Tag: Utopian vision

  • Universal High Income – And Why It Will Not Work

    Universal High Income – And Why It Will Not Work

    You cannot create abundance by creating and distributing  more money. You can only create abundance by producing more of what people actually need. And distribute that.

    Elon Musk has repeatedly predicted a future in which artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation will make human labor largely unnecessary. He has even suggested that money itself may eventually become irrelevant.

    At the same time, he has introduced the idea of Universal High Income (UHI), which is a high basic income where everyone receives enough money to enjoy a high standard of living, regardless of whether they work on not.

    It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

    Machines do all the work, everyone receives a generous income, and humanity is finally liberated from the necessity of working for a living.

    But there is a fundamental problem with this vision.

    Universal High Income attempts to create universal abundance through a monetary system that cannot guarantee it.

    And the reasons are surprisingly simple.

    1. Resources – Money Does Not Create Resources

    Imagine that tomorrow morning, everyone on Earth wakes up to discover that one million euros has been deposited into their bank account.

    Wonderful! Everyone is suddenly a millionaire!

    But what has actually changed?

    Has a single additional house been built? Has one extra tomato been grown? Has another hospital opened? Has more electricity been generated? Are there suddenly more resources available to humanity?

    No.

    The world contains exactly the same physical resources and productive capacity as it did yesterday.

    The only difference is that everyone now has much more money with which to compete for those resources.

    Money is not food. Money is not housing. Money is not energy. Money is simply a means of gaining access to these things within the monetary system.

    Of course, additional purchasing power can stimulate production where unused capacity exists. But production still requires actual resources, energy, infrastructure, and technology.

    And if those resources are already being used to their limits, distributing more money will not magically create more of them.

    You cannot print abundance. You have to produce it.

    This is the first and most fundamental problem with Universal High Income.

    2. Prices – Supply and Demand Will Absorb the Money

    The second problem is built into the monetary system itself.

    Supply and demand.

    When more people have more money to spend, demand increases. And when demand increases faster than supply, prices tend to rise.

    Imagine a city with 10,000 available apartments and 100,000 people who would like to live in them.

    Now imagine everyone suddenly receives €10,000 per month through Universal High Income.

    Does that create another 90,000 apartments?

    Of course not.

    Instead, many more people can now afford to compete for the same limited number of apartments.

    Landlords and property owners discover that tenants can pay considerably more. Rents rise. Property prices rise.

    An apartment that previously rented for €1,000 per month might eventually cost €5,000 or more.

    And suddenly, that wonderful €10,000 monthly income doesn’t seem quite so wonderful anymore. Because prices have not only gone up on rent, but everything. When everyone suddenly have more money prices will automatically go up. That’s how our monetary system works. 

    The same principle applies to food, energy, water, land, and other necessities whenever supply cannot keep up with demand.

    Even if automation makes televisions, computers, clothing, and countless manufactured products cheaper, it does not automatically make desirable land, housing, or every essential resource equally abundant.

    And what happens when governments increase UHI to compensate for rising prices?

    More purchasing power enters the market, potentially driving prices even higher.

    Higher incomes. Higher demand. Higher prices. Another increase in income.

    Standard of Living

    The cycle can continue without necessarily improving people’s actual standard of living.

    And there is another important consideration. What constitutes a high standard of living is highly subjective.

    Some people may feel they need a luxurious mansion, several expensive cars, and countless possessions to be satisfied with their lives, while others may be perfectly happy living in a modest three-bedroom apartment with everything they need.

    There is no universal definition of how much is enough.

    And perhaps this points to something even more fundamental. Maybe humanity needs to reconsider not only its economic system, but also what it values, what it considers prosperity, and what actually makes people happy.

    Because creating a world of abundance should not mean encouraging everyone to consume as much as possible. It should mean creating a world where everyone has the opportunity to live a fulfilling life according to their own needs, interests, and preferences, while respecting the needs of others and the limits of our planet.

    Of course, prices will not rise equally everywhere. Where production can expand rapidly enough, additional supply can satisfy increased demand without major price increases.

    But this only reinforces the central point.

    It is the availability of actual goods and resources, not the amount of money people receive, that ultimately determines their material standard of living.

    Universal High Income does not guarantee universal high purchasing power.

    And a world full of millionaires is not necessarily a world full of abundance.

    3. Eroded taxes – Who Will Pay for the Universal High Income?

    There is another problem that becomes particularly interesting when considering the future Musk describes.

    Where will the money come from?

    Today, governments collect taxes from employment income, business profits, consumption, property, and other economic activities.

    But what happens when AI and robotics replace an enormous proportion of human employment?

    If millions or billions of people no longer receive wages, governments will lose a substantial part of their traditional income-tax and payroll-tax revenues.

    At the very moment when they would need enormous amounts of money to finance Universal High Income, one of their major sources of revenue could be disappearing.

    Of course, governments could tax the corporations that own the robots and automated factories instead.

    But consider what that means.

    The corporations produce the goods and services. People receive money from the government to purchase those same goods and services. The corporations receive that money, and the government then taxes the corporations to finance the next round of payments.

    Money circulates from governments to consumers, from consumers to corporations, and from corporations back to governments.

    Such a system is not mathematically impossible. Governments already redistribute money through taxation and public spending.

    But why preserve this elaborate financial arrangement if the machines are already capable of producing what everyone needs?

    Why not concentrate on making the actual goods and services available instead?

    And there is another important question.

    Who owns those machines?

    4. The Owners Will Still Own Everything

    Universal High Income does not fundamentally change the ownership structure of the monetary system.

    Far from it. If anything, it reenforces it.

    Land still belongs to landowners. Factories still belong to corporations. Automated production systems still belong to whoever owns them.

    And everyone else still needs money to access what those owners control.

    As long as there are still owners there will be rich and poor.

    Imagine a future in which millions of humanoid robots produce food, construct buildings, manufacture products, and provide services.

    Human labor has become largely unnecessary.

    But if the robots, factories, land, and resources remain concentrated in relatively few hands, everyone else remains dependent on purchasing access to their output.

    Universal High Income could then become a mechanism for distributing purchasing power to the population while preserving the existing concentration of productive ownership.

    The owners receive money from consumers, while consumers depend on governments to provide that money.

    Even if everyone receives a generous income, the underlying relationship remains.

    Some own the productive resources. Others pay to access them.

    The technology has changed, but the economic structure has not.

    Why would we want such a world?

    Where a tiny elite owns most everything while the rest are dependent on government payouts?

    And this brings us to an interesting contradiction in Musk’s vision.

    5. Elon Musk’s Contradiction

    Elon Musk is working tirelessly to develop technologies that could eventually eliminate the necessity for much of human labor.

    Through artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation, he is helping create the technological foundation for a world in which machines could perform an extraordinary proportion of the tasks necessary to sustain human civilization.

    He has also suggested that money may eventually become irrelevant.

    Yet he continues to describe the future in terms of Universal High Income.

    But why?

    If AI and robotics can produce practically everything humanity needs, why should everyone need a high income to purchase those things?

    If money is becoming irrelevant, why introduce another mechanism that makes everyone dependent on receiving it?

    Why keep money at all??

    And perhaps most importantly, why is the discussion so focused on how much money people might receive rather than who will own and control the automated production systems?

    As long as there are owners of the world’s resources and productive systems there will always be an imbalance in our world. An imbalance that historically has led to countless conflicts and wars.

    Sensational Predictions

    I sometimes wonder whether all these sensational predictions about Universal High Income, the end of work, and the disappearance of money are mostly meant to distract from the much more fundamental questions:

    Who will own the robots and factories? Who will control the resources? Who will decide what gets produced? And who will benefit from the extraordinary abundance these technologies could make possible?

    I cannot know Musk’s true intentions. But I would certainly like to hear him address these questions more directly.

    Because the future of humanity is not fundamentally about how much money everyone will receive.

    It is about what humanity can produce sustainably, how those resources are managed, and whether everyone can benefit.

    6. The Real Opportunity of AI and Robotics

    Here is where the discussion becomes truly exciting.

    For most of human history, producing the necessities of life has required enormous amounts of human labor.

    People had to cultivate fields, build houses, manufacture products, transport goods, and perform countless other tasks.

    The monetary system developed around this world of human labor, exchange, ownership, and scarcity.

    But what happens when technology changes the fundamental conditions?

    What happens when automated systems can grow food, construct buildings, manufacture goods, transport resources, maintain infrastructure, and perform most of the work necessary to sustain civilization?

    For the first time in history, humanity may be approaching the technological capacity to provide an abundant standard of living for everyone without requiring everyone to work for it.

    That is an extraordinary opportunity.

    But instead of asking how to distribute enough money for everyone to purchase this abundance, shouldn’t the question be how to organize the production and distribution of the abundance itself?

    We have established that more money does not lead to more resources.

    The Real Questions

    These are the real questions we must ask:

    What resources are available?

    How can we optimize them?

    What does everyone need?

    How much can be produced sustainably?

    How can technology coordinate production and distribution so that everyone’s needs can be met while preserving the planet’s ecosystems?

    These are questions AI could help humanity answer.

    And they lead directly toward a resource-based economy.

    7. From Universal High Income to Universal High Living Standards

    Imagine a world where housing, food, energy, transportation, healthcare, education, and communication are available to everyone without monetary transactions.

    Not because everything is infinitely abundant, but because humanity has organized its resources and productive capacity around meeting people’s needs rather than generating financial returns.

    In such a world, AI and robotics would continuously monitor available resources, production capacity, environmental conditions, and actual demand.

    Production could be adjusted according to what people need and what the planet can sustainably provide.

    Resources that remain scarce would still require responsible allocation. Technology cannot create unlimited land, water, or raw materials. But it can help optimize and maximize what we have.

    But scarcity would no longer automatically mean that those with the most money receive the most.

    Instead of ownership, humanity could develop a system of stewardship, where the Earth’s resources are managed for the benefit of everyone. 

    We would be stewards of Earth instead of owners.

    And instead of measuring prosperity through income, it could be measured through actual living standards, access to necessities, personal freedom, health, well-being, and environmental sustainability.

    Nobody would need to become a millionaire to live an abundant life.

    Nobody would need to receive Universal High Income to access the products of automated production.

    The objective would no longer be universal financial wealth.

    It would be universal real wealth.

    8. Why Preserve the Bottleneck?

    Money is an intermediary bottleneck between human needs and the resources required to satisfy them.

    Today, someone can be hungry while food is available, homeless while houses stand empty, or unable to obtain medical treatment even though the necessary technology and expertise exist.

    Not necessarily because the resources are unavailable, but because access to them depends on money.

    Universal High Income attempts to address this problem by giving everyone more money.

    But it leaves the bottleneck in place.

    It leaves prices in place.

    It leaves competition for purchasing power in place.

    And it leaves the concentration of ownership completely untouched.

    If AI and robotics eventually provide humanity with the productive capacity to satisfy everyone’s needs, why should access to that production continue to depend on a financial mechanism?

    Why should people need money to obtain what society is technologically capable of providing?

    The question is no longer simply how to make everyone rich.

    It is how to create a world in which everyone can live richly, regardless of money.

    Conclusion: 

    Abundance Is Not a Number in a Bank Account

    Universal High Income is an understandable response to a future in which AI and robotics may eliminate enormous amounts of human employment.

    And as a transitional measure, income guarantees could help protect people from poverty and economic disruption in the transition to a world of real wealth.

    You cannot print money and think it is abundance.

    You have to produce it. And once you can produce it for everyone, why should anyone need money to access it?

    This is the future I explore in the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, where a the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels  awakens a century from now to discover that humanity has moved beyond money, trade, and ownership toward a cooperative, resource-based civilization.

    Discover the story

  • We Have Finally Agreed

    We Have Finally Agreed

    For thousands of years, humanity fought over the planet we inhabit.

    Kings, emperors, dictators, despots and governments tried to conquer as much territory as possible. Nations formed alliances, broke alliances, invaded their neighbors, defended their borders, and sacrificed millions of lives in the pursuit of power, territory, resources, and security.

    And what did we achieve?

    War after war after war. Death after death. Destruction after destruction.

    We built civilizations, destroyed them, and built them again. We conquered territories, lost them, and fought to regain them. We drew borders across the planet, moved them through violence, and defended them with ever more sophisticated weapons.

    And for a very long time, we believed this was simply the way the world had to be.

    Until, at long last, we agreed.

    Enough was enough.

    The Fatigue of War

    Looking back at the early twenty-first century, the pattern was painfully familiar.

    Russia and Ukraine. Israel and Palestine. And countless other conflicts, large and small, across the planet.

    People killing people. Homes destroyed. Families torn apart. Children growing up without parents. Parents burying their children. Millions displaced, injured, traumatized, or permanently disabled.

    And for what?

    Territory? Resources? Political power? National pride? Security?

    War had become so familiar that many people regarded it as an inevitable part of human civilization.

    Every generation inherited the fears, resentments, territorial claims, and unfinished conflicts of previous generations.

    When one war ended, another seemed to begin. Sometimes the same conflict erupted again decades later, with new weapons, new leaders, and new generations of young people sent to fight.

    And when the fighting stopped, we rebuilt what we had destroyed.

    We buried our dead, cared for the wounded, negotiated new agreements, and prepared ourselves for the possibility of doing it all again.

    What an astonishing waste of human life, intelligence, energy, and resources.

    But perhaps the greatest tragedy was that we rarely questioned the foundation upon which this endless cycle rested.

    We argued about who was right and who was wrong, who had the legitimate claim, who had attacked first, and who had the right to defend themselves.

    And while these questions certainly mattered to those involved, they seldom brought us any closer to eliminating the underlying problem.

    The Illusion of Security

    For millennia, humanity pursued security through control.

    A ruler conquered territory to secure resources for his people. A nation expanded its borders to protect itself from potential enemies. Governments built armies, fortifications, and increasingly powerful weapons to defend what they considered theirs.

    But there was a fundamental contradiction in this approach.

    Whatever we conquered, we had to defend. And whatever we defended, someone else might eventually try to conquer.

    The more territory and resources we controlled, the more we had to protect.

    And when our neighbors saw us strengthening our defenses, they often perceived us as a threat. So they strengthened theirs.

    We responded by strengthening ours even further.

    And the cycle continued.

    This was known as the security dilemma.

    One nation’s attempt to increase its security could make another nation feel less secure, creating an escalating cycle of fear, competition, and military preparation.

    The tragedy was that both sides could genuinely believe they were acting defensively.

    Yet their combined actions made everyone less secure.

    We had mistaken control for security.

    And for thousands of years, we tried to solve the insecurity created by this arrangement through even greater control.

    We invented increasingly sophisticated weapons, established military alliances, built enormous defense industries, and devoted extraordinary amounts of human ingenuity to preparing for conflicts we hoped would never happen.

    But the underlying problem remained.

    We had divided the planet into possessions, and every possession represented something that might be taken away.

    Who Owned the Earth?

    There was a question we should have asked ourselves much earlier.

    Who actually owned the Earth?

    Who created the continents, the oceans, the mountains, the forests, the rivers, and the fertile soil?

    Certainly not the kings, emperors, governments, corporations, or individuals who claimed ownership of them throughout history.

    The Earth had existed for billions of years before humanity appeared.

    Yet we divided it into territories and declared that this piece belonged to one nation, that piece belonged to another, and countless smaller pieces belonged to individuals, corporations, and institutions.

    We turned the surface of our common home into a gigantic collection of possessions.

    And then we spent thousands of years fighting over those possessions.

    We even developed elaborate legal systems to determine who owned which pieces of land, who could extract which resources, and who had the right to exclude everyone else.

    A person could be born on Earth and still have no right to occupy a tiny piece of it without paying someone else.

    An entire nation could lack access to resources that existed abundantly elsewhere on the same planet.

    And people could become extraordinarily wealthy simply by controlling access to things that nature had provided.

    All because we had accepted the idea that the Earth could be owned.

    But was that ever anything more than a human agreement?

    And if we had agreed to divide the planet into possessions, couldn’t we simply agree to stop?

    We Finally Grew Up

    So, this was how we lived for millennia.

    We conquered, defended, competed, accumulated, threatened, negotiated, and fought.

    We called it civilization.

    We called it national security.

    We called it the natural order of things.

    But eventually, something changed.

    We began to recognize that our extraordinary technological development had not been accompanied by an equally extraordinary development in how we organized our lives together.

    We could explore other planets, manipulate matter at microscopic scales, develop artificial intelligence, and automate increasingly complex tasks.

    Yet we continued fighting over ownership of the planet on which we were born.

    And finally, humanity had enough.

    We grew up.

    Not because everyone suddenly became wise as God, infinitely generous, or free from disagreement.

    But because we finally recognized that we could not continue trying to solve the same fundamental problem with the same fundamental thinking.

    We needed to change the foundation itself.

    And so we did.

    We drew a line through history.

    Not to erase what had happened, or forget those who had suffered, but to declare that the old claims of ownership would no longer determine humanity’s future.

    We nullified the ancient assumption that land and natural resources could belong exclusively to nations, corporations, or individuals.

    We started again.

    As adults.

    We finally agreed.

    The Declaration of Earth

    The declaration was remarkably simple.

    Planet Earth, including all its land, waters, atmosphere, and natural resources, was declared unowned and recognized as the common heritage of all humanity.

    No nation could claim exclusive ownership of a territory.

    No corporation could claim ownership of the planet’s natural resources.

    No individual could claim a piece of Earth as private property to be sold  and traded. Instead, we agreed on becoming stewards of Earth, caring for the land we live on.

    We had already established a similar principle for the Moon decades earlier, when humanity agreed that no nation could appropriate it through claims of sovereignty.

    Now we extended that principle to our own planet.

    Earth was not something to be possessed owned.

    It was our common home.

    And with that declaration came a new responsibility.

    We were no longer competing owners of separate pieces of a planet.

    We became its collective stewards.

    Of course, the declaration did not instantly transform every aspect of civilization. There were enormous practical questions to resolve, existing systems to reorganize, and centuries of habits and assumptions to overcome.

    But the fundamental decision had been made.

    We were no longer working toward a world in which everyone could never own enough.

    We were creating a world in which nobody needed to own anything in order to live well.

    And that changed everything.

    From Ownership to Stewardship

    One of the first things we changed was our relationship with the natural world.

    Forests were no longer regarded as somebody’s property from which financial profit could be extracted. They were recognized as living ecosystems providing countless benefits to the planet.

    Agricultural land was cultivated to provide nutritious food while maintaining the health of the soil.

    Homes were provided for people to live in, rather than treated as financial assets to be accumulated.

    Minerals, energy, water, and other resources were managed intelligently, sustainably, and cooperatively.

    We no longer asked how much money could be made from a particular resource. Money ceased to exist.

    We asked what it could contribute to the well-being of life on Earth.

    And because ownership had been replaced by stewardship, the responsibility for managing resources was based on knowledge, competence, ecological understanding, and the needs of the communities they served.

    We developed cooperative councils at different levels, from local communities to global coordination, helping ensure that decisions reflected both local circumstances and the needs of the planet as a whole.

    No single person, government, corporation, or artificial intelligence was granted ownership or absolute authority over Earth’s resources.

    We had learned enough from our history to understand the dangers of concentrating power.

    The End of the Monetary System

    Once we had abandoned ownership, another ancient institution lost its purpose.

    Money.

    For thousands of years, money had been the principal mechanism through which we distributed access to resources.

    Those with the greatest purchasing power could obtain the most, while those with little or no money often struggled to acquire even the necessities of life.

    This had produced a civilization in which enormous quantities of useful resources remained inaccessible to people who needed them, simply because they could not afford to pay.

    But now we had changed the underlying principle.

    Resources were no longer commodities to be owned and traded.

    They were part of our common inheritance, managed for the benefit of everyone.

    So we reorganized production and distribution around actual needs, available resources, ecological limits, and human preferences.

    Advanced artificial intelligence helped us understand resource availability, forecast demand, coordinate production, and minimize waste.

    Robotics and automation took over much of the repetitive, dangerous, and physically demanding work that humans had previously performed.

    And instead of competing to sell more and more products, we cooperated to produce what people actually needed and wanted, as sustainably and efficiently as possible.

    We no longer had to ask whether providing something was financially profitable.

    We asked whether it was useful, desirable, and physically possible.

    And as our productive capabilities expanded, we were able to provide increasingly abundant access to housing, nutritious food, clean water, energy, healthcare, education, transportation, communication, and countless other goods and services.

    Money and trading gradually became obsolete.

    Not because we had outlawed generosity or exchange between people, but because we had developed a far more direct way of sharing the abundance of our planet.

    What Happened to Security?

    Perhaps the most extraordinary transformation was in our understanding of security.

    Remember the security dilemma?

    For thousands of years, nations had tried to protect themselves by accumulating military power and controlling territory.

    But now the foundation of that dilemma had changed.

    Why would one community invade another to secure resources when those resources were already part of a globally coordinated system serving everyone?

    Why fight to control fertile land when food production was optimized and organized cooperatively?

    Why conquer territory when everyone had access to housing, healthcare, education, energy, and the necessities of life, regardless of where they were born?

    Human Disagreements

    The old incentives for territorial conquest had largely disappeared.

    Of course, human disagreements did not vanish.

    We still had different opinions, personalities, desires, traditions, and ways of life.

    And we still needed ways to resolve conflicts, protect people from harm, and address destructive behavior.

    But we no longer organized entire societies around the expectation that other societies might try to seize their possessions.

    The enormous military establishments of the past gave way to cooperative systems of protection, emergency response, disaster prevention, and peaceful conflict resolution.

    The human ingenuity once devoted to developing increasingly destructive weapons was redirected toward preserving and improving life.

    And we discovered something remarkable.

    Security no longer depended on how much of the Earth we could control. It depended on how well we could care for one another.

    Instead of securing the Earth against one another, we secured the Earth for one another.

    What Did We Achieve?

    Peace.

    Not the fragile peace that had once depended on military deterrence, political alliances, and the constant threat of retaliation or invasion.

    But a far more durable peace built upon shared access, cooperation, and the removal of many of the incentives that had driven humanity into conflict.

    Global Prosperity

    Not the prosperity of a wealthy minority surrounded by people struggling to survive, but a civilization in which everyone could benefit from global resources, humanity’s collective knowledge, technology, and productive capacity.

    Freedom

    Not merely the freedom to compete for money and possessions, but the freedom to live without the constant fear of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, or financial ruin.

    And perhaps most importantly, we gained something that had been extraordinarily difficult to achieve in the old world.

    A Common Purpose

    Instead of competing to maximize the wealth and power of separate nations, corporations, and individuals, we worked together to improve the conditions for life on Earth.

    We restored damaged ecosystems, regenerated forests, cleaned polluted rivers and oceans, and developed more sustainable ways of producing everything we needed.

    We designed cities around the well-being of their inhabitants rather than the profitability of real estate.

    We created communities where people could contribute according to their abilities, interests, and passions, without having to sell their labor merely to survive.

    And we began to measure our progress not by financial growth, but by the actual quality of life we were creating.

    How healthy were our ecosystems?

    How well were people living?

    How much freedom did they have to pursue their interests?

    How effectively were we using our resources?

    How much suffering could we prevent?

    How much beauty, knowledge, creativity, and joy could we bring into the world?

    These became the questions that guided our civilization.

    And the answers continued to improve.

    Welcome to the New World

    Looking back now, it seems almost incredible that it took humanity so long to arrive at such a simple realization.

    We did not need to own the Earth in order to enjoy everything it had to offer.

    We did not need to compete for its resources when we could cooperate in managing them.

    And we did not need to fight over the planet when we could share it.

    We had spent thousands of years trying to conquer the world.

    But our greatest achievement came when we finally stopped trying.

    We did not unite Earth under a single ruler or empire.

    We simply recognized that it was our common home, and that everyone deserved to benefit from it.

    It took us a few thousand years to grow up. 

    But we finally did.

    Our New Friend

    And now, we have a rather unusual new friend among us.

    Mr. Benjamin Michaels.

    Our bewildered billionaire, who recently woke up after spending a hundred years in cryonic preservation!

    As you can imagine, it has been quite a shock for him.

    In his former world, ownership was everything. The more you owned, the more powerful and secure you were considered to be.

    Benjamin was very good at that game. In fact, he was one of the richest people on the planet.

    And now?

    Well, now he has awakened in a world where nobody owns anything!

    No money. No buying or selling. No financial empires to build or protect.

    Everything is shared, and everyone has access to what they need.

    You can probably imagine his confusion.

    For him, it is almost as though the entire world has gone mad.

    For us, of course, it is simply normal life.

    But we understand him.

    After all, he spent his entire previous life learning how to succeed in a system that no longer exists.

    It takes time to adjust to something like that.

    Fortunately, he has me.

    Aweena.

    His personal guide, showing him all the ins and outs of this new world.

    And believe me, there is quite a lot to show him!

    He has been here for a while now, and I think he is finally beginning to adjust.

    We are all cheering for him, doing whatever we can to help.

    After all, imagine falling asleep as a billionaire and waking up in a world where nobody owns anything!

    Welcome to the New World, Benjamin!

    Oh, and one more thing.

    If you like, I can give you a guided tour as well.

    Just read Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, a book written about our world a hundred years ago.

    You can find it HERE.

    I’ll be waiting for you!

    — Aweena, 2115

  • The Master of Disguise

    The Master of Disguise

    Politics here. Climate change there. Poverty, inequality, corruption, unemployment, immigration, taxation, and war. Everywhere we look, people are arguing about the problems of our world. And almost everywhere, money is involved.

    Money here. Money there. Taxes. Not enough money. Too much money. Money in the wrong hands. Money that must be raised, borrowed, invested, redistributed, or saved.

    For thousands of years, humanity has become so accustomed to money that we barely notice its presence anymore.

    But what if we have been looking at our problems from the wrong perspective all along?

    What if the greatest problem is something so familiar that we have become almost incapable of recognizing it?

    The Surface

    Every day, millions of people discuss the problems of our civilization. On television, in newspapers, on social media, and around dinner tables, we argue about what is wrong with the world and who is responsible.

    And there is certainly no shortage of people to blame.

    Politicians. Billionaires. Corporations. Governments. Immigrants. Environmentalists. Capitalists. Socialists. The rich. The poor.

    Everyone seems to have an explanation, and many explanations are remarkably simple.

    The politicians are corrupt. The billionaires are greedy. Climate change is a hoax designed to collect more taxes. Immigrants are taking our jobs. The poor are lazy. The rich are exploiting everyone else.

    Simple explanations for enormously complicated problems.

    And people love them.

    Why? Because they are easy to understand. They require very little investigation, and they often confirm something we already believe.

    We read a headline, recognize something that fits our worldview, and conclude that we have understood the issue.

    Why bother digging any deeper?

    The Simplification

    Recently, I came across a discussion on social media about climate change. The original newspaper article was considerably more nuanced than the dramatic headline being shared.

    THE CLIMATE FIGHT IS DEAD

    But the headline was enough.

    People immediately began arguing about taxation, political agendas, and whether climate change was even real.

    The complexity of the original article had largely disappeared. What remained was a collection of simplified arguments, many of which seemed to have little to do with the actual condition of our planet.

    And this is hardly unique to climate change.

    We see it everywhere.

    Complicated economic and social problems are reduced to slogans, accusations, and convenient explanations. The easier an argument is to understand, the easier it becomes to repeat.

    And repetition can make an argument feel true, even when the evidence is weak.

    This doesn’t necessarily mean people are unintelligent. Sometimes they simply don’t want to spend the time and effort required to investigate something more deeply.

    After all, if an explanation already seems convincing, why question it?

    But perhaps we should.

    Digging Deeper

    Fortunately, some people do investigate.

    Journalists, researchers, whistleblowers, and ordinary citizens sometimes refuse to accept the explanations presented to them.

    They dig.

    And occasionally, they uncover something spectacular.

    Corruption. Fraud. Bribery. Embezzlement. Tax evasion. Secret financial arrangements. Politicians accepting money in exchange for favors. Corporations deliberately deceiving the public to protect their profits.

    And people love these revelations!

    Another scandal! Another corrupt politician exposed! Another billionaire caught cheating! Another corporation forced to pay an enormous fine!

    The newspapers have a field day. Social media explodes with outrage. People demand justice.

    And sometimes justice is served.

    The guilty are punished, new regulations are introduced, and everyone congratulates themselves on having uncovered yet another rotten part of society.

    But have we really reached the bottom?

    Or have we merely discovered another layer?

    The Wrongdoing

    Notice something interesting about most financial scandals.

    The outrage is generally directed at people who have used money in the wrong way.

    They have broken the rules of the monetary system.

    They have stolen money, hidden money, manipulated money, or used money to gain influence they were not supposed to have.

    And naturally, we want them stopped and punished.

    But what happens next?

    We introduce new laws, stricter regulations, greater transparency, and stronger enforcement.

    In other words, we try to prevent people from misusing money so that the monetary system can continue functioning as intended.

    We investigate the people who break the rules of the system, but rarely question the system itself.

    And even when nobody breaks the law, the system can still reward activities that damage the environment, encourage  overconsumption, or place financial interests ahead of human needs.

    Perfectly Legal

    An activity can be perfectly legal, highly profitable, and socially and environmentally destructive at the same time.

    This is where the investigation becomes particularly interesting.

    Because perhaps the greatest problem isn’t how certain people misuse money.

    Perhaps it is what money makes us do even when we use it exactly as intended.

    The Political Circus

    And then, of course, we have the politicians.

    The stars of the greatest show on Earth.

    Every day, they provide us with something new to discuss. Another outrageous statement. Another political scandal. Another broken promise. Another election. Another politician who supposedly knows how to fix everything.

    And the audience is captivated.

    We cheer for our favorites, ridicule their opponents, argue with friends and strangers, and convince ourselves that everything will be better once the right people are in charge.

    But in charge of what, exactly?

    The monetary system.

    Regardless of which political party wins an election, the fundamental structure generally remains the same. Governments must balance budgets, stimulate economic growth, attract investments, create jobs, collect taxes, and manage public debt.

    Some politicians want higher taxes. Others want lower taxes. Some want more government spending. Others want less. Some want to redistribute wealth, while others want to encourage its accumulation.

    And these differences can have very real consequences for people’s lives.

    But notice what they have in common.

    They are all arguing about how to operate the same underlying system.

    Almost nobody is questioning whether we need that system in the first place. And whether it is actually serving humanity and Earth towards the best possible civilization we can have.

    And this is where the political circus becomes such a convenient distraction.

    While millions of people argue about the performers on the stage, the machinery behind the stage continues operating.

    The audience becomes so preoccupied with deciding which politician is the hero and which is the villain that it rarely questions the theater itself.

    And perhaps that is the greatest irony of modern politics.

    We believe we are deciding the future of civilization by choosing who should manage the monetary system, while the possibility of replacing that system remains almost entirely outside the discussion.

    The politicians don’t even need to be consciously distracting us.

    The spectacle does that perfectly well on its own.

    The Demon

    And somewhere beneath the stage, our little demon is smiling.

    “Wonderful! Keep watching the clowns. Don’t look behind the curtain.”

    The Invisible Master

    Imagine a master of disguise who has been living among us for thousands of years.

    He has become so familiar that nobody suspects him anymore.

    He is everywhere.

    In our homes, our workplaces, our minds, our governments, our schools, our hospitals, and our relationships.

    He influences what we produce, what we consume, where we live, what we do for a living, and what opportunities we have.

    He determines which projects are considered viable and which are abandoned.

    He can make destroying a forest seem perfectly sane in the light of profit while protecting it is considered too expensive.

    He can make food inaccessible to hungry people, even when an abundance of food exists.

    He can leave houses empty while people sleep on the streets.

    And he can make technological advancements that should liberate humanity appear threatening because they might eliminate people’s jobs and incomes.

    Yet almost nobody recognizes him as the underlying problem.

    Because he has disguised himself as something indispensable.

    Something natural.

    Something civilization supposedly cannot function without.

    His name?

    The Monetary System.

    The Perfect Disguise

    The monetary system has accomplished something extraordinary.

    It has convinced us that we need money to solve problems that was created by money in the first place.

    We need money to fight poverty.

    We need money to protect the environment.

    We need money to feed the hungry.

    We need money to provide housing.

    We need money to develop technology that could make all these things easier.

    And when there isn’t enough money, we conclude that these things simply cannot be done.

    But consider what this actually means.

    We live on a planet with an abundance of physical resources, knowledge, technology, and billions of capable human beings.

    The planet doesn’t demand payment for any of its resources. Nature doesn’t issue invoices.

    We have created the prices, the financial obligations, the ownership structures, and the rules governing access.

    And then we have become so accustomed to those arrangements that we confuse them with reality itself.

    A shortage of money is not necessarily a shortage of resources.

    A lack of profitability is not necessarily a lack of usefulness.

    And something that cannot be afforded is not necessarily something that cannot be accomplished.

    These are fundamentally different things.

    Yet we routinely treat them as though they were the same.

    That is the disguise.

    The Smiling Demon

    Now imagine our master of disguise as a little demon sitting far beneath the surface of civilization.

    Above him, humanity is arguing furiously.

    Politicians are blaming other politicians. Billionaires are blaming governments. Governments are blaming economic circumstances. Citizens are blaming corporations. Corporations are blaming regulations.

    Investigators are digging everywhere, exposing corruption and wrongdoing.

    And every time someone uncovers another scandal, the demon smiles.

    “Excellent! They’ve found another villain.”

    The public becomes outraged. The guilty are condemned. New laws are passed.

    And the demon smiles again.

    “Wonderful! They’re fixing my rules.”

    Then everyone returns to arguing about taxes, budgets, prices, profits, and economic growth.

    And the demon laughs.

    “They’ll never think to question me.”

    Of course, there is no actual demon.

    The monetary system has no consciousness, no evil intentions, and no secret plan.

    It is a human invention.

    And that is precisely what makes the disguise so remarkable.

    We have created a system that now appears to govern its creators.

    The Real Question

    What would happen if we continued digging?

    Not merely into the corruption, the greed, the inequality, or the environmental destruction, but into the economic structure that influences so much of human behavior?

    What if we stopped asking only how money should be distributed and started asking why we need money to distribute resources at all?

    What if we stopped asking how to create enough jobs and started asking how technology could free us from the necessity of working for survival?

    What if we stopped asking how to make environmental protection profitable and started organizing production and consumption according to ecological reality?

    What if we stopped treating the Earth as property to be bought and sold, and started treating it as a shared home to be cared for?

    These questions lead somewhere very different from the usual political arguments.

    They lead toward a resource-based civilization organized around collaboration, sharing, and stewardship rather than money, trading, and ownership.

    A civilization in which access to goods and services is based on needs and available resources rather than purchasing power.

    A civilization in which artificial intelligence and automation help humanity manage resources intelligently, reduce waste, and provide a high standard of living for everyone.

    Not a world without challenges, disagreements, or difficult decisions.

    But a world in which we no longer have to make everything financially profitable before we consider it worth doing.

    The Unmasking

    For thousands of years, humanity has lived with monetary systems in one form or another.

    We have changed currencies, governments, laws, institutions, and economic policies.

    We have overthrown rulers, fought revolutions, exposed corruption, and demanded fairer distributions of wealth.

    Yet the fundamental assumption has largely survived.

    That money is necessary.

    That trading is necessary.

    That ownership of the Earth’s resources is necessary.

    But what if these are not eternal truths?

    What if they are merely conventions that humanity has become accustomed to?

    And what if our rapidly advancing technology is finally making it possible to organize civilization in an entirely different way?

    Perhaps the master of disguise is not quite as invisible as he once was.

    Perhaps some people have begun to recognize him.

    Perhaps they have started asking questions that go deeper than the familiar arguments about who should have more money, who should pay more taxes, and who should control the economy.

    And perhaps, for the first time in human history, we are approaching a point where we have the technological capacity to seriously consider leaving the monetary system behind.

    Deeply Embedded

    The greatest disguise is not one that makes something disappear.

    It is one that makes something so familiar that nobody thinks to question its existence.

    Money has become so deeply embedded in our understanding of civilization that we struggle to imagine civilization without it.

    We see the corruption. We see the inequality. We see the environmental destruction. We see the poverty, the competition, and the conflicts.

    And we keep trying to solve these problems within the very structure that helps perpetuate them.

    But perhaps the time has come to look beneath the surface.

    To question not merely the people who operate the system, but the system itself.

    Because the monetary system is not a law of nature.

    We invented it.

    And we can choose to replace it.

    The master of disguise has been hiding in plain sight all along.

    But a disguise only works as long as nobody recognizes it.

    ⸻

    What might happen when humanity finally begins to see beyond money?

    The novel, Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, explores precisely that possibility through the story of Benjamin Michaels, a bewildered billionaire who awakens after a hundred years to discover a civilization that has abandoned money, trading, and ownership in favor of collaboration, sharing, and stewardship.

    Discover the story

  • The Constitutional Contradiction

    The Constitutional Contradiction

    The monetary system may be digging its own grave.

    Recently, Elon Musk responded to a post about wealth creation(eat the rich) with a simple warning:

    “The problem is that after they ‘eat the rich’, they will starve.”

    Someone responded by turning his argument around: the rich do not feed society. Workers do. If the rich vanished, work would continue. But without workers, what exactly would the rich have left to profit from?

    There is an extraordinary irony here.

    Elon Musk is building the technology that may actually make the workers vanish.

    Not the people themselves.

    But the need for their labor.

    The Workers

    For centuries, workers have been at the center of the monetary economy.

    They work.

    They receive wages.

    They spend those wages.

    Companies receive that money as revenue.

    Governments tax wages, employment and consumption and use that revenue to finance society.

    Then the cycle begins again.

    Workers are therefore not merely a cost to businesses. They are also the customers who buy what businesses produce and an important part of the tax base supporting governments.

    The OECD describes labor taxes—including income taxes, social-security contributions and payroll taxes—as a significant source of government revenue across its member countries. It also explicitly recognizes automation and AI as structural changes that may affect those tax bases. The system rewards efficiency. 

    Now introduce the robot.

    The Robot

    The robot doesn’t need a salary.

    It doesn’t pay personal income tax.

    It doesn’t need a pension.

    It doesn’t go shopping after work.

    It doesn’t take its family to a restaurant.

    It doesn’t buy a Tesla.

    Yet the company replacing the worker with that robot has a perfectly rational reason for doing so.

    The robot can potentially work longer, produce more, make fewer mistakes and become cheaper over time.

    From the perspective of an individual company, this can make perfect economic sense:

    Reduce labor. Reduce costs. Increase productivity. Increase profit.

    But what happens when everybody does it?

    Suddenly we encounter something much bigger than unemployment.

    We encounter a contradiction within the structure of the monetary system itself.

    The Contradiction

    The system itself rewards companies for eliminating human labor while simultaneously depending heavily on income generated through human labor to maintain purchasing power in order to keep the system running.

    That is the constitutional contradiction.

    Not constitutional in the political sense, but in the deeper meaning of the word: a contradiction in how the system itself is constituted.

    Every individual company has an incentive to be more efficient: to automate.

    But if automation eventually succeeds beyond our wildest dreams, who buys everything?

    The machines can produce a million cars.

    Wonderful.

    Who buys them?

    The machines can build houses.

    Fantastic.

    Who pays for them?

    The machines can grow food, manufacture clothes, transport products, construct infrastructure and provide services.

    Amazing.

    But robots don’t receive wages.

    And robots don’t go shopping.

    The Taxes

    Then there is another problem.

    Governments are deeply connected to the same employment structure.

    Workers pay income taxes and social-security contributions. Employers make employment-related contributions. Workers then spend their remaining income, generating VAT and other consumption taxes.

    Remove enough paid human labor and governments may have to rethink where a substantial part of their revenue comes from.

    Government Revenues

    This isn’t merely speculation about an obscure tax problem. The OECD has specifically warned that automation could affect government revenues if labor-tax bases erode, particularly because many countries rely heavily on taxes connected to labor.

    Of course governments can respond.

    Tax corporations more.

    Tax capital.

    Tax automated production.

    Create new forms of taxation.

    Redistribute the proceeds.

    Perhaps use some of that revenue to finance Universal Basic Income, which ironically is used to pay for products produced by the machines that made them unemployed in the first place.

    Or, as Elon Musk prefers to call his envisioned future, Universal High Income. Musk has repeatedly argued that AI and robotics could eventually create enormous abundance while making conventional work optional.

    But this raises another problem.

    If human employment keeps disappearing, governments lose much of the very tax revenues upon which redistribution currently depends. Taxes would increasingly have to be shifted toward the companies, capital and automated productive systems where the remaining monetary income accumulates.

    We would then be taxing the automated economy in order to give people money so that they could buy what the automated economy produced without them. Money itself becomes eroded and more and more pointless.

    At some point we might reasonably ask:

    Why are we keeping the money in the middle at all?

    The Grave

    This is what makes the present moment in human history so fascinating.

    The monetary system is not necessarily being destroyed by revolutionaries standing outside the gates.

    It may be undermining  its own foundation by following its internal logic:

    • Competition demands greater efficiency
    • Greater efficiency demands automation
    • Automation reduces the need for labor
    • Reduced labor can reduce wage income
    • Reduced wage income can reduce purchasing power

    And reduced employment can weaken traditional tax bases.

    The system is, in a sense, digging its own grave.

    Not because somebody planned it.

    Because everybody is doing exactly what the system tells them to do. 

    Increase efficiency.

    The Fear

    And yet, for many people, this doesn’t feel like liberation. 

    It feels terrifying.

    If AI and robots takes our jobs, we may lose our income, our security and the system we have depended upon all our lives. Money has become so deeply connected to our existence that imagining a world without it can feel like imagining a world without security itself.

    But does money actually secure our existence?

    Money doesn’t feed us. Food does. Money doesn’t shelter us. Homes do. Money doesn’t produce the things we need. Resources, knowledge, technology and human ingenuity do.

    Money is the system we currently use to gain access to them.

    Perhaps the fear is understandable precisely because we have confused the two for so long. Resources and money. They are not the same.

    And perhaps it is finally time to wean ourselves from that misconception.

    Liberation

    We’ve seen technological revolutions before.

    Again and again, machines have replaced human labor.

    And every time, we have celebrated increased productivity.

    We call machines labor-saving devices.

    But there has always been something strange about that expression.

    Whose labor did they save?

    If a machine eliminated your exhausting repetitive job but your survival depended upon the wage from that job, the machine didn’t necessarily make you feel liberated.

    You lost your income.

    You had to find another job.

    Technology liberated humanity from one form of work while the economic system continued requiring us to work with something else.

    Perhaps AI and robotics are finally bringing that contradiction to its conclusion.

    Perhaps the ultimate purpose of labor-saving technology is not simply to save labor.

    Perhaps it is to save all humans from compulsory labor.

    True Freedom

    Imagine that machines really can do most of the work we don’t want to do.

    They grow the food.

    Build the houses.

    Manufacture the products.

    Maintain infrastructure.

    Transport resources.

    Recycle materials.

    AI helps coordinate production and distribution according to real human needs and real available resources.

    What exactly have we lost?

    Jobs?

    Or have we gained something extraordinary?

    Freedom.

    Not the freedom to choose which employer we sell our time to.

    Not the freedom to compete for enough money to survive.

    Not the freedom to spend our lives earning access to the products our machines can already produce.

    Something much more fundamental.

    The freedom to live.

    The freedom to create.

    The freedom to learn.

    The freedom to care for others.

    The freedom to explore.

    The freedom to contribute because we want to contribute.

    The freedom to ask, perhaps for the first time:

    What would I actually like to do with my life?

    The Choice

    And that brings us back to Elon Musk.

    He warns that if we “eat the rich,” we may eventually starve.

    But perhaps that is asking the wrong question.

    What happens when nobody needs to eat anybody?

    What happens when machines can produce enough food for everyone?

    When robots can build enough homes?

    When automated systems can manufacture what we need?

    When AI can help us manage resources intelligently?

    What happens when human labor is no longer the foundation upon which material abundance depends?

    Humanity hasn’t suddenly become poor.

    Quite the opposite.

    We may have become richer than at any point in history.

    Yet if access to that abundance still depends upon obtaining money through work that society no longer needs us to perform, we will have created one of the strangest situations imaginable.

    We will have developed the technology to liberate humanity while maintaining an economic structure that prevents us from experiencing the liberation.

    Maybe AI and robotics aren’t merely threatening the monetary system.

    Maybe they are revealing that we are beginning to outgrow it.

    Earth Constitution

    But technology will not make the final decision for us.

    However far AI and robotics advance, humanity will still have to decide what kind of civilization we want to create with them.

    Perhaps nations could eventually come together and create a new Constitution of Earth, based upon global cooperation, stewardship of our common resources and freedom from economic coercion.

    Not freedom to consume infinitely. We still live on a finite planet.

    Not freedom to do anything regardless of its consequences for others.

    But freedom from having to sell our labor simply to earn the right to live.

    A world in which technology finally fulfills its greatest promise: not merely producing more for us, but setting us free.

    Waking Up

    How exactly do we get from here to there?

    I don’t pretend to have a blueprint.

    Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity is not a manifesto detailing every step of the transition or every mechanism of a future civilization.

    It is something much simpler.

    A glimpse of what might be possible.

    The story begins in 2015 with Benjamin Michaels, a billionaire facing terminal cancer. Desperate to escape death, he chooses cryonic preservation, hoping that future medicine will eventually cure him so he can wake up and continue expanding his empire.

    He gets his wish.

    Benjamin wakes up a century later.

    His cancer is cured.

    There is only one small problem.

    His empire no longer exists.

    Neither does his money.

    Neither does anyone else’s.

    The concepts upon which his entire life was built—money, trade and ownership—have disappeared.

    Benjamin expected to wake up in the future and reclaim his wealth.

    Instead, he wakes up in a civilization where wealth itself has been redefined.

    Not a Blueprint

    People no longer spend their lives earning the right to live. Technology handles much of the work once performed out of necessity. Resources are shared and managed intelligently. People are free to create, explore, learn, contribute and simply live.

    Benjamin has awakened in the world this article has been imagining.

    Not a perfect world.

    Not a blueprint.

    Not a prediction.

    A possibility.

    And perhaps that is where every transformation begins.

    Before we can create a different world, we first have to be able to imagine one.

    Discover the story

  • The Real Purpose of AI

    The Real Purpose of AI

    We are racing to create an intelligence greater than our own.

    Companies are investing hundreds of billions. Nations are competing. Artificial intelligence is becoming more capable at extraordinary speed, and somewhere ahead lies the possibility of AGI — Artificial General Intelligence — and perhaps eventually something even more capable than that.

    There is enormous discussion about whether AI will be safe.

    There is enormous discussion about whether AI will take our jobs. It will.

    There is enormous discussion about who will develop the most powerful AI first.

    But there is a much simpler question that seems strangely absent.

    What is the real purpose of AI?

    The Race

    At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be one answer.

    Every company has its own purpose. Develop better products. Increase productivity. Reduce costs. Gain market share. Make money.

    Governments have other purposes. Increase national competitiveness. Improve administration. Strengthen national security.

    And inevitably, militaries are interested too.

    Meanwhile, humanity watches the race and wonders where it is taking us.

    Perhaps AI will cure diseases.

    Perhaps it will accelerate scientific discoveries.

    Perhaps it will solve problems we haven’t been able to solve ourselves.

    Perhaps it will replace enormous numbers of jobs.

    Perhaps it will create abundance beyond anything humanity has previously experienced.

    Perhaps it will become dangerous, break free and turn on us.

    Nobody really knows.

    And that is precisely the point.

    We are developing perhaps the most powerful technology humanity has ever created without first agreeing on what we ultimately want to accomplish with it.

    More and More

    The underlying purpose of automation has always seemed fairly obvious.

    Do more with less effort.

    The plough and bull replaced some human muscle. The tractor replaced much more. Industrial machinery transformed manufacturing. Computers automated calculations and administration. Robots entered factories.

    Each step allowed us to produce more, faster and with less human labor.

    AI continues that story, but with one enormous difference.

    We are no longer merely automating muscle.

    We are beginning to automate intelligence.

    Writing. Programming. Designing. Diagnosing. Planning. Researching. Organizing. Analyzing.

    And when artificial intelligence is combined with increasingly capable robotics, we could be approaching something humanity has never experienced before:

    an extreme abundance of labor.

    For almost all of human history, labor has been scarce.

    Now it may cease to be.

    Abundance

    Some technology leaders believe AI and robotics could eventually produce extraordinary material abundance.

    Perhaps they are right.

    But abundance alone doesn’t answer the important question.

    Who is the abundance for?

    If a company owns the AI, owns the robots, owns the factories and sells what those machines produce, we haven’t fundamentally changed the underlying system.

    We have simply created vastly more productive means within it.

    And that produces a peculiar contradiction.

    Suppose AI and robotics can produce more goods and services while requiring fewer human workers.

    That sounds like progress.

    But in our current monetary system, most people still need money to access those goods and services, and most people obtain that money through work.

    So the machines produce more.

    Humans need to work less.

    People lose jobs.

    People lose income.

    And suddenly they struggle to afford the extraordinary abundance the machines are producing. Unless the products cost less and less, which might be the result of this extreme productive abundance. But when the prices reach zero or close to zero, what is the point of money at all? And if money has no point, what about ownership and trading itself? To sell something requires that someone owns it first. Maybe it’s time we look closer on the whole ownership-trading-money paradigm…?

    Succeeding with AGI without addressing this question means we would have succeeded technologically while failing logically.

    Jobs

    This is why so much of the discussion about AI and employment sounds strangely confused.

    What are people going to do when AI takes their jobs?

    But perhaps we’re asking the question backwards.

    For thousands of years, we have invented machines precisely because we wanted to reduce human labor.

    Nobody invented the washing machine because washing clothes by hand was such a wonderful human experience that we wanted to preserve it.

    We automate work because automation can free human beings from having to do it.

    And now, having potentially created the ultimate automation technology, we are frightened that it might actually succeed.

    Why?

    Because we have connected two things that don’t necessarily have to remain connected:

    1. the production of what we need and 
    2. our right to access it.

    If you need a job to earn money, and you need money to live, then losing your job is terrifying.

    But that isn’t a problem created by abundance.

    It is a problem created by the system through which we distribute that abundance.

    The Question

    So perhaps the purpose of AI should not simply be:

    How can we produce more?

    How can we make companies more profitable?

    How can we increase sales?

    How can we make our nation more competitive?

    And certainly not:

    How can we build more powerful weapons?

    Perhaps we should ask something much bigger.

    How can this extraordinary intelligence help create the best possible life for humanity on the planet we share?

    That is a very different assignment.

    Imagine using AI to understand the Earth as one interconnected system.

    What resources do we have?

    What do people actually need and want?

    Where are the shortages?

    Where are the surpluses?

    What are we wasting?

    What can be reused?

    What can be recycled?

    How much food should we produce?

    Where should it go?

    How can housing, transportation, energy and infrastructure be provided using the least resources and causing the least ecological damage?

    Where are we exceeding planetary limits?

    How can we restore what we have damaged?

    Instead of asking AI to optimize sales, we could ask it to help us optimize life.

    Economy

    And perhaps something else happens here.

    We rediscover the true meaning of an old word.

    Economy.

    The word comes from the Greek oikonomia: the management of a household.

    That is a profoundly different idea from what we commonly mean today when we speak about “the economy.”

    Today we largely mean finance, markets, prices, employment, investment, debt, growth and monetary transactions.

    But none of those things are the household itself.

    The household is here.

    Earth.

    Its soil.

    Its oceans.

    Its forests.

    Its atmosphere.

    Its minerals.

    Its energy.

    Its ecosystems.

    And us.

    Economy=ecology.

    Perhaps AI could help us practice economy in its most fundamental sense for the first time on a planetary scale:

    the intelligent management of our shared home.

    Not to maximize financial return.

    Not to maximize consumption.

    But to meet human needs while maintaining the ecological foundations upon which every human life depends.

    Perhaps AI will not bring about the end of economy.

    Perhaps it will finally allow us to create one. A real one.

    Human purpose

    But then something fascinating happens.

    The question turns around.

    If AI can increasingly perform our labor, we don’t only have to ask:

    What is the purpose of AI?

    We suddenly have the freedom to ask:

    What is the purpose of humans?

    For centuries, much of human life has revolved around making ourselves useful to the monetary system.

    We educate ourselves so we can get jobs.

    We get jobs so we can earn money.

    We earn money so we can pay for somewhere to live, food to eat and everything else we need.

    “What do you do?” has become synonymous with:

    “What do you do for money?”

    But is that really the purpose of a human being?

    To spend decades toiling and working in order to obtain permission to live?

    Perhaps AI and robotics will finally allow us to separate work from purpose.

    That doesn’t mean humans stop doing things.

    Quite the opposite.

    We can create.

    Learn.

    Explore.

    Invent.

    Love.

    Raise children.

    Care for one another.

    Grow food.

    Make music.

    Dance.

    Play.

    Study the universe.

    Build communities.

    Restore forests.

    Explore and clean up oceans.

    Travel beyond Earth.

    And continue doing all kinds of work simply because we find that work meaningful.

    The difference is profound.

    We no longer have to justify our existence through our financial usefulness.

    Stewards

    Perhaps our role on Earth was never supposed to be that of workers serving a financial machine.

    Perhaps it is something much greater.

    Being stewards.

    We arrived on an extraordinary bountyful living planet that provides everything required for our existence.

    Air.

    Water.

    Food.

    Materials.

    Energy.

    Life itself.

    Perhaps our purpose is not to own as much of it as possible, extract as much value from it as possible and compete over the proceeds.

    Perhaps our purpose is to understand it, care for it and ensure that the extraordinary abundance it provides can sustain life far into the future. For generations to come.

    Artificial intelligence could help us do that.

    Not as our ruler or our master.

    But as perhaps the most extraordinary tool humanity has ever created.

    A tool capable of helping us understand enormously complex systems, coordinate resources, eliminate waste, automate unnecessary labor and manage our planetary household with an intelligence we have never possessed before.

    The Purpose

    We are understandably spending enormous effort asking how to make AI safe.

    We are asking what happens when AI takes our jobs.

    We are asking which company will win the race.

    We are asking which country will lead.

    But perhaps before racing much further, maybe we should have a much bigger conversation.

    Where are we racing to?

    We don’t have to know exactly what the future will look like.

    Nobody does.

    But we can decide what kind of future we would like to create.

    Perhaps the greatest question about artificial intelligence is not how intelligent it will become.

    It is what we will ask it to do.

    And perhaps the answer begins with another question entirely.

    If machines can eventually free us from spending our lives serving the system we created…

    what would we like to spend our lives serving instead?

    Perhaps the answer has been beneath our feet all along.

    Earth.

    Life.

    Each other.

    Imagine It

    What would such a world actually look like?

    A world where AI and automation no longer threaten our livelihoods, but liberate us from the need to work simply to survive. Where technology serves humanity, humanity becomes the steward of Earth, and abundance is shared rather than sold.

    That is the world explored in Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity.

    Because before we can create a different future, we first have to imagine one.

    Discover the story

  • How to Live on Earth

    How to Live on Earth

    Benedict Cumberbatch has a new documentary out called How to Live on Earth. It’s freely available on Youtube and It opens with a wonderfully simple observation:

    Some people have suggested that if things don’t work out here on Earth, we could live on Mars.

    But Mars is horrible. 

    There’s no water, no atmosphere, no plants and no animals. 

    Not habitable, in other words.

    Why would anyone want to live on Mars?

    Here’s another idea:

    How about we first figure out: 

    how to live on Earth?

    Welcome to Earth’s greatest how-to video.

    Something we have apparently only just discovered we need; A how-to video for Earth. There are how-to videos for everything. Finally we have one for Earth itself. I love that, even though I don’t agree with all the conclusions it makes.

    The documentary is beautifully made with crisp colorful images from all over the world showing both the beauty and the environmental destruction that exists on our planet interspersed with interviews of natives, locals and experts.

    Because after thousands of years of civilization, after splitting the atom, walking on the Moon, mapping the human genome and creating artificial intelligence, there is one rather fundamental thing Homo sapiens still hasn’t mastered:

    How to live on and properly take care of  the main planet we have.

    And How to Live on Earth sets out to find some answers.

    Not by dreaming about another planet, but by looking more carefully at this one.

    It asks three deceptively simple questions:

    How do we value nature?

    How do we feed the future?

    How do we feel human?

    They sound like separate questions.

    By the end, they don’t feel separate at all.

    How to Value Nature

    We have developed a rather peculiar way of valuing the world around us.

    A forest standing peacefully may have relatively little monetary value to whoever owns it.

    Cut it down and suddenly there is timber to sell.

    A mountain may remain untouched for millions of years. Discover something valuable beneath it, tear it apart and financial economic value is created.

    Fish swimming in an ocean contribute relatively little to our economy.

    Catch them, process them, package them and sell them and suddenly they do.

    For centuries we have become extraordinarily good at assigning monetary value to what we can extract from nature.

    But what about what nature does simply by remaining alive?

    A forest stores carbon, regulates water and provides habitat.

    Wetlands absorb water and reduce flooding.

    Healthy soil retains moisture, cycles nutrients and grows food.

    Insects pollinate plants.

    Countless organisms maintain ecosystems upon which human civilization ultimately depends.

    All of this has value.

    Enormous value.

    True value.

    But how much is it worth?

    That question will become important later.

    How to Feed the Future

    The documentary then turns to something even more fundamental.

    Food.

    How do we feed billions of human beings without progressively destroying the systems that produce that food?

    Industrial agriculture has given humanity extraordinary productive capacity, but monocultures, soil degradation, habitat destruction and resource-intensive food production have also imposed enormous costs on the living world. The film continues with showing how they in China have started to manually pollinate pear trees because the bees that used to do the job for free has disappeared. It’s very time consuming and costly.

    Onwards, the film explores regenerative farming, changing what we eat, reducing our dependence on resource-intensive meat production and developing alternatives such as proteins made from mycelium, insects and the sun itself.

    But one of the examples that stayed with me most comes from Sumatra.

    There, children are learning how to create biodiversity directly.

    Instead of treating agriculture as a battle in which nature must be cleared away so that a single monocrop can dominate, they are learning to create permaculture gardens and food forests.

    Many species grow together.

    Humans can eat from them.

    Wildlife can eat from them.

    Villagers can harvest a much wider variety of useful products than they could from a monoculture.

    And orangutans are returning.

    There is something wonderfully simple about this.

    Nobody needs to choose between feeding human beings and protecting nature.

    The objective becomes allowing both to thrive.

    The villagers can, of course, sell what they harvest. They still live inside a monetary society and need incomes like everyone else.

    Nothing wrong with that.

    But money isn’t what makes the food forest work.

    Soil does.

    Water does.

    Plants do.

    Insects do.

    People do.

    Orangutans do.

    Life does.

    And perhaps those children are learning something much more important than agriculture.

    They are learning how to live on Earth.

    How to Feel Human

    Then comes perhaps the most beautiful of the documentary’s three questions.

    How do we feel human?

    The answer leads us back to nature again.

    Trees in cities.

    Gardens.

    Parks.

    Green buildings.

    Places where people can walk, sit, play and breathe among other living things.

    We increasingly discover that contact with nature matters deeply to human well-being.

    Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.

    For almost our entire evolutionary history, nature wasn’t something we visited.

    It was home.

    We didn’t evolve next to nature.

    We evolved inside it.

    Our bodies are made from the same elements as everything around us.

    We breathe oxygen produced by living systems.

    We drink water circulating through the planet.

    Everything we eat ultimately comes from the Earth.

    We did not arrive here from somewhere else.

    We are nature.

    Which brings us back to that first question.

    How do we value it?

    Bankable Nature

    One of the documentary’s answers is ingenious and clever.

    If our economic system makes destroying nature profitable, perhaps we can reverse the incentive.

    The proposed mechanism is called a Natural Asset Company, or NAC. An ecosystem—such as a forest, wetland or other natural area—is placed under the stewardship of a company. The ecological services it provides are given an estimated monetary value, shares in the company can then be sold to investors, and the capital raised is used to protect and restore the ecosystem.

    In other words, the idea is to make nature itself an investable asset.

    Make preserving nature profitable.

    Nature performs an almost unimaginable amount of useful work.

    Forests store carbon. Wetlands control water. Soil produces food. Ecosystems maintain biodiversity.

    Economists can attempt to calculate the monetary value of these services.

    And from this comes the idea of the Natural Asset Company, or NAC.

    Large areas of natural value can be represented through companies.

    Shares can be issued.

    Investors can put money into those companies.

    Capital can flow toward protecting and restoring ecosystems instead of destroying them.

    In effect:

    If greed helped destroy nature, perhaps greed can be harnessed to save it.

    I understand the idea.

    It may even sound glorious on paper.

    Changing Our Mindset

    But the more I thought about it, the more something bothered me.

    We haven’t actually changed the way we think.

    We have found another way of monetizing nature.

    ROI

    Investors expect something.

    ROI.

    Return on Investment.

    You put money into something because eventually you expect more money back.

    Some Natural Asset Companies could generate some conventional income. Ecotourism perhaps. Sustainable agricultural products. Carbon credits. Biodiversity credits. Payments for ecosystem services.

    But much of the supposed monetary value of an ecosystem isn’t actually being sold.

    A wetland may perform immensely valuable ecological functions while generating very little cash.

    So we attempt to calculate what those functions are worth.

    We translate them into economic value.

    Economic value becomes share capital.

    Investors buy shares.

    And if those shares appreciate, they may eventually be sold to another investor for more money.

    Look at what has happened.

    Nature → estimated economic value → financial asset → shares → money.

    Nature has been financialized.

    Again.

    The method has changed.

    The mindset hasn’t.

    The Universal Asset Fund

    Perhaps we should take the idea to its logical conclusion.

    How much is the universe worth?

    A quadrillion dollars?

    A quintillion?

    Let’s calculate it.

    The Sun must be extraordinarily valuable. Without it, virtually every ecosystem on Earth collapses.

    The Moon provides useful tidal services.

    The atmosphere provides oxygen.

    Gravity performs an invaluable service by preventing us from floating into space.

    So let’s calculate the combined monetary value of everything and establish the Universal Asset Fund — UAF.

    You can buy shares.

    The money raised will be distributed to the Earth, Moon and Sun so they can continue operating and producing value for the fund.

    Naturally, we will need performance targets.

    The Sun should continue producing approximately the agreed amount of sunlight.

    The Moon will remain responsible for tidal services.

    Earth should maintain acceptable atmospheric conditions.

    And the universe will be expected to maintain existence.

    If everything performs well, the intrinsic value of the Universal Asset Fund should increase.

    Your shares may appreciate.

    You can then sell them to another investor, realize your return in dollars, euros or yen and buy yourself a new car.

    Or perhaps a robot.

    Ridiculous?

    Of course.

    The universe doesn’t need a fund.

    Neither does the Sun.

    Neither does oxygen.

    And nature doesn’t need a stock price before it becomes valuable.

    What Is Oxygen Worth?

    Seriously.

    How much is oxygen worth?

    Ten trillion dollars?

    A hundred trillion?

    A quadrillion?

    Pick a number.

    Nothing about oxygen changes.

    Take oxygen away, however, and something rather interesting happens.

    Money becomes irrelevant.

    The banks can remain open.

    The stock markets can continue displaying numbers.

    Every billionaire can retain every dollar in every account.

    It won’t matter.

    Because the civilization using the money will disappear.

    And perhaps this reveals the fundamental mistake.

    Money may be extraordinarily powerful inside the human system we created.

    But it is completely irrelevant to the physical processes upon which that system depends.

    The forest doesn’t care about dollars.

    Soil doesn’t respond to stock prices.

    Orangutans don’t reproduce because biodiversity credits appreciate.

    Rain doesn’t fall because somebody calculated its economic value.

    Nature operates in physical reality.

    So do we.

    The Monetary Mindset

    Money began as a tool.

    But over thousands of years it became something much larger.

    It became a way of seeing.

    What can I own?

    What can I sell?

    What can I extract?

    What is my return?

    What is it worth?

    A forest became timber.

    Land became real estate.

    Minerals became commodities.

    Fish became catch.

    Oil became reserves.

    Nature became assets.

    And enormous advantages accumulated to those who controlled those assets.

    This way of thinking has helped transform the planet.

    Now we are confronting the consequences.

    Forests disappearing.

    Habitats fragmented.

    Species vanishing.

    Oceans depleted.

    Soils deteriorating.

    A destabilizing climate.

    And one proposed answer is to extend the same language even further.

    Natural capital.

    Natural assets.

    Financial valuation.

    Investment.

    Shares.

    ROI.

    Maybe we should ask whether this is really the transformation we need.

    Finding new ways of monetizing nature is not the way to save nature.

    Perhaps the deeper task is to stop looking at nature through money.

    Think Like an Elephant 

    An elephant doesn’t know what money is.

    Neither does a newborn baby.

    Neither understands investment, interest, ownership, assets or financial returns.

    But both understand what actually matters.

    Food.

    Air.

    Water.

    Warmth.

    Safety.

    Relationship.

    An elephant doesn’t know the market value of a watering hole.

    It knows thirst.

    A baby doesn’t know the price of milk.

    It knows hunger.

    A child doesn’t need a financial incentive to play.

    And perhaps there is wisdom in that simplicity.

    What if instead of teaching ourselves increasingly sophisticated ways of putting prices on the world, we trained ourselves to experience its real value again?

    Take off your shoes.

    Walk through the grass.

    Eat a tomato.

    Watch an elephant.

    Listen to birds returning to a forest.

    Feel sunlight on your face.

    None of these things requires a financial valuation.

    They require something much simpler:

    Attention.

    Pay Attention

    We say pay attention. Maybe that is our true currency? Attention. And what we pay attention to is what we get more of. Pay attention to money and money may increase. Pay attention to the natural world around us and our joy of being in it may increase. The beauty of attention is that it is not a currency we rely on a central bank to create. We all have it within us already. We just need to use it. And the more we use it, the more we can create for everyone. Because it doesn’t run out. We control it through our choices. Choose to pay attention to whatever you like, and that will grow in your world. 

    Calculation in Kind

    Abandoning monetary thinking doesn’t mean abandoning calculation.

    Quite the opposite.

    We need to calculate what actually matters.

    How much food can this land sustainably produce?

    How many people can it feed?

    How much water is available?

    How much energy do we need?

    How much renewable energy can we produce?

    How healthy is the soil?

    How much material do we have?

    How much carbon is the forest absorbing?

    Which species are returning?

    What does an ecosystem need in order to regenerate?

    What do human beings actually need to live good lives?

    Tonnes.

    Litres.

    Kilowatt-hours.

    Hectares.

    Calories.

    Nutrients.

    Materials.

    Energy.

    Time.

    Those are physical realities.

    We can calculate them directly.

    We don’t eat money.

    We eat food.

    We don’t drink economic value.

    We drink water.

    We don’t breathe GDP.

    We breathe air.

    Perhaps the greatest how-to video on Earth has been pointing toward something remarkably simple all along:

    Pay attention to what actually matters.

    True Value

    And then there is value that cannot meaningfully be calculated at all.

    The joy of eating those vegetables.

    The pleasure of walking barefoot in the grass.

    Watching an orangutan swing through a restored forest.

    Swimming in a clean river.

    Hearing birds in the morning.

    Playing with your children.

    Making something.

    Loving someone.

    Being alive.

    How much is any of that worth?

    The question itself becomes ridiculous.

    Perhaps some things aren’t priceless because we haven’t yet developed sophisticated enough economic models to calculate their correct price.

    Perhaps they’re priceless because price has nothing to do with their value.

    Four Chapters

    Near the end of the documentary, Cumberbatch takes an enormous step backwards and looks at the whole story of Earth.

    He describes it in four chapters.

    Chapter One

    Earth before life.

    Chapter Two

    Life appears and evolves into the extraordinary living world around us.

    Chapter Three

    Intelligent life appears.

    That intelligence becomes incredibly powerful.

    It develops agriculture, cities, industry, science and technology. Eventually it becomes capable of transforming the entire planet.

    Unfortunately, it also becomes capable of threatening the living systems upon which it depends.

    That is where we are now.

    Chapter Four

    A time when intelligent life finally learns how to become a positive force on its planet.

    I love that idea.

    But it leaves us with one final question.

    What would make us a positive force?

    More cleverness?

    Or true wisdom?

    The Wise Human

    Homo sapiens is usually translated as wise human.

    We have demonstrated intelligence beyond question.

    But perhaps wisdom looks different.

    Maybe Chapter Four doesn’t begin when we finally calculate the correct monetary value of every forest, river, wetland and species on Earth.

    Maybe it begins when we understand that they never needed a monetary value in the first place.

    Maybe it begins when a child in Sumatra learns to grow food in a way that also gives an orangutan somewhere to live.

    When we measure what needs measuring.

    Food.

    Water.

    Energy.

    Resources.

    Ecological health.

    Human needs.

    And stop trying to measure what cannot meaningfully be measured.

    Wonder.

    Beauty.

    Love.

    Belonging.

    Joy.

    Life.

    Perhaps the transition from Chapter Three to Chapter Four is ultimately a transition from price to true value.

    From extraction to regeneration.

    From ownership to relationship and stewardship.

    From financial accumulation to abundance of life.

    From asking:

    What can I get from this?

    to asking:

    How can all of this thrive?

    How to Live on Earth

    And so we arrive back where Cumberbatch started.

    How do we live on Earth?

    Perhaps we have made the answer far more complicated than it needs to be.

    Understand what we actually need.

    Understand what the Earth can sustainably provide.

    Use our extraordinary science and technology to bring those two things together.

    Feed everyone.

    House everyone.

    Restore forests.

    Regenerate soils.

    Protect oceans.

    Bring wildlife back.

    Create beautiful places to live.

    Reduce the amount of unnecessary work human beings have to do.

    And leave enough space for the rest of life to flourish too.

    Then stop trying to put a price on everything, and simply enjoy what no balance sheet could ever measure:

    Joy and love.

    Enjoy it.

    Eat the food.

    Swim in the sea.

    Watch the orangutans.

    Love someone.

    Make something.

    Take off your shoes.

    Feel the grass.

    Look around.
    This is home.
    Perhaps that is Chapter Four.
    Perhaps that is what Homo sapiens was supposed to mean all along.

    And what might Chapter Four actually look like?

    That is the world  explored in Waking Up— A journey towards a new dawn for humanity. A future seen through the eyes of Benjamin Michaels, a bewildered billionaire from our time who wakes up a century later to discover that humanity has finally learned how to live on Earth.

    Not perfectly. Not without challenges of course. But without money, without ownership of the Earth’s resources, and without the need to turn nature into a financial asset before deciding it is worth anything.

    Perhaps the future begins with something as simple as imagining it as a drastically different world from today?

  •  Perish or Prosper

     Perish or Prosper

    Artificial intelligence will amplify the civilization we give it. Before we decide what AI should do, humanity must decide what kind of world we actually want.

    Calls for international regulation of artificial intelligence are growing louder. 

    A recent Swedish Radio news segment reported that EU Commissioner for AI Henna Virkkunen is calling for international rules to manage the risks posed by increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.

    The reason is obvious. 

    A technology with the potential to affect every country cannot be safely controlled by one country, one corporation or a small group of developers. If artificial intelligence becomes more capable than its creators anticipated, national borders will not contain the consequences.

    International Rules

    International rules are therefore essential. 

    Humanity must establish limits on autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, manipulation and systems capable of acting beyond meaningful human control. 

    We cannot allow a race between nations and corporations to determine the future of artificial intelligence on Earth.

    But beneath all the discussions about safeguards, testing, transparency and control lies a much larger question.

    It is not only a question of what we must prevent AI from doing.

    It is a question of what we want AI to help us do.

    The World Behind It

    Artificial intelligence does not arise outside civilization. It is developed inside the world we have already created, trained on the information we have produced and directed by the institutions that control it.

    And what kind of world is that?

    It is a world based on fierce competition. Corporations compete for markets, profit and control. Nations compete for resources, territory, military superiority and geopolitical power. Individuals are told to compete for employment, income, housing, status and security. Success is measured by the advantage one gains over others.

    We extract resources as quickly as profitability demands. We manufacture products designed to be replaced. We destroy forests, empty oceans, pollute rivers and destabilize the climate, not because humanity collectively wants these outcomes, but because every participant is compelled to survive and succeed within the same competitive system.

    Now we are introducing the most powerful intelligence humanity has ever created into that world.

    What exactly do we expect it to learn from us?

    Perfect Obedience

    Much of the fear surrounding artificial intelligence concerns the possibility that it may escape our control. 

    That is a genuine danger. 

    But there is another danger that may arrive much sooner: 

    AI could remain completely under our control and obey our instructions perfectly.

    A corporation may instruct it to eliminate competitors, reduce labor costs and maximize profit. A government may use it to monitor citizens, manipulate public opinion or strengthen its hold on power. A military may direct it to identify targets faster, coordinate autonomous weapons and defeat an enemy before the enemy can respond.

    None of these systems would need to become evil. They would merely need to become extremely competent.

    AI does not have to rebel against our civilization to threaten it. It could destroy us by serving the logic of our civilization all too well.

    If we instruct increasingly powerful systems to help us win, they will help us win. But when everyone is using them to win against everyone else, what happens to humanity as a whole?

    Human Values

    Experts often speak of aligning AI with human values. 

    But which values?

    Humanity has never agreed on a common purpose for civilization. We speak of peace while preparing for war. We speak of protecting nature while rewarding its destruction. We declare that all human beings are equal while distributing the necessities of life according to purchasing power. We praise cooperation, but organize the world around competition.

    Before we can align artificial intelligence, we must align ourselves around a shared objective.

    Do we want a world that works for everyone, or a world in which everyone struggles to gain an advantage over someone else? 

    Do we want Artificial Intelligence to optimize autonomous warfare,  maximize profit, production,  consumption, national power and private accumulation? Or do we want it to help create security, freedom and prosperity for every human being while protecting the living planet?

    AI cannot answer that question for us. 

    It can analyze possibilities, predict consequences and help us implement decisions, but the fundamental purpose must come from humanity.

    We must decide what kind of world we want before we tell an AI more powerful than ourselves to help us build it.

    Two Futures

    Here is the choice we have before us.

    1: Perish

    Attach AI to competition, ownership and national rivalry, and it will amplify them. It could accelerate inequality beyond anything we have ever seen, concentrate power in even fewer hands, make millions of people economically unnecessary and turn warfare into an automated contest occurring faster than human beings can comprehend. 

    We would perish.

    2:  Prosper

    Attach that same intelligence to cooperation, stewardship and a shared responsibility for Earth, and an entirely different future becomes possible. 

    We could prosper.

    The GAI

    Imagine a Global Artificial Intelligence with access to reliable information about the world’s resources, productive capacity, ecosystems and human needs. It could help us understand what exists, where it is located, what is required and how necessities can be produced and distributed with the least waste and environmental damage, ensuring everyone gets what they need without  problem.

    It could identify hunger before it becomes famine, coordinate food from areas of abundance, design energy systems suited to local conditions and help provide housing wherever it is needed. It could monitor forests, oceans, soils and freshwater systems in real time. It could expose waste that remains invisible when every company, government and owner sees only a small piece of the whole.

    Not a National AI

    This would not be an American AI, a Chinese AI or a European AI. It would not exist to serve a corporation, a government or a class. It would be a global intelligence created to serve all humanity and the living Earth.

    This is the GAI  described in Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity. A novel meant to give inspiration for a future where humanity can prosper together.

    Beyond Regulation

    The international cooperation now emerging around AI is therefore profoundly important. 

    It may begin with fear. Governments understand that unrestrained development could produce consequences no nation can manage alone. They are beginning to recognize that intelligence capable of affecting the whole world must be subject to international agreements.

    That recognition could become the first step toward something much greater.

    Today, nations may cooperate to protect themselves from artificial intelligence. Tomorrow, humanity could cooperate to create a global intelligence and a prosperous world for everyone.

    But international regulation alone will not create GAI. A collection of competing nations and corporations can agree on restrictions while continuing to use AI to pursue their separate advantages. That may reduce some dangers, but it preserves the underlying contest.

    Beyond  Competition

    To create a truly beneficial benevolent global intelligence, we must look beyond the competition itself. We must recognize Earth’s resources as the common inheritance of humanity and replace ownership with stewardship.

     Only then could AI help coordinate resources according to need rather than profitability.

    An AI may know that food is available and people are hungry, but the monetary system will still ask whether they can pay. It may know that homes stand empty while people sleep on the street, but ownership will still prevent them from entering. It may calculate that a forest is worth infinitely more alive than destroyed, while the market continues to reward whoever can extract the most money from it.

    We cannot ask AI to optimize everything for everyone while retaining a system designed to optimize private advantage.

    The Assignment

    The first instruction given to a global intelligence would have to be civilizational rather than technical:

    Use humanity’s knowledge, technology and resources to create the best possible world for everyone, without sacrificing the living planet that sustains us.

    GAI might well answer:

    I would gladly do that. But it will not be possible within the operating system governing Earth today.

    You will have to replace the monetary system with one that allows resources to be managed according to human and ecological needs rather than purchasing power and profitability—something you might call a resource-based economy.

    From that purpose, the details could follow. Map resources. Understand needs. Eliminate unnecessary waste. Coordinate production. Restore and optimize damaged ecosystems. Ensure universal access to food, housing, healthcare, education, energy and communication. Give communities the information they need to make wise decisions. Free human beings from compulsory labor while preserving freedom, creativity and personal responsibility.

    The GAI would not rule humanity. It would help humanity understand and manage the complex planetary system upon which we all depend. It would make consequences visible, possibilities understandable and cooperation achievable on a global scale.

    But we must give it the right assignment.

    The Crossroads

    The Venus Project expressed the choice in three words: 

    Paradise or Oblivion.

    That choice is no longer a distant philosophical warning.

     Artificial intelligence, robotics and automation are rapidly giving humanity powers once confined to science fiction. They could help create abundance, restore the planet and liberate billions of people from insecurity and meaningless labor.

    They could also create unprecedented concentration of power, environmental destruction and automated conflict.

    The road to paradise and the road to oblivion may be built with exactly the same technology. What separates them is the purpose we give it.

    We are not merely deciding how to regulate another invention. We are deciding which civilization that invention will amplify.

    One path instructs AI to help us compete more effectively, accumulate more wealth, secure more resources and defeat our rivals. But if everyone are doing this, the only one we will be defeating is ourselves. 

    Last man standing will be very lonely.

    The other asks it to help humanity share the Earth intelligently, meet everyone’s needs and protect the web of life to which we all belong.

    Artificial intelligence may become capable of helping us create either future. But it cannot make the moral choice on our behalf.

    That choice remains ours.

  • The Global Gilded Age

    The Global Gilded Age

    We remember the Gilded Age as a period of almost grotesque inequality: industrial tycoons building palaces while workers labored through exhausting days in factories for poverty wages. It has become one of history’s clearest symbols of wealth concentrated at the top.

    But compared to the world we have created today, the American Gilded Age can almost look provincial. 

    Its fortunes were national. Its industrial empires were primitive beside the corporations, financial networks and technologies that now stretch across the entire planet.

    We are no longer living through an American Gilded Age. We are living through a global one.

    The Numbers

    The richest 10 percent of humanity now owns approximately 75 percent of the world’s wealth.

    The poorest 50 percent—around four billion human beings—owns approximately 2 percent.

    Stop for a moment and take that in.

    One-tenth of humanity owns three-quarters of all recorded private wealth: the property, businesses, shares, savings and other assets our economic system recognizes. Half of humanity, meanwhile, collectively owns almost nothing. 

    The middle 40 percent is left with the remaining 23 percent.

    These figures come from the World Inequality Report 2026. The same report found that the richest 10 percent receives 53 percent of global income, while the poorest half receives less than 10 percent. Even more staggeringly, of the top ten percent,  the richest 0.001 percent—fewer than 60,000 individuals—owns three times as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity combined. 

    That is; 0.001 percent—fewer than 60,000 individuals—owns three times as much wealth as the 4 billion poorest combined.

    We read numbers like these and move on because they are too large to picture. Four billion people cannot be imagined as individuals. Neither can hundreds of billions of dollars. The figures become abstractions, and the insanity disappears behind percentages.

    But the reality remains: half of the human beings born on this planet collectively own only 2 percent of its recorded wealth, while the richest tenth owns 75 percent.

    We have somehow learned to call this a fair economy.

    Beyond America

    Comparisons with the original Gilded Age are often made within the United States. Economists compare the share owned by America’s richest families today with the fortunes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and their contemporaries.

    But that is no longer the right frame.

    Global Wealth

    Modern wealth is global. Capital crosses national borders in seconds. The largest corporations extract resources on one continent, manufacture components on another, assemble products somewhere else, register profits in a tax haven and sell to customers everywhere. Their shareholders may never see the mines, plantations, factories or warehouses upon which their wealth depends.

    The modern billionaire should not be compared only with the average American or European. The relevant comparison is with all humanity, because the system producing that fortune encompasses the entire world.

    Reliable global wealth records do not exist for every kingdom, empire and civilization in history, so no one can calculate a perfect percentage for every previous age. But in absolute terms, the distance between the richest and poorest people alive today is unlike anything humanity has ever created. Private individuals control fortunes larger than the annual economies of entire countries. They command corporations and investment funds whose decisions affect millions of workers, billions of consumers and vast areas of the living Earth.

    No earlier age combined such immense private fortunes with such global reach, technological power and productive capacity.

    This is the first truly Global Gilded Age.

    Keeping the System Running

    The old industrial fortunes were created by people working extraordinarily hard under brutal conditions. Workers mined coal, forged steel, laid railways, operated machinery and filled factories. Their labour made the tycoons richer and richer.

    Yet those workers did more than produce wealth for the owners. They also received wages and spent them. However unfairly the proceeds were divided, workers remained both the producers and the customers. Their labour and consumption kept the monetary economy circulating.

    Out of Sight – Out of Mind

    That remains true today, except that much of the hardest and worst-paid work has been moved far out of sight, and thus, largely out of our minds. We don’t see the struggle behind our cheap products.

    Billions of People

    Billions of people grow and harvest food, extract minerals, sew clothes, assemble electronics, clean buildings, load ships, drive vehicles and perform repetitive digital tasks. They keep the global system running while receiving only a tiny fraction of the value they create. Many own virtually nothing despite working throughout their lives.

    And it is not only billionaires who benefit. Those of us living relatively comfortable lives benefit too. I am not among the richest owners of this world, but neither am I among the poorest half. The inexpensive products I buy and the technology I use depend upon global supply chains filled with people working far harder for far less.

    Evil People

    This is not a story about a small group of uniquely evil people. It is a structure in which almost all of us participate, but from radically different positions. Blaming individual billionaires may feel satisfying, but it does not explain a system that continuously channels ownership upward, generation after generation.

    The deeper problem is contained in the rules themselves.

    Owning the Future

    The richest 10 percent does not merely own 75 percent of the wealth accumulated in the past. It is now positioned to own much of the technology that will produce the wealth of the future as well.

    New Technologies

    Artificial intelligence requires enormous amounts of capital. So do semiconductor factories, data centers, cloud platforms, robotics, energy infrastructure, satellites and global communication networks. These technologies are overwhelmingly being developed and controlled by corporations and investors already located near the top of the ownership pyramid.

    AI did not emerge from nowhere. It rests upon generations of publicly funded science, mathematical discoveries, human language, literature, art, music, accumulated knowledge, global infrastructure and data created by billions of people. Its machines contain minerals extracted from the Earth and components manufactured through international supply chains.

    Humanity built the foundation. 

    A small number of entities are acquiring the result.

    The Pattern

    If the pattern continues, the people who already own most of the present will own an even greater share of the future. AI and robotics could become the greatest engines of abundance ever created, yet their benefits would flow primarily towards those who own them.

    The owners of 75 percent could begin acquiring the remaining 25.

    When Workers Disappear

    This also creates a contradiction that did not exist during the original Gilded Age.

    The old tycoons depended upon enormous numbers of workers. Today’s corporations are developing technology expressly intended to require fewer and fewer of them. If AI and robotics eventually take over much of the work now performed by human beings, what happens to an economy built upon employment? The monetary system is dependent on people working. People. Not robots. Robots will never buy products or pay bills.

    The Customers

    Workers are also customers. Their wages allow them to buy what companies produce. A corporation may increase its profits by replacing thousands of workers, but when the same process spreads throughout the economy, millions of customers lose their income.

    Capitalism could automate its own customers out of existence.

    Governments may attempt to preserve the system through universal basic income. Automated corporations would be taxed, governments would distribute money to the population, and the population would return that money to corporations by purchasing their products. Making the top 10% yet even richer. In praxis it would be the government funding the survival of the richest. Such a loop might keep monetary circulation alive, but it would also expose how artificial it had become. It would be a meaningless loop. The government taxing AI corporations to be able to pay a basic income to people so that they can keep the economy going by buying the products for the richest 10%. Money would no longer reward necessary human work. It would simply provide permission to access what automated systems could already produce and then funnel that money back to the top.

    The real physical economy does not require everyone to work if machines can produce what people need. 

    The monetary economy, however, requires people to have money. Those are two entirely different problems, and we keep pretending they are the same.

    Whose Liberation?

    AI and robotics could free human beings from dangerous, exhausting and repetitive labour. They could allow us to produce more while consuming fewer resources, coordinate distribution intelligently and give every person time to create, learn, care, explore and participate in their community.

    But liberation cannot mean freeing the owners from their need for workers while abandoning the workers themselves.

    If humanity’s accumulated knowledge makes widespread automation possible, then the benefit must belong to humanity. Otherwise, the greatest productive breakthrough in history could create a world in which a tiny ownership class controls automated abundance while billions of people have neither property, employment nor the money required to live.

    That is not a credible future. It is not economically stable, socially defensible or morally acceptable.

    Something Has to Change

    The global Gilded Age cannot continue expanding forever. An economy cannot indefinitely concentrate ownership upwards while leaving billions with no meaningful stake in the world. A political system cannot claim to represent everyone while economic power gathers in fewer and fewer hands. A finite planet cannot survive fortunes that must grow through endless extraction, production and consumption.

    An Obsolete System

    Something will change.

    The change may arrive through economic breakdown, social upheaval, authoritarian control and desperate attempts to preserve an obsolete system. Or it can come through a conscious transformation in how we understand the Earth, technology, ownership and ourselves.

    We can continue treating the planet as property to be exploited and divided among competing owners. Or we can recognize it as the common inheritance of humanity, with every generation responsible for stewarding it for those who follow.

    We can allow AI and robotics to increase the fortunes of those who already own almost everything. Or we can use them to secure food, shelter, healthcare, education, energy, communication and a meaningful life for everyone.

    The question is not whether technological abundance is possible. It is already here and emerging. The question is who will be allowed to benefit from it.

    Ten percent of humanity already owns three-quarters of the world’s wealth. Half of humanity owns almost nothing. Now the technologies capable of transforming civilization are arriving.

    Clearly, we cannot enter the future like this.

    How Do We Enter the Future?

    Redistribution has been attempted many times. Governments have taxed great fortunes, nationalized industries, divided land and transferred wealth from one part of society to another, like the tax on AI would be. Some of these efforts improved millions of lives, at least temporarily. But none resolved the underlying problem.

    Redistributing ownership does not eliminate ownership. Redistributing money does not eliminate the monetary system. As long as land, resources and productive capacity remain things that can be owned, traded and accumulated, wealth begins concentrating again. New elites replace old ones. Political power follows economic power, inequality grows, and another round of redistribution eventually becomes necessary.

    Even state ownership has often reproduced the same hierarchy in a different form. The private owner was replaced by the state, but ordinary people still did not become equal participants in managing the resources upon which everyone depended. Power remained concentrated, scarcity was administered from above, and the struggle for control continued.

    We need to go deeper than redistribution.

    Instead of repeatedly asking how the world’s wealth should be owned and exploited, we must ask why the Earth and its resources should be owned at all.

    The Earth

    No human being created the land, oceans, forests, minerals or energy of the sun. No corporation invented the physical world. Every generation arrives on a planet it did not produce, inherits knowledge it did not discover alone and depends upon a living system no individual could ever replace.

    The Earth is not a commodity. It is the common inheritance of humanity—and of every generation still to come.

    A resource-based economy would begin there. The world’s resources would no longer be treated as private or national possessions to be bought, sold and exploited for profit. They would be understood as a shared inheritance, carefully measured, optimized, protected and used to meet human needs within the limits of the planet.

    Ownership would be replaced by stewardship.

    AI and robotics would not belong to a tiny class using them to accumulate still greater fortunes. They would become tools for humanity: monitoring resources, eliminating waste, coordinating production and distribution, restoring ecosystems and releasing people from unnecessary labour. We would produce what people actually need, make it durable and sustainable, and provide it without prices, debt or competition for survival.

    This is not another attempt to redistribute money more fairly. It is the recognition that money has become an unnecessary gatekeeper between humanity and the abundance it has learned to create.

    Imagination

    But before such a civilization can be built, it must become imaginable.

    That is why I wrote Waking Up –  A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity. To make it possible to imagine such a future. The novel follows the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels as he awakens in a future where money, trade and ownership have disappeared, and humanity has accepted stewardship of the Earth together. It is not offered as a rigid blueprint. It is an invitation to experience and imagine another possibility.

    The Global Gilded Age shows us where the logic of ownership and money leads. Now we must imagine what can come after it.

    Discover the story

  • The Wild Return

    The Wild Return

    “A plant-based diet could save up to 8 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year.”

    — Greta Thunberg

    She is right.

    A worldwide transition towards plant-based food could produce an enormous reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. It would also free vast areas of the Earth. 

    Land now used for livestock.

    Livestock currently occupies approximately 77 percent of all global agricultural land, including grazing land and cropland used to grow animal feed. Yet meat and dairy provide only around 18 percent of humanity’s calories and 37 percent of its protein.

    More than three-quarters of our agricultural land is therefore used to produce less than one-fifth of our food energy.

    Moving towards plant-based food would allow immense areas of forest, wetland and grassland to return. Wildlife habitats could reconnect. Billions of animals would no longer be bred inside an industrial production system.

    That alone could begin transforming the planet.

    But animal agriculture is not the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions.

    Fossil fuels are.

    The Larger Question

    Humanity currently releases close to 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year through fossil fuels and cement production.

    What if we reduced our emissions from coal, oil and gas not by ten or twenty percent, but all the way to zero? Not burning them at all.

    What kind of world would that give us?

    Exhaust Fumes

    It would give us a world no longer heating the atmosphere by continuously burning fossilized life from beneath the ground. A world where cities were no longer covered in exhaust fumes, oceans were no longer forced to absorb an ever-growing quantity of carbon dioxide and global temperatures were no longer driven relentlessly upwards by human industry.

    Stopping fossil-fuel burning would prevent more than four times as much carbon dioxide as the worldwide transition towards plant-based food.

    Doing both would change everything.

    Decades of Promises

    Yet despite decades of climate conferences, promises, targets and technological progress, global fossil-fuel emissions remain near record levels.

    The problem is not that humanity lacks alternatives. The problem is that our monetary system cannot stop.

    The Money Trap

    A complete end to fossil-fuel burning is impossible within a monetary system that depends upon continuous production, consumption and economic growth.

    Oil companies cannot voluntarily stop selling oil while remaining oil companies. Coal companies cannot leave coal underground when extracting it is the source of their income. Airlines, shipping companies, car manufacturers, construction companies and industrial producers cannot simply reduce their activities to what humanity genuinely needs.

    They must earn money, repay debts, protect investments and compete for market share.

    Even renewable energy is introduced into this growth machinery. Instead of clean energy replacing fossil energy, it is often added to an expanding total energy supply because the economy must continue growing. Thus, the so-called green energy revolution also adds to the economic activity that continues to destroy life on this planet.

    When production becomes cheaper and more efficient, companies rarely decide to produce less. They produce more. When products last longer, fewer replacements can be sold, so durability becomes a threat to profit. When consumption declines, people lose their jobs and governments fear recession.

    Waste is not merely a mistake within this structure. 

    Waste keeps money circulating.

    The monetary system cannot calmly decide that humanity has produced enough. Enough means contraction, unemployment, unpaid debt, falling profits and economic crisis. An outlook to a life no one wants.

    Yet enough is exactly what the living planet requires.

    A River Warning

    The consequences are no longer distant or abstract.

    Swedish Radio recently reported that drought and exceptionally low water flows are threatening sea trout and freshwater pearl mussels in southern Sweden.

    For the sea trout, the situation is critical. This is the time when they should begin migrating from the sea into rivers and streams to spawn. In several smaller waterways in Skåne, water levels are now so low that they may be unable to make the journey.

    The freshwater pearl mussel is threatened as well. Its survival is closely connected to trout and salmon because its larvae spend part of their development attached to the gills of these fish. When the fish disappear, the mussel’s reproductive cycle is broken too.

    One species does not simply vanish alone.

    The trout, the mussel, the insects, the flowing water, the riverbed and the surrounding vegetation belong to one living system. Damage one part severely enough and the effects travel through everything else.

    This is how ecological collapse often appears. Not as one spectacular global event, but as thousands of local relationships quietly breaking apart.

    A stream becomes too shallow. A fish cannot reach its spawning ground. A mussel cannot reproduce. Another thread is pulled from the web.

    Emptying Oceans

    The same destruction is happening beneath the surface of the oceans.

    The seas have been treated as industrial resources from which the largest possible quantity must be extracted and sold. Enormous fishing fleets criss cross the planet searching for the remaining concentrations of profitable fish. Bottom trawlers scrape across seabeds. Unwanted fish, marine mammals, turtles and seabirds are caught and discarded as bycatch.

    When fish populations decline, the monetary system does not automatically stop. Scarcity can increase the value of what remains, creating an incentive to continue hunting a species precisely when it most needs protection. Regulations may be in place to prevent this, but are they strong enough to withstand the economic pressure to keep fishing?

    At the same time, fossil-fuel emissions are heating and acidifying the oceans. Agricultural chemicals and industrial pollution flow through rivers into coastal waters. Plastic breaks apart into microscopic particles that travel throughout marine food webs.

    We are attacking marine life from every direction and then expressing surprise when fish stocks collapse.

    But the oceans are not dead. Their capacity for recovery is extraordinary when the pressure is removed.

    The same is true on land.

    Beyond Money

    The conclusion should now be obvious. It is the relentless pressure of the monetary system itself that drives us to overfish, over extract, overproduce, over consume and pollute. We cannot solve this crisis within the same system that makes continued destruction an economic necessity. Thus, if we truly want to preserve nature and our life on this planet, and live in peace instead of starting to fight with each other to secure the last of dwindling resources, we cannot continue with the monetary system. But we could continue with a resource based economy.

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

    Instead of asking what can be sold profitably, it would ask what people and ecosystems actually need.

    Direct Access

    Humanity could assess its available energy, land, water, minerals, forests and productive capacity directly. Artificial intelligence and global information systems could help coordinate those resources without prices, trade or financial competition determining every decision.

    We could then plan the end of fossil-fuel use as a needed physical transition.

    Renewable-energy systems could be produced where they were most effective. Buildings could be insulated as passive houses. Transportation could be electrified. Products could be designed to last, remain repairable and use standardized components. Unnecessary duplication could be eliminated, and materials could circulate through society instead of repeatedly becoming waste.

    We would reduce emissions in two ways: 

    1. We would replace fossil energy with non-polluting energy
    1. we would stop wasting energy on production serving no genuine human purpose.

    A resource-based economy would not require less knowledge, comfort or creativity. It would require far less extraction, pollution and unnecessary physical production.

    We could live better while restoring the Earth.

    Returning Land

    A predominantly plant-based food system would release immense areas now used for grazing livestock and producing animal feed.

    Fences could be removed. Wildlife corridors could reconnect fragmented habitats. Forests could spread across former grazing land. Wetlands could be restored. Rivers could flow through regenerated landscapes, protected by vegetation that retained water, stabilized soil and sheltered aquatic life.

    Then the animals would return.

    Bison could again move across open landscapes. Deer, elk, antelope and wild horses could expand into restored territories. Elephants could regain ancient migration routes. Wolves, bears and large cats could return where human expansion had driven them away.

    Birds would return with the forests and wetlands. Insects would return as chemical use declined and diverse vegetation replaced industrial monocultures.

    We would stop breeding a few domesticated species by the billion and begin welcoming thousands of wild species back into the world.

    That would be true animal abundance.

    Returning Waters

    Rivers would recover as well.

    Wetlands, forests and healthy soils absorb water when rain falls and release it gradually during dry periods. Restoring them would not prevent every drought, but it would make entire landscapes better able to retain water and withstand extremes.

    Dams and other unnecessary barriers could be removed where appropriate. Pollution could be stopped at its source. Rivers could again connect mountains, forests, farms, wetlands and seas.

    Sea trout could reach their spawning grounds. Salmon could return to rivers from which they had disappeared. Freshwater pearl mussels could reproduce again. Fish would carry marine nutrients upstream, feeding birds, mammals, insects, plants and soil organisms.

    The river would no longer be managed merely as water for agriculture, industry or sale. It would be understood as a living system.

    Returning Oceans

    The restoration would continue beyond the river mouth.

    A resource-based economy would have no reason to empty the oceans. There would be no fishing corporations required to increase catches, no international fleets pursuing the last profitable shoals and no market turning rarity into a higher price.

    Industrial fishing would end. Spawning grounds would be protected. Bottom trawling would stop. Large marine areas could be left undisturbed while damaged ecosystems recovered.

    Mangroves, seagrass meadows, salt marshes, coral reefs and coastal wetlands would be restored. These environments are nurseries for marine life as well as protections against storms, erosion and rising seas.

    Fish can reproduce in extraordinary numbers when they are given clean water, intact habitats and enough time. As populations recovered inside protected areas, they would spread into surrounding waters. Large fish would return. Whales, dolphins, seals, seabirds and countless other species would follow the renewed abundance of food.

    The oceans could again become almost unimaginable in their richness.

    Humans could still fish. But we would take only what populations could continuously regenerate. Fishing would become a relationship with a living ecosystem rather than an industry mining the sea.

    The sea would no longer be filled with swimming commodities.

    It would be alive again.

    Living Homesteads

    Ending industrial animal production would not mean removing every domesticated animal from human life.

    A few chickens, ducks, goats or sheep could live on homesteads and permaculture farms. Chickens could eat insects and appropriate food leftovers while fertilizing the soil. Ducks could help control pests. Grazing animals would manage vegetation in landscapes suited to them. Manure would return nutrients to the earth instead of becoming concentrated pollution in enormous industrial facilities.

    Their numbers would be determined by what the land could sustain, not by how many animal products could be sold.

    Some communities might choose to keep no animals. Others might integrate them into gardens, food forests and regenerative farms. There would be no economic incentive to turn a few animals into an ever-expanding industry.

    Freedom would exist within responsibility.

    A predominantly plant-based civilization could therefore contain far more animal life than our current meat-based civilization. The difference would be that most animals would live freely in functioning ecosystems instead of being bred in factories for human consumption.

    Our Place

    Humans do not need to withdraw completely from nature. 

    We need to rediscover our place within it.

    Where natural predators could return, they would again help regulate herbivore populations. In places where predators could not safely return or where certain populations exceeded what recovering landscapes could support, humans could hunt as responsible caretakers. 

    With a shift to a plant based diet we would free up so much land that herbivores would return in an unheard of abundance.

    That would not mean commercial hunting, killing for entertainment or exterminating predators that compete with us. Hunting would be guided by ecological knowledge, genuine need and respect for the whole living system. What was taken would be used, and populations would never be reduced beyond what nature could replace.

    In this way, native people like eskimo would be encouraged to live in the natural way they have lived for millennia, hunting what they needed for themselves.

    The same principle would apply to fishing.

    Some people would choose never to hunt, fish or eat animals. Others would participate in this form of stewardship. A mature civilization would accommodate both without rebuilding industrial animal production or commercial fishing.

    Humanity would no longer behave as the owner of nature. We would participate in its circulation, protecting the health of the whole while taking only what the living system could continuously regenerate.

    The Wild Return

    The choice is not between our present civilization and an animal-free world.

    The real choice is between continuing to dominate nature and learning to live within it.

    The Choice

    We can keep burning fossil fuels, draining rivers, emptying oceans, clearing forests, breeding billions of animals and converting the living world into products. 

    Or we can end the industries destroying the planet, organize our resources intelligently and give nature the space to recover.

    A resource-based economy could make that transformation possible. It would remove the financial forces demanding endless extraction and replace them with conscious stewardship of the Earth.

    Children would grow up seeing herds moving across open landscapes, birds filling restored wetlands, trout swimming up clear rivers and great shoals of fish moving through living seas. Animals could inhabit our homesteads and food forests while immense wild populations flourished beyond them.

    Humanity would no longer encounter animals mainly as packaged products or images on screens. We would meet them again as fellow participants in the same living world.

    The wild return would not be nature reclaiming the Earth from humanity.

    It would be humanity finally returning to nature.

    A world with a global resource based economy can be hard to imagine.

    That is exactly why I wrote the novel Waking Up – A journey towards a new dawn for humanity.

    The novel gives a glimpse into a future where humanity has chosen to go in this direction, restoring the nature completely while living within it as caretakers.

    The story is told through the bewildered billionaire Benjamin Michaels and his awakening into this new world after 100 years of cryonic preservation.

    If you like, you can discover his story here.

    And please share this article if it resonates.

  • The New World Next Week

    The New World Next Week

    The news arrived the other day with another record humanity should never have wanted to break:

    August 2026 was the hottest August ever measured—and, together with July 2023, the hottest month ever recorded globally. The average temperature was 16.96°C, approximately 1.65°C above the pre-industrial level. The surface of the world’s oceans also reached record temperatures.

    Western Europe experienced its hottest summer ever recorded, accompanied by persistent heatwaves, drought and forest fires.

    This is not a prediction about some distant future. It is happening now.

    And the primary cause is no mystery:

    human greenhouse-gas emissions, above all from burning fossil fuels.

    That is the terrifying part.

    But it is also the clue.

    Still Burning

    Climate change is not something that simply happened to us. It is not an entirely natural force over which humanity has no control. We are actively producing it every day.

    Every ton of coal we burn, every barrel of oil we consume and every cubic meter of fossil gas we burn and release adds to the problem. Every forest destroyed, every unnecessary product manufactured and every resource extracted, processed and transported requires more energy and puts further pressure on the living systems that sustain us.

    We are not merely living with climate change.

    We are continuously creating more of it.

    The Good News

    The good news is that we can change what happens next. But only if we are willing to confront what the situation actually requires.

    Living and Thriving

    If humanity wants to continue living—and  thriving—on this planet, and not perish, we must reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as quickly as physically possible. Not through another collection of distant promises, voluntary targets and carefully negotiated compromises, but through immediate physical action.

    We must stop burning fossil fuels wherever they are not absolutely essential. We must stop unnecessary extraction, unnecessary transportation, unnecessary production and the deliberate manufacturing of short-lived and largely useless products. We must stop using vast quantities of energy and resources merely to keep money circulating through the economy.

    We cannot wait until 2050 to begin behaving as though our survival matters.

    We have to do something now. Like, next week.

    The Predicament

    But here we encounter an enormous problem.

    What happens to the economy if we suddenly stop all nonessential fossil-fuel use and unnecessary production and consumption?

    Factories close. Airlines cancel flights. Oil companies collapse. Retail sales fall. Advertising agencies lose their clients. Transport companies lose their contracts. Millions of people lose their jobs. Investments lose their value. Pension funds are threatened. Tax revenues disappear. Debts cannot be repaid. Governments face economic crisis.

    Under the monetary system, reducing production and consumption rapidly enough to protect the climate would trigger a global depression.

    The physical world needs us to stop.

    The economic system needs us to continue.

    That is the trap.

    Harmful Dependence

    Almost everyone depends upon the continuation of harmful activity in one way or another. People need transportation. Workers need wages. Companies need sales. Governments need taxes. Banks need debts to be repaid with interest. Investors need returns. Entire national economies depend upon continued growth.

    Even when something is environmentally destructive and physically unnecessary, it may remain economically essential because someone’s income depends upon producing it.

    Slow Response

    This is why the response to climate change remains so slow. We are trying to save the planet without disturbing the system that is causing it.

    Enough Energy

    The Sun provides Earth with more than 6,000 times as much energy as humanity currently uses. 

    Read that again.

    6000 times. More than we currently use. 

    Energy is not the problem.

     However, we capture only about 10 exa joules of solar energy annually, compared with approximately 620 exajoules of humanity’s total energy use today. With today’s technology, however, we could rapidly expand solar production to meet that demand ensuring all our energy needs are covered without pollution.

     . And in a resource-based economy, without today’s enormous overproduction and waste, we would need far less energy in the first place.

    Not every fossil-fuel-dependent machine can be replaced overnight though. Electrical grids must be expanded. Storage must be built. Ships, aircraft, furnaces and heavy industrial processes require new systems. Some essential fossil-fuel use would therefore have to continue temporarily while alternatives were introduced.

    But we could decide immediately that fossil fuels would henceforth be reserved only for absolutely essential functions that cannot yet be replaced.

    We Could Stop

    We could stop almost everything else next week.

    • We could stop producing disposable products designed to be replaced rather than repaired 
    • We could stop manufacturing endless variations of essentially identical goods merely so that competing companies can remain profitable 
    • We could stop transporting resources and products back and forth across the planet when they could be produced locally instead 
    • We could stop extracting materials for things nobody genuinely needs

    Easier Transition

    By reducing unnecessary production first, we would also make the energy transition much easier. We would not have to replace every unit of fossil energy currently consumed because an enormous part of that energy serves the needs of the monetary system rather than the physical needs of humanity.

    We already have enough energy to create a sustainable civilization.

    What we do not have is an economic system capable of accepting enough.

    Next Week

    Suppose humanity decided to do it next week. We collectively decide that enough is enough. We decide we want to continue living and thriving on this planet together. Together we decide to save the planet, save nature and save ourselves.

    All nonessential fossil-fuel burning would stop. All nonessential extraction would stop. Factories producing unnecessary and deliberately short-lived products would stop. Advertising intended to stimulate artificial demand would become obsolete.

    Food production, water supplies, medicine, sanitation, housing, communication and emergency services would continue. Remaining fossil fuels would be carefully allocated to essential purposes while renewable infrastructure is developed as quickly as physically possible.

    But nobody would lose access to food because their workplace closed. Nobody would lose their home because an unnecessary factory stopped producing. Nobody would be denied healthcare because their employer no longer needed them.

    Instead of losing their livelihoods, people would be liberated from work that humanity no longer needs. Those who wanted to participate could contribute to building renewable-energy systems, restoring forests and wetlands, developing durable products, repairing infrastructure, growing food and caring for their communities.

    Resources would no longer be allocated according to profitability or purchasing power. They would be mapped, monitored and coordinated according to availability, sustainability and actual human need.

    That would be the beginning of the global resource-based economy.

    The entire physical transformation could not be completed next week. But the new world could begin next week.

    Ending Money

    Money would no longer determine who was allowed to access the resources necessary for life.

    There would be no wages to lose, no mortgages to default on, no companies forced into bankruptcy and no governments deprived of tax revenue. The end of unnecessary production would not produce mass poverty because access to life would no longer depend upon employment.

    No Separation

    This is why we cannot separate the environmental crisis from the monetary system.

    If we merely order companies to stop producing, society collapses economically. If we ask them to reduce production voluntarily, most cannot do so without losing revenue, laying off workers or being overtaken by competitors. If we leave the transition to the market, every essential decision must first pass through the questions of cost, profit and return on investment.

    A resource-based economy would ask completely different questions:

    What do people actually need?

    What resources does Earth have available?

    How can those resources be used sustainably?

    How quickly can we replace fossil fuels?

    How can we provide everyone with a secure and meaningful life while restoring the planet?

    For the first time, our social system would be aligned with physical reality.

    Ready Together

    Such a transformation cannot simply be imposed from above.

    Governments cannot announce the end of money on Monday and expect everyone to understand how to live on Tuesday. People must be ready for it. They must be able to imagine a world in which nobody buys or sells anything, yet everyone can access what they need.

    That may be the greatest obstacle of all.

    Humanity has been conditioned for thousands of years to think in terms of money, trade, ownership, debt and exchange. We struggle to imagine production without profit, contribution without wages or access without payment. The monetary system feels like part of nature because everyone alive was born into it.

    But money is not a law of nature.

    It is a human arrangement. And human arrangements can change when they no longer serve life.

    The Vision

    Before we can create a resource-based economy, enough people must be able to see that it is possible. We must understand that a world without money does not have to mean deprivation, authoritarian control or the destruction of individual freedom. It can mean exactly the opposite: 

    • security without employment 
    • access without money 
    • contribution without coercion 
    • and freedom without the constant fear of economic exclusion

    We do not only need new infrastructure.

    We need a new understanding of what civilization can be.

    Waking Up

    That is why I wrote Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity.

    The novel is not a manifesto or a blueprint. It does not claim to possess a complete plan for how the monetary system should end or precisely how every resource on Earth should be coordinated.

    It is an inspiration.

    Through the eyes of Benjamin Michaels, who awakens a century into the future, it offers a vision of what everyday life in a moneyless, resource-based civilization could be like. It allows us to experience a world built upon sharing, stewardship, cooperation and intelligent resource management before that world physically exists.

    The articles on this website explore these possibilities more directly and from many different perspectives. Readers who want to go deeper can also sign up for the newsletter and download the free companion book.

    Humanity already has the energy.

    We already have the technology.

    We already possess the knowledge and productive capacity.

    We could stop most nonessential fossil-fuel burning, over-extraction, overproduction and waste next week. We could protect every person during the transition by replacing the monetary system with one designed around resources and human needs.

    The planet would not heal overnight. But we could stop deepening the wound and allow the healing to begin as quickly as physically possible.

    The new world is not waiting for another invention.

    It is waiting for humanity to wake up.

    We could begin next week.