Responsible Abundance
Think about the oxygen in the air you are breathing.
It is, arguably, the most important thing to your continued existence, yet all you have to do to get it is breath.
How is that possible?
Oxygen doesn't occur in atmospheres without something putting it there. No other planet we have found has oxygen in the atmosphere.
On this planet, trillions of self replicating systems capture sunlight, use the energy in it to split the hydrogen atoms off of water, and release the oxygen into the atmosphere.
Without those little self replicating machines (plant cells) our form of life would not be possible.
Nobody pays for oxygen. It is simply there when we need it.
What we are proposing, is that it is now possible to take technology similarly to the next level, where fully automated machines do all that is required to create and maintain copies of machines just like them, and are also capable of producing almost all the goods and services most people reasonably need and want, at no cost.
Certainly, that is a major change from how we organise things now, and it will require multiple levels of new systems to do all the things the old market based systems did, and that is both possible and necessary.
Certainly it takes a lot of effort to set the system up in the first instance, but once in place, and it has replicated for 33 cycles, then everyone can have one, and there is no need to exchange anything. (And of course it is deeply more complex than that, and all of those complexities have reasonable solutions.)
When that happens, there is no scarcity, and the market value of those goods and services is exactly the same as oxygen in the air - zero.
We no longer need poverty to keep the economic system running.
Everyone can enjoy a high standard of living, with reasonable degrees of freedom, provided they act responsibly and within the real limits that are present in cosmology, physics, biology and whatever cultures and communities they are part of.
Biology has already proven to us that it is possible.
We are "simply" proposing to take it to the next level of complexity and technology.
The idea of money has arguably served us well in getting us to this point in our evolution, but it has reached the end of its usefulness, and cannot take us to where we need to go.
We must now learn how to think beyond money, and for some that will take a while.
There are multiple classes of existential risk that we must solve if we are to have a long term future, and we require both abundance and cooperation to solve most of them. Our existing systems of labour, capital, money and markets cannot take us where we need to go.
And this one example is already proof positive that what we are proposing is possible, and it does work.
Authorised by: Ted Howard,
1 Maui St, Kaikoura, New Zealand
Phone: 027 442 4281