Utopia

 

Random thought: are we heading for an economy where the 1% and the 99% become completely economically disconnected? They will control AIs* to do mental work and robots to do physical work and massive amounts of wealth, and so they will have nothing we can afford and we will have nothing they want.

At first it sounds like one of those scifi dystopias where the poor live on a poisoned, ruined planet and the rich live on floating techtopias**, living off the crumbs that fall from their tables, except for the fact that they live in compounds rather than sky islands. But it could go differently.

Before I go any further: please do not piss on my parade. If you think my thought here is hopelessly utopian, you are probably right. I just don't want to hear it right now.

Imagine we choose to economically disconnect from them. They have all the dollars, so we won't use dollars. Their money is no good here. We farm and make things and perform and create arts and take care of each other in our own economy, independent of them, with our own currency or none at all***. Our economy would be based on the value of labor and its exchange, not capital. We can live on real food and read books and listen to live bands and watch actors on stage and care for each other while they eat highly processed junk and stream and read AI generated algorithmic slop while their best friend is a robot butler.

We don't need to overthrow them, as communist manifestos assume. We can just ignore them as they self-isolate, geographically and socially and economically. Now, an obvious objection to this is that they might send in security forces to tell us we can't farm this land because it belongs to them, or that we have to pay them taxes, or to take our produce. In other words, to treat us as an occupied country. However, there are more of us than there are of them. Many more. It would be the kind of occupation where they control only whatever square yard of land they have a solider standing on at any given moment.

Of course, this would mean giving up a lot of technology, but if we're honest, a lot of technology has not made our lives better. We work longer hours than pre-industrial peasants, have less leisure, are more stressed, and spend our time on social networks that make us unhappy by design.

The one great loss would be modern medicine. But considering how unaffordable that is to many Americans already, and how unavailable to most of the world population anyway, that's worth considering. Or maybe it's the one thing we trade food to the rich for. 

Anyway, that's my utopia. What's yours?

—-

Now the footnotes.

* Useful AIs, not LLMs, which are the dumb animal trick of AI. 

** Techtopia is a perfectly valid neologism. Thomas More created "utopia" in 1516 by latinizing greek roots meaning "no" and "place". "Techtopia" parallels that construction. (The root of "tech" is "to weave", by the way.) Arguably it should be Technotopia, since techno- is the combining form of the word, e.g. as in technology, but I think techtopia is snappier. 

***The alternative to currency is not barter, as many would have you believe, but ledgers and optionally fixed rates of exchange for commodities. Ledger-based trade has existed successfully for hundreds of years at a time in thousands of communities, often in parallel with official currencies and barter for untrusted outsiders. See "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber for more exposition than I can fit in a Bsky thread.