Each term in the essays’ own words, with a link to where it’s explained.
That means intelligent machines we can call on to do any job, scaled up or down as needed, producing universal basic goods and services for everyone.
Put intelligence and intelligent bodies together, and you get what I’m calling machine labor on demand.
Labor and materials are two kinds of resources. When this series talks about sharing resources, here’s the full list I mean:
The resources you pool in a party are then time, access to machines, and reputation, rather than startup cash in the traditional sense.
Part 2 The two markets we live in Part 5 A flexible floorPart 6 What do we pool?
Every resident holds one equal share of the machines that make their essentials. It can’t be sold, so it can’t pile up in a few hands the way shares do today.
Your share can’t be sold, but it moves with you.
Universal basic capital scored highest of all on agency and on ownership of the gains, and second from the bottom on feasibility, because nothing like it has been tried before.
Part 5 Universal basic capital Part 7 Where we are nowPart 19 Stage 3: The build-out (about 2030 to 2040)
That’s the thing I’ve been advocating all along without saying it out loud: machine labor on demand for all. Call it universal basic machine labor.
And everyone should be able to call on it. That’s what I mean by universal basic machine labor: machine labor on demand, for all.
Everyone gets a base: a personal machine of their own, with personal machine intelligence and personal machine labor linked together.
Food, water, energy, housing, healthcare, transport and communication: the actual things we need to live, provided from a world of abundance powered by machine labor on demand.
In this world, you don’t need to trade anything for universal basic goods and services.
If a human wants to do it, a human gets to do it.
We can build that very world, so long as everything else is covered by machine labor on demand.
In the world we want, humans are always first in line, and machines fill whatever gap is left.
Part 2 Humans first, machines fill the gap Part 1 The answer, in briefPart 4 Humans get first pick
The concept of a “party” in D&D is one where you get a ragtag group of merry adventurers together to go on some singular quest, overcome adversity in order to achieve it, and when it’s completed, all share the spoils.
You form a party when you want to take on a quest
You join a guild when you want to learn a skill or practice a craft.
A guild could similarly have a charter obligation to pursue mastery of its craft and keep its doors open to anyone who wants to apprentice.
Once a community’s infrastructure is up and running, truly up and running, I propose it gets gifted back to the people who live there.
Part 5 The gift-back Part 19 Stage 4: The gift-back and the floor (about 2035 to 2045)
Picture infrastructure that works like a microgrid, but for everything.
Each community runs its own nodes: local machines, local energy, and local computation, producing enough to cover its own basic needs at a surplus.
A network of resilient communities becomes the main way people organize their lives, connected by trade in information and resource surplus rather than wages.
There is also scarcity by human nature: beachfront property, original art, the attention of one particular person. No amount of labor fixes the demand for those kinds of things, which is why money, or something like it, will likely still be needed to coordinate demand around those.
Part 3 Why things are scarce Part 6 What about scarce wants?
A quest is one goal with an end: make a film, a bridge, a new product line, or anything else. A party is just the group that forms to finish it.
Imagine companies built around a singular purpose that disband once that purpose is fulfilled, like parties.
Where corporations face constant pressure to produce profit for their shareholders, a party would have what’s called a charter obligation to complete the quest it’s on.
Better materials make better chips, batteries, solar panels, magnets, and robots. Better chips and robots make more and faster labs. More labs find better materials. Each turn of the wheel speeds up the next one
With the rise of humanoid robots, and the combination of these humanoid robots with machine intelligence, we’ll soon have intelligent bodies (robots) we can call on demand.
The floor would be the same everywhere, but what sits on top of it is up to each community.
At that point, the safety net isn’t a program funded by taxes. It’s the floor itself.
Part 5 A flexible floor Part 18 The first sketch, and why it changedPart 19 Stage 4: The gift-back and the floor (about 2035 to 2045)