamin Michaels unexpectedly wakes up to one hundred years in the future in Waking Up – A journey towards a new dawn for humanity. A world that at first seems impossible, but that slowly reveals itself to have grown from thousands of small choices made by ordinary people—people who chose stewardship over ownership, abundance over scarcity, and sharing over endless competition.

    Perhaps the future does not begin with a revolution.

    Perhaps it begins with a single seed.

    Discover the story

  • The Death of Money

    The Death of Money

    It’s an almost apocalyptic title.

    The kind of title that immediately makes you think of empty supermarket shelves, closed banks, worthless banknotes and a world descending into chaos.

    Because if money dies…

    …what happens to us?

    The Book

    That is the question at the heart of The Death of Money, a fascinating book by economist, investment banker, lawyer and bestselling author James Rickards(74). Throughout his career, Rickards has advised governments, major financial institutions and even the U.S. defense and intelligence communities on financial risk, economic warfare and the international monetary system.

    When someone with that background writes a book with a title like The Death of Money, it is worth paying attention.

    Reserve Currency

    Rickards argues that the international monetary system has become increasingly fragile. The U.S. dollar has served as the world’s reserve currency since the end of the Second World War, becoming the foundation of international trade and finance.

    Confidence

    But that foundation rests on something surprisingly fragile.

    Confidence.

    The only value money possesses comes from only this one thing: 

    Our confidence in it.

    Not from gold.

    Not from silver.

    Not from the numbers displayed in our online bank accounts.

    Not even from the paper it is printed on.

    Confidence.

    That is all.

    The moment that confidence disappears…

    …so does the value of the currency.

    That simple observation changes everything.

    Growing debt, relentless fiat money creation, financial crises, geopolitical tensions, currency wars and increasing challenges to the dollar all place pressure on that confidence. Rickards argues that if confidence in the dollar(or other currencies for that matter) is seriously undermined, the consequences could spread throughout the entire international monetary system because no obvious replacement is waiting in the wings.

    Whether or not every prediction unfolds exactly as he expects is almost beside the point.

    His book forces us to confront a question most of us never ask.

    What happens if that confidence is lost?

    The Warnings

    Rickards is far from alone.

    For years, warnings have come from every direction. The LaRouche movement has long argued that the financial system is fundamentally unstable. Mainstream economists warn about unsustainable debt. Investors warn about bubbles. Governments quietly prepare for financial crises. Newspapers speak of inflation, banking instability, currency wars, de-dollarization, recession and geopolitical conflict.

    Different people describe different threats.

    Different people propose different solutions.

    Yet beneath all the disagreement lies the same uncomfortable feeling.

    Something doesn’t feel right.

    Something feels increasingly fragile.

    Perhaps that explains why The Death of Money resonates with so many readers.

    It gives a name to a fear that many people already carry.

    The Disaster

    Now imagine the warnings are right.

    Not every detail.

    Not every prediction.

    But the central concern.

    Imagine confidence suddenly evaporates.

    Banks close.

    Markets crash.

    Currencies collapse.

    Savings lose their value.

    Governments panic.

    Television screens fill with the words nobody ever wanted to hear.

    Financial collapse.

    Currency collapse.

    Economic emergency.

    The death of money.

    Fear spreads around the world.

    Because for centuries we have quietly come to believe that money is civilization itself.

    Without money…

    there is no food.

    No products.

    No joy.

    No work.

    No fun.

    No future.

    No survival.

    One question suddenly becomes more important than every other.

    What shall we do??

    The Illusion

    Will we die??

    No.

    Because money has never fed anyone.

    Money has never grown a single grain of wheat.

    Money has never purified a single drop of water, or made it rain.

    Money has never generated electricity.

    Money has never built a home.

    Money has never healed a patient.

    Money has never made a movie.

    Money has never created wealth.

    People do those things.

    Nature provides the resources.

    Technology transforms those resources.

    Human knowledge makes it all possible.

    Money has only organized access to them.

    It has only kept score.

    Somewhere along the way we forgot the difference.

    We stopped seeing money as a tool.

    We started seeing it as reality itself.

    Money became sacred.

    Question governments and people will argue with you.

    Question capitalism and people will argue with you.

    Question socialism and people will argue with you.

    Question banks and people will argue with you.

    Question money itself…

    …and many people think you’ve lost your mind.

    That is how deeply the illusion has taken hold.

    The Reality

    Imagine every currency disappeared tomorrow.

    What would actually disappear?

    Would the forests disappear?

    Would the rivers disappear?

    Would fertile farmland disappear?

    Would power stations disappear?

    Would hospitals disappear?

    Would engineers suddenly forget how to build?

    Would doctors suddenly forget how to heal?

    Would farmers suddenly forget how to grow food?

    Of course not.

    The real wealth of humanity would still be here.

    The Earth would still be here.

    Its resources.

    Its ecosystems.

    Its energy.

    Its knowledge.

    Its technology.

    Its people.

    Everything that actually sustains life would remain.

    Only the accounting system would have disappeared. And instead of the very unfair accounting system based on confidence in money, our accounting system could simply be based on confidence in each other, technology and Earth itself. Confidence that the Earth provides, technology can optimize and distribute it, and confidence in our own conscience, only taking what we need.

    Money has never been wealth.

    It has only represented wealth.

    The map is not the territory.

    The receipt is not the meal.

    The price tag is not the product.

    And money is not wealth.

    A New World

    James Rickards asks us to contemplate the death of money.

    I think he is asking exactly the right question.

    Because once we stop asking how to save money…

    …we can finally begin asking how to organize the real wealth of this planet directly.

    How do we organize food?

    Water?

    Energy?

    Housing?

    Healthcare?

    Education?

    Knowledge?

    Technology?

    Without depending upon an accounting system whose only value comes from our collective confidence in it.

    If confidence is what gives money value…

    …perhaps confidence itself is the real currency.

    The only remaining question is where humanity chooses to invest it.

    In paper.

    In numbers.

    In financial markets.

    Or in ourselves.

    In science.

    In technology.

    In the Earth.

    In stewardship instead of ownership.

    In the extraordinary abundance of this planet.

    And in each other.

    Maybe the death of money is not the death of our world, but rather the birth of a new one…

    And this world is exactly the one explored in the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity. It is a novel, not describing yet another post-apocalyptic dystopian future, but rather a future protopia, a world that that works for all and is constantly being improved.

    Join the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels as he wakes up one hundred years into the future expecting to expand his empire.

    Instead, he discovers something he never imagined possible.

    Money is gone.

    Ownership is gone.

    Yet humanity has never been wealthier.

    Not because it created even more money.

    But because it finally learned to organize the real wealth of the Earth itself.

    Perhaps the death of money will turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to humanity…

    Discover his story