This is basically a guide on how to make a perfect society with technology.
- Section 0: Author's Preface
- Section 1: Overview
- Section 2: Let's Get Into Specifics
- Section 3: Common Whatabouts
Hello, I am JT Raber. I am currently working towards a B.Sc. of Computer Science with a concentration in Robotics and Embedded Systems and a minor in Mathematics. For years I have been thinking about a societal structure that can utilize technology to the advantage of the people. I think it would be a good idea to really flesh out the ideas with a Github repository, not only because it is public for everyone to read, but because it is also open for community contributions. The first few words of the title (Grand and Unified) are good indicators of how complicated this guide will be, both to write and to carry out. If you want to contribute to the guide, please feel free to make a revision and submit a request. This guide is supposed to be for the people, it should also be made by the people. With the preface out of the way, let's begin the guide.
Quick Disclaimer
Things I am:
- Computer Scientist
- College Student
- A Dude
Things I am not:
- An Ethicist
- A Lawyer
- A Farmer
- A Nuclear Engineer
- An Architect
- A Logistician
- An Astronaut
- A Miner
- A Doctor
- A Chemist
- A Psychologist
- A Sociologist
- Many Things
Let's break this down into its component parts.
- Fully-Automated: Robots will complete every menial task, including manufacturing, physical labor, custodial work, and any other form of labor that is not desirable for a human to perform. Robots to build houses, robots to cook food, robots to harvest resources, robots for everything.
- Luxury: The automation of labor will push humanity to a post-scarcity state, allowing everyone to live a life of luxury. Energy will be generated with thorium reactors, rarer resources will be mined from asteroids or other planets (but we are getting ahead of ourselves), or ideally, their use will be minimalized and replaced with a more renewable approach. Due to the automation of labor and the elimination of scarcity, currency will become useless, everyone will be elevated to the same height of luxury, living life as they please.
- Space: As mentioned in the previous paragraph, we will need to go to space. The reasoning for this is two-fold. First, certain resources are simply not abundant enough on our own planet. Second, one of those resources will eventually be space. A planet can only hold so many people, so we must venture into the void and separate ourselves from our earthly bond. Perhaps we will terraform Mars and eventually reach further.
- Communism: There would be no need for currency. Everything you need would be provided for you. You would be free to pursue your passions in life. Language, travel, arts, sciences, whatever you want. Being freed from the chains of your labor, you will be free to flourish as an individual without the weight of working stopping you from following your heart and mind. There will be no class, there will be no money, there will be no suffering.
Because it is the societal organization that will maximize the freedom of individuals and reduce suffering the most. We have the technology and we are creating more every day, we should use it to help the masses rather than to line the pockets of the CEOs and the overlord minority. Figureheads don't create technological advancements, their devteams do. It is time for the technology made by the people to start serving the people.
Now I know that section 1.1 sounds pretty far fetched, that is because it is. This is only one of many paths that humanity can take as we advance our civilizations. This route will not be easy, it will take a lot of work from a lot of very smart people. This guide is simply a framework to follow to reach this state. The rest of this question, and more, will be answered in the rest of this guide.
Alright, here is where the meat of the guide begins. We will talk about a lot of things, so let's begin with some basics.
Note: when I mention "robots", I think it would be best to keep in mind that most of the time I am not referring to humanoid robots, but rather a large amalgam of parts that complete one task. For example, a robot that plants seeds in the ground will not be some little guy with arms and legs, but will be a machine that goes along a track, using a linear arm to place the seeds in the ground. I cannot stress enough how important it is to think outside the box of the humanoid and find more creative frameworks for solving physical problems. Like, if you take one thing from this guide, it should be that humanoid robots are usually far from the best solution to a problem. We have built our entire society around the human form and its limitations, and for that I do not fault anyone, but this is not the best we can do. The way that we have organized our society makes it easiest for humans to do work, but robots are not limited to a humanoid form. This is the key to the door that leads from "a robot doing a thing" to "many robots doing everything" and as such, is the key to our chains.
We will begin with energy, without which nothing can be done. There are many sources of energy, but none are as dense and plentiful as thorium. Certainly hydrogen, solar, and wind are renewable, but they are not as energy rich as thorium. We must move away from resources such as coal, natural gas, and others that are inefficient and harmful to the earth. Let's go over a few quick points about thorium.
- It is estimated that there are 6,355,000 tonnes of thorium. It is more abundant than uranium in nature.
- Thorium is not fissile, but rather it is fertile. This means that it cannot cause a meltdown like uranium. Thorium needs a catalyst element to begin a reaction, and will stop reacting once the catalyst is removed. The coefficient of reactivity is negative.
- 1 tonne of thorium has the same amount of energy as 200 tonnes of uranium or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal.
- There is up to two magnitudes less nuclear waste from thorium in a liquid fluoride reactor than from uranium.
- Thorium production does not produce carbon dioxide.
- Earth's thorium supply will last at least 10,000 years.
These are six of the benefits of thorium. Basically, if you can get it working well you will have a safe, clean, practically unlimited energy supply. We need a very strong base so that we can develop the rest of our society without worry about energy.
I don't want to say this because I really like meat, but I think that factory farming of animals should be put to an end. I am not exactly very knowledgeable on this topic, so this is somewhere that the wisdom of the crowd could come in. Basically, from what I have heard it is not a good life for the animals, we are getting pretty good at making fake meat, and farming animals takes a lot of space. Alright, with that out of the way, let's talk about my alternative:
Farming Skyscraper/Groundchamber
Alright, so this is pretty much the same thing people do in cities. When expanding outward moves you too far from the epicenter of your city, you build up (or down?)! Utilizing the third dimension, one square mile of farmland can be transformed into one hundred square miles of farmland. These agricultural structures will serve as large scale greenhouses, featuring irrigation, climate, and lighting systems.
I am no farmer, but I am guessing that we can create dirt (I think I saw some article on creating dirt from scratch) and grow stuff like corn, beans, carrots, potatoes, and other types of food that grows in the ground. The regularity introduced in such a controlled environment will simplify the harvesting and planting process. There would probably be a general rail system above the crops, and depending on the type of crop special attachments or instructions could be added to harvest the crop.
For example, one would not harvest corn in the same way that they harvest potatoes. Corn grows up on stalks and potatoes grow in the ground.
This section is probably going to be a bit short, seeing as we mainly use trees as a building material and I would like to find a more abundant alternative that does not require as much processing. We would still farm trees for their fruit, and we would do it in a similar way as described in section 2.2.1. The buildings would be multi-storied, but the levels would be taller to allow room for the trees to grow upward.
This section is going to sound like it comes straight from a sci-fi novel from the 20th century, but really, it comes from a 19th century story! Alright, regardless, it is possible with technology and research. We got a few guys on the moon, how hard could some asteroids be? They might be pretty hard to get to. The basic idea of asteroid mining is:
- Get on asteroid
- Take stuff from asteroid
- Bring stuff back to humans
This is an extreme oversimplification of the process, with each step probably being composed of tens if not hundreds of steps. This section will need to be expanded.
Maybe instead of using wood to build houses we could switch to a primarily metal or rock based system. This would allow us to refrain from using trees to build houses and use resources taken from asteroids.
I think that it is safe to say that people should have the right to a house. I don't mean just some box that barely fulfills basic needs, I mean an actual house that they choose or design themselves or with an architect. Robots will build the houses. There are ridiculously many ways to build a house, so I will just cover a few for now.
This is just like the house most people live in. Wooden framing, drywall walls, tiled or plastered ceilings, etc. This style of house would not be too difficult to create with robots. The foundation would not be difficult to make, we would just need automatic excavators and cement pourers. I imagine that one could design a specialized robot to automatically create the frames from 2x4 pieces of wood. The pieces of wood would probably come in a uniform pile and would be fed into the machine where they would be automatically cut to size, rotated, and nailed together. Another machine would probably transport the frames to where they go and assemble them. This machine could be crane-like and use object detection and analysis with a camera to adaptively figure out what to do to put the frames together.
Exterior finishing could be achieved with a mechanical arm on a rail going around the house. This could be used to add siding, or stones, or really whatever is desired. Interior finishing could be done similarly, but on wheels maybe, for extra versatility. Adding cupboards and cabinets could be done in a similar way, with a wheeled robot lifting them up like a forklift and nailing/screwing them into place on the walls. Snake-like robots could be used to bore holes in the frames for electrical wiring, and to connect the wiring. Plumbing could be done in a similar manner, with snake-like robots.
The roof would either be put on by the aforementioned crane robot, or by the aforementioned forklift-type robot. The actual roofing would probably be done by the latter of the two, or possibly by an amalgam of them. A crane-type robot with a steady hand with many axes of motion and attachments.
The best design would most likely be a very versatile robot that can do general work while still remaining simple. Humanoid robots are not a good fit due to the complexity of the human figure. A boxier machine would work well, using wheels instead of legs. The wheels should be on extendable rods to allow the robot to be level regardless of terrain.
This is an interesting one. The house comes in pieces that can be assembled just like building blocks. The pieces are all uniform triangular frustums. I imagine that there would be all kinds of types of these, and that some would be larger than others to accomodate for larger features, such as doors, large windows, etc. These can certainly be built with special hidden aspects to make assembly easier for a robotic arm. Maybe a notch in one of the obfuscated sides could be used as a uniform grabbing point during construction. The way that I see this going is that all of the pieces needed will be at the build site, along with a mechanical arm to put the pieces together. The arm would be in the center of where the house will be, building the house around itself. Of course, there are a lot of other things that need to be done, like adding stories or rooms. I am not sure how this could be done, but that can be expanded upon later.
For those who want a more industrial look, you can get a house 3D printed! This has already been done as of the date of writing (10/23/2020). This is certainly the simplest method, one simply sets up the frame of the printer, prepares the concrete, and presses start. For windows and other features, an auxiliary robot such as the kind mentioned in section 2.3.1.1 would be best.
Now I'm no clothes maker, but I bet that it wouldn't be too hard to have a roll of fabric set up to be pulled and cut and sewn together into the shape of a shirt or pants without the intervention of humans.
Robot chemist. That's about it. I imagine that we would just have a ton of chemicals and equipment integrated into a machine that can run routines to create any medicine that is needed. I'm being a bit facetious here, but sort of like a Minecraft auto brewer.
There are a few ways that we could do this. We could have a centralized medicine machine, or we could have distributed ones. Also, some of the medicine created by these machines would be restricted to only people who need them for treatment, while others would be available to all, like painkillers or cough syrup. Such open access to drugs might make one think that addiction would be likely in a lot of people. This would not be true.
Addiction is not random, and it can be treated. People who are mentally healthy and in a sound state of mind are naturally less likely to turn to drugs for happiness. I don't have empirical evidence to back this up, maybe some community research and sources would be good. I am just going off how I feel and what makes sense. People do drugs to cover up pain or sadness, people without pain or sadness won't need to cover up what they don't have, proper mental health helps people stay happier. See section 2.4.2.1: Mental Health for more on the subject.
When I look at my desk, I see a lot of things that are pretty specific which would probably not be efficient to have at the local stockpile. I see an ESP8266 prototyping board, just one of many models of the like. I see wires, buzzers, LEDs. Now, I'm not sure how large the stockpile would be, maybe it would be big enough to hold tons of stuff. Like, ridiculously much stuff. Maybe it will be a multi-story building with different departments for different goods. This leads us to a point of variance: how will we handle specialty items? There are two basic methods that I can think of.
Method 1: Make sure that we have very large stockpile buildings to hold all of the possible things people could want.
Method 2: Create a system like Amazon or Ebay where someone can have items specially manufactured and sent directly to them.
I personally prefer method 2, as I think it would be the most efficient method in terms of space and complexity. Here are some examples.
Let's take the ESP8266 board that I have on my desk as an example. This board has many small components that need to be put on very precisely. I would be surprised if they did not already have the process automated. Basically, I would choose from a catalog online which board I wanted. When I submit the order, the machines capable of creating the board will go to work and manufacture the board immediately. Once it is finished it will be packed up somehow and sent to me. Maybe there will be drone delivery, maybe we will have pneumatic mail tubes, maybe we will just have mail truck robots. For more on this topic, please see Section 2.4.4: Mail for more deliberation on how people will recieve things.
If you want a certain type of desk, make an order online for it. Or better yet! Design it yourself and send it in to be made for you! Completely custom! It will be assembled for you out of the materials you choose. A large item like this will probably not fit in the tubes, and you would need a rather large drone to carry such an item. This leaves one option of delivery: a mail truck robot. I don't think that one method of delivery will work best for all cases, and I think that a mix of all 3 methods mentioned would be the best way to do this.
"If there's no money, how do we buy things?" you ask, to which I reply "you don't buy things, you just take what you want from the stockpile!". The stockpile (working name, let me know if you have a better idea of what to call it) is like Walmart on steroids! Take what you want, there's always more where that came from. We're post-scarcity, baby. Really though, just take what you want.
Now a common rebuttal to this is "what if someone takes all of the food?!" which is kind of silly. When you go to the store right now you may be partially limited in what you buy due to money, but really the reason that you don't take all 153 cobs of corn is not that you can't afford it but because it just isn't really something people do. You don't see Jeff, Mark, or Elon talking about having a metric ton of Reese's Puffs in their pantry. This is not because they are limited financially, but because there is really no point in taking more than what you want/need.
There is no incentive to resell the items you get, and the reasoning for this is two-fold: first, everyone else will have the same access to the same items at a literal price of $0. And second, what are you gonna resell them for? Money? You mean that weird green paper stuff we used to use to denote value? Yeah, what are you gonna buy with that? Everything is free, remember?
We will probably use artificial intelligence to route the needed amount of items to areas. If red shirts are selling really well in one area and not in another, more will be supplied to the higher demand area and less to the other. The items will maybe be driven to the areas with self driving cars, maybe the items will be sent via the trans-continental underground system of transportation. Kind of like the subway, but for things instead of people. This will simplify the shipping process, allowing straighter routes, faster transportation, and no human interference.
As discussed in Section 2.3.4: Specialty Items, some items are just not common enough to efficiently hold in the stockpile. Like, think of all of the specialty stores like Lowe's, JoAnn Fabrics, Harbor Freight, Dick's Sporting Goods, Micro Center, Ikea, etc. Now imagine putting all of the stores you can think of and more into one building. That would be a big building, and some areas would be sparsely populated.
Everybody gets a doctor, and its name is D.O.C.T.O.R. which stands for Department Of Care Treatment Operator Robot. I know it is a meme, but they did surgery on a grape. Robot doctors are more precise than humans will ever be, it is just that simple. You can train an artificial intelligence on literally decades of medical data, and that is exactly what we will do with D.O.C.T.O.R. An AI can detect patterns that would seem invisible to us. I am pretty sure that I remember hearing about IBM Watson being used to do a similar thing, but I am not sure. Some community input here would be great. So we have a robo-doctor diagnosing us and performing surgery on us, what if we need some medicine? See section 2.3.3: Medicine for the answer to that.
Another important branch of healthcare is mental healthcare. Mental health is more closely bound to physical health than we thought, and even if it weren't it would still be important. Sadness and trauma are like illnesses that cloud the mind and make life less enjoyable. They lead to poor decisions and reckless behavior, which can put people in danger. Ideally, people would learn as they grow up how to have healthy mental habits. Under this societal structure, that would be strongly enforced. It is good to be happy. Certainly having negative emotions is ok, and everyone has them from one time to another, but the problem with them is right in the name, negative. It is not a fault of the person to be sad or feel angry, but rather it is a natural response to stimuli. What is important is how people handle their emotions. If someone is feeling a way they don't want to feel, they should be able to come to a mental health practitioner and work through what they are feeling.
All education will be completely free and all knowledge will be open to the public. Primarily, we will be taught by robots. Every person will have their own teacher, giving a personalized experience. Education would probably be virtual. Humans who wish to be teachers will be able to teach.
Maybe there will be magic (technological) ways to implant education into people's minds. Like, having the knowledge put into your brain like a file from a USB stick to a computer. This is pretty technologically advanced and I have no idea how it would happen. Most likely though, people will just be taught virtually like on Khan Academy or something.
Basic skills would be required to be learned, such as reading, writing, basic math, etc. I am not a child educator so I don't know how their little brains work. Anything past the basics should be left to the student to pursue. I really think that it would be a good idea to perform a massive overhaul on how we structure education. I am not too far off from the days of public school, and let me tell you that so many of the kids there would not have gone if they didn't have to. I don't think it is as much of a fault of the student as it is a fault of the environment in which they were raised.
I grew up in a sort of poor area on the outskirts of appalachia, and I'll be the first to say that we were not funded very well and the students did not usually have a great home life. There were those students who rose to the top of the class, and it is not impossible to be a good student there, but I believe that how one is raised has a massive impact on the students motivation. I think that the ideal school system would instill a lasting sense of creativity and curiosity in the students. As I have stated before, there were the students like me who chose to push themselves academically, but we were the few at the school; my calculus class had 7 students in it.
Why is it that students would rather take math 4 than calculus? I can see a few reasons. Maybe the student simply wasn't interested in mathematics and would rather pursue an art, maybe the student did not believe that they would understand calculus, maybe the student just didn't want to. But we must remember that every want has a why behind it. John Green said something about learning being similar to cartography, in that when you learn about one thing you can see a sliver of land in the distance, representing a new island or discipline. How could someone not want to pursue the horizon? Perhaps they are disheartened at the thought of exploration, or perhaps they are content where they are. The latter is acceptable, but the former is the problem at the core of this discussion.
We should not teach in a way that will kill the sense of curiosity and wonder that comes from learning something new.
Things need to go places, and here it how we will get them there! There are a few ways that we could go about this.
First, for smaller items we could use pneumatic tubes going directly to people houses. This would probably be the simplest of the three methods. There would be the least variables with this method. We would just need to control the pneumatics of the tubes to get the items to the correct place, which would just consist of opening and closing gates and changing air pressure.
Second, drones could also be used. This would be a good way to get smaller items to places that don't have tubes. It would probably also be faster than doing it with trucks because the drone would carry only your items and go right to you. It also would have the entire air space to move, rather than just roads. The limitation with this is that larger items would be inefficient to transport. That is where method 3 comes in.
Third, trucks will take care of the larger items that are too big for tubes and drones. Stuff like furniture, machinery, etc.
Alright, first of all I think that murder should not be allowed. Killing people is not right. Rape, as well, should not be done. Assault is also bad.
Everyone will have full bodily autonomy by principle. This includes the right to an abortion, if one is wanted. At no point should anyone be forced to undergo a process such as a surgery or pregnancy/childbirth. Outlawing abortion does not stop abortion, it only moves it from safe clinics with proper equipment to motel rooms with coat hangers.
Theft would not really be much of an issue because anything you have can be found for free at the stockpile. Theft occurs when financial desperation outweighs social norms and morals. Financial desperation will be non-existent in this new state of society, and therefore theft would be much less likely. Nobody will break into your car to steal your radio when there are hundreds of new radios of all kinds at the stockpile. In the rare case that theft does occur, it probably won't be violent. It is hard to say what should be done for non-violent theft, seeing as no true harm has been done. You can always get more at the stockpile. On the other hand, we should incentivise not stealing because it is kind of mean and an inconvenience for the victim. This might need some community input to decide on.
There are ridiculously many laws that will need to be made. Since this is just a guide being written by a 20-year-old Computer Scientist in a dorm room and not some lawyer or ethics professor I will cease this section for now. The big issues are covered for now, more can be added by the community.
What should be done to people who break laws? They should be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society. I am no expert on this topic, but I believe that people can change. When shown the error of their ways, people can be made to be better. Our jails/prisons would be a lot different than the prisons of our current day. They would be more hospitable and less of a punishment. Maybe we would have a robo-judge who could determine the sentence for individual crimes.
Reseach is the force that drives the progress of humanity. In our society, anyone will be free to do whatever research they want to do to advance the understanding of this world in which we live. People would not be bound by material limits, and would therefore have complete control over the method of research. There could just be some dude living alone doing research day in and day out, or people could organize themselves into larger groups and work together towards larger goals. I can imagine large groups of researchers organizing in a similar way to a company, without the financial incentives.
One thing that is crucial to note about our current system is that research does not find what is best for the most people. Research is used to find what is most profitable to the people funding the research. In fact, every large-scale institution in our current system is pointed in the direction of profit over all. This is because in our current system money is power and power is money, creating a terrible cycle where the rich can become more powerful by buying politicians and implementing laws that make them more money. We choose who to put up, but the wealthy choose what they do.
Tangent aside, our new system will not motivate research through profit, but rather through individual interest and satisfaction. If I get a new piece of technology, I get excited just thinking about all of the new things I can do with it. I have recently picked up an interest in augmented reality, and will be recieving some equipment soon and I am very excited to start creating new things with it. I know that I am not alone, everyone has a passion. For some people it is painting, for others it is programming, chemistry, or even just traveling around. Because we have taken away the carrot on a stick of profit motive, those fields that many people enjoy will now be a viable devotation of time. Activities don't need to be profitable to be worth it anymore.
As mentioned in the previous section, the research collective is a way that people can organize themselves to effectively complete research. People of different skills and skill levels would come together in a group and perform experiments and developments. There could even be sort of subsets of the research collective organization, such as an artists studio where artistically inclined people gather to discuss art and exchange practices. Basically, I think that it would be a good idea for experts in certain fields to gather together to discuss ideas among themselves and to also teach less experienced people who want to participate as well.
It is completely up to the people how they organize themselves, but I think that the best way to do it is in an anarchist way. Nobody is the leader of the collective, everyone votes democratically, everyone is equally as important. Sure, there could be different titles to denote the experience level of a person, but having some people be effectively more powerful than others is not very collective and would make the group seem more like a heirarchy rather than a conglomerate of people all working towards the same goal. A good example of what I think is the optimal research structure is how open-source software works currently. In fact, there is a certain website which allows people to take community contributions towards things that they are making. Hmmmmm, I wonder what that site is.
If there is a piece of software that you want to improve just pull the repository, make the changes, and the push it back up to the remote repository. It is really a beautiful system that allows the collaboration of anyone who wants to help. I think that this would be a great way to organize research.
This section's purpose is to answer some common "What about...?" questions that people might have. The topics range from stuff like recreational drug use to careers and education. If you have a whatabout, please send me a message or something and I will add it to this section.
Crime is not random. People committing crimes, just like all people, are products of their societies. Certain crimes (such as property crimes) would cease due to improved material conditions, others (such as murders) would cease due to increased mental health and education. Show me a criminal, and I will show you a societal shortcoming behind them. A burglar breaks into a home to steal, they were either suffering from a lack of materials or had the anti-virtue of greed hammered into them by a system that praises objects.
There may still exist a certain element of passion crimes because human emotion cannot be quelled completely by improved material conditions. Your wife is in bed with another man? Who could blame you for burning up and seeing red, and then seeing the man's body laying lifeless at the side of the bed. Just because it is understandable, does not mean that it is acceptable. Increased mental health awareness might help people control their reactions to emotions as well.
People will be allowed to freely practice their beliefs, but if those beliefs infringe on the rights of others the group will be held as accountable as a hate group such as the KKK or the Nazis. Religion does not get a free bigot pass. Be peaceful and accepting of others, or you will not be accepted. I would not be surprised if a lot of religions slowly faded away in this new society as we approached new frontiers of science and people had less of a reason to need a belief.
Every war that has ever been fought has been fought for God or for power. In section 3.2 I explain that I believe that religion will slowly fade. This eliminated the former of the two reasons for war. The latter of the reasons will also be irrelevant, as everyone will have equal and complete power over themselves. Everyone will be satisfied with their standing, not feeling the need for more power, as they already have as much as they want, as much as they could want.