With input and feedback from Josh Fairhead, Phil Wolff and James Fairhead.
At the recent Web3summit in Berlin, I attended a presentation by Trent McConaghy about Nature 2.0. Nature 2.0 is a vision on how the world may perform and operate sometime in a not so distant future where IoT, AI, machine learning and total automation has replaced nearly all jobs that we know today. To some this is verging on Utopia, to the rest a terrifying future.
Central to the vision of Nature 2.0 is the concept of self ownership of ‘Things’ (cars, roads, trees, plots of land). As the technical capability to IoT, AI, and decentralization increases, the need for human control will be eliminated and each of these common resources will become endowed with self ownership. Self owning Things will become a new class member in society. A Thing will borrow money to bring itself into existence (eg. buy/build the car) and then over its useful life will pay back the creation loan to the organization that lent the money in the first place. Once the loan obligation is fulfilled, the Thing then belongs to the Commons and any income generated goes to the pool that funds a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for all. The concepts and vision are grand (as they should be), however I believe that there are some serious flaws in the base assumptions, the most fundamental of these is that all people are looking for is income.
Over the past few years there has been a growing call for the establishment of UBI globally - Finland tried an experiment with it (it ended with no further action planned), Switzerland voted on it (it failed to pass) and Canada talked about it - and how this will be the ultimate solution for the coming technology driven revolution. What is curious, is that we have many examples of a form of UBI that has been in existence for more than a hundred years, that has been disastrous for those receiving it, and is never mentioned. These are all the ‘Reservations’ of the native peoples of North America. Here are the very real results of handing a ‘basic income’ without creating new purpose for people. The changes of mass immigration and technology of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries destroyed the purposeful existence for all these peoples, no effort was made to help inspire new ones, all these people were sacrificed to the call of progress. By simply offering UBI are we not going down the same road again? It did not work before, so why do we believe this will work this time?
people are most happy when their lives are filled with purposeful activity
There are no simple solutions in the challenges facing humanity. Simply throwing money to those unfortunate many whose purpose in life is destroyed is not a solution. Yes, it may mean that they have an ability to keep a roof over their head, and some minimal food on the table, but is not purpose. Contrary to a belief held by many, Man is not just another animal. Man is a special creature, we do not operate in automatic mode, we are not animals purely looking for the next meal, people are most happy when their lives are filled with purposeful activity.
Now, before I am accused of trying to hold back the tide of progress, let me state I am an engineer, someone who has been in the midst of technology for thirty years. I do believe we are on the cusp of a fundamental change in how mankind exists, with a choice of either fantastic opportunities for great things or frightening opportunities for dystopia and enslavement.
In 2006 with the launch of the smartphone, those working in this industry could not imagine the full impact of a mobile revolution. Devices and machines built in the previous twenty years were suddenly being connected to the internet, accessible from halfway around the world; little thought for security and hardening of legacy devices was given. We now live in a world where electric grids are being hacked or viruses are being downloaded into industrial equipment for self destruction; enormous expense is now underway in a race to replace or retrofit all these systems. No one could envision this before the world of the smartphone burst upon us. We engineers raced forward with mobile technology like a child in a toy shop, idea upon idea, new concepts, new business models, new everything and sometimes leaving the boring hard stuff (security) for later consideration. The child like curiosity of the technocrats led the charge and the financiers kept the funding flowing as the returns were out of this world.
The child like curiosity of the technocrats led the charge and the financiers kept the funding flowing as the returns were out of this world.
A fundamental sign of intelligence is the ability to reflect on previous actions to see if there should be modification of behavior to produce a better outcome BEFORE rushing headlong down an already tried path. We have already trod the path of the technocrat with the mobile revolution, it was mostly good, but a lack of consideration for the hard stuff (security) has now put our entire way of life at risk. Do we want to replicate at global scale the horrific UBI experiment of the 19th and 20th century with its results on display in the hopeless situations for many of the Native Peoples of North America?
What must be added to a Nature 2.0 vision is not the easy UBI answer alone, but serious consideration and thought on creating entirely new lifelong education systems and means for enabling people to re-ignite the desire for growth. There are no frictionless surfaces, the concepts outlined in Nature 2.0 are intriguing and an important first thought, but to have real credibility there must be attempts to address the really hard problems of dislocation, re-tooling those dislocated and question the pursuit technology for technology's sake alone.