scott_sanford

Elon Musk made a statement recently that was very interesting, and even in concept true:
 
 “There will be universal high income (not merely basic income). Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else. Sustainable abundance.”

This is called the post-scarcity society. And Musk's basic statement and vision is that this is within reach. If we reach the point that machines can do all the work of production and such, well, MACHINES don't need 5 million Playstation 6's or a luxury apartment building or a dozen new blockbuster films, or even just a few billion tons of food of various types. Only people use those things. 

So the LOGICAL thing to do is let the machines do the work and free people to do... whatever they'd like to do, without the constraints of "I can't afford that" or "I would love to, but I have to work three jobs". 

He's right. I don't know if that is quite physically possible NOW, but all the pieces exist to make it reasonable to speculate that it COULD happen, and in not too long a time. 

The problem is, of course, that just because we CAN do a thing doesn't mean that we WILL do that thing, and people like Musk and his co-super-billionaires are actually one of the roadblocks. The nature of their businesses, investments, and practices is to CONCENTRATE wealth, power, and productivity into the control of fewer and fewer people. For Musk to do HIS part to achieve this golden future, for instance, he'd have to give up the vast majority of HIS wealth so that it could be spread out to society. 

Note that "vast majority" does not in any way translate to "pauperize". He could still have a billion or two. He just wouldn't be able to accumulate MORE at a rate greater than the overall productivity of the planet, which currently he's exceeding by, well, a lot. 

Marshall Brain wrote about this problem in his short book Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future. While I don't agree with some details of his utopian vision, the basic dichotomy he describes IS our current problem. We are on the edge of near-utopia, or of a vicious dystopia, and the current trends are MUCH more to dystopia, primarily because of the self-perpetuating positive feedback loop of modern investment capitalism without appropriate controls. 

To make the GOOD future happen requires an acceptance of human existence as a value unto itself -- as THE value unto itself, by which all others are measured. (for "human" substitute "sapient being" if you want to allow for actually fully intelligent AIs, uplifted dolphins, or alien visitors). Currently the system has "work" as the actual value, with the exact valuation of "work" depending on what KIND of work it is and who's doing it. The value is also broken down purely into monetary units, which means that the value can be taken and accumulated. You can't accumulate human existence -- we only have one, and it's each person's unseparable value. 

A HUGE amount of our current problems come from the societal, built-in, often-unstated but absolutely present assumptions that not all human existences have value -- or at the least, certainly not the SAME value. This is why we have gatekeeping laws and rules at so many levels. 

It's most obvious in governmental services, which are inevitably FILLED with rules whose purpose, stripped of all the flowery details, is to make sure that people who don't "deserve" the service don't get it. The rules are nearly ALWAYS designed with a preference for denying services rather than providing them. 

For the described near-utopia, the reverse must be true. A person who wants medical care should receive it. There should be no questions about why, or how. A person who needs to eat should be able to get food. A person who wants to have a safe and comfortable home should have one. The only real limits should be "is this going to cause harm to someone else?". (excluding the "harm" of someone being annoyed that Those People are getting stuff). 

To make this all HAPPEN, unfortunately, requires severe and far-reaching changes in multiple areas -- in corporate law and custom, in taxation, in economic assumptions, in almost every single major facet of our world. 

There are some countries that have done some of the groundwork, but without the USA and other major countries leading the charge, the change will take generations to happen, if the dark future version doesn't grind them down first. 

The question is whether the Musks and Bezoses and such can even understand that the utopian world starts with them changing the entirety of their business.