@abundance

Almost 20 years ago I came to the conclusion that sooner or later automation is going to completely wreck our economy. (That was before AI was even a thing.) Since I was in college at the time, that made me wonder — what’s the point of making a lot of money if, in 30–40 years, money itself might lose value once the economy collapses? I started thinking about whether I could actually understand what’s wrong with our system — and maybe come up with a way to fix it. An alien looking at our situation would probably think we’ve lost our minds. It’s not some catastrophic event threatening to collapse our economy, but technological progress itself — the ability to mass-produce almost everything people need and want, with little to no human labor. It just didn’t make sense. So I studied economics in college and did come up with a possible solution. The problem was that what I came up with required a technological component that, at the time, I estimated would take about 80 years to develop. So I decided to focus on a career in architecture instead, hoping that sooner or later someone would figure out a way to avert an economic collapse. Almost 15 years later, I listened to a podcast with @vitalik.eth and realized that Ethereum — or rather, “programmable money” — could be used instead of the tech solution I had originally imagined. What struck me then was that not only had no one offered a serious solution to prevent mass joblessness or economic collapse, but two new challenges had emerged: 1) AI is accelerating the timeline I had once worried about. 2) Our information ecology has deteriorated so much that even a great solution would struggle to break through the noise. Still, we have to play the hand we’re dealt. Almost two decades later, I’m seeing that most of the crises we face today — from the breakdown of trust in media and institutions, to social polarization, economic stagnation, market failures in public goods, and resource conflicts — are all connected to the same underlying problem I was trying to identify back then. The good news is that it can be solved. We now have both the technological tools and the economic framework needed to move toward prosperity instead of collapse. Here’s that framework:

0 reply

0 recast

0 reaction