An Automated Society

Picture this; you're hungry so you go into the fridge and realise you're out of food. So you take a trip to your local super market and you enter your car, instead of taking the steering wheel however you only have to type the destination into a touch-screen and you are taken there faster than you would of ever driven. As you walk into the supermarket you are greeted by a holographic image of a lady who informs you of all the latest food they have in stock. As you grab your food and head to the exit you are greeted again by the holographic image who bid you farewell. There are no staff in this store, no tills, nothing to buy nothing to sell, everything is free.

This is the world envisaged by many academics, architects, scientists and sci-fi writers. A big proponent for a society similar is no deceased Jacque Fresco who created and ran 'the Venus Project'. It is know by many as 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism'.

Work in a 'FALC' society doesn't exist, at least work as we know it. Between 2004 and 2018 the ONS estimates that over 2 million jobs disappeared from the job market in the United Kingdom completely as a direct or indirect result of automation and AI. While many see technological advancements in automation and artificial intelligence as a threat to jobs worldwide the advocates of FALC look to fully embrace the idea. They see it as an opportunity to absolve humanity of unnecessary labour and frees humans to do things they would otherwise not be able to do.

Capitalism or even broadly speaking 'the monetary system' is a self-defeating enemy of human progression and technological advancement. Since profit is the main driver and motivator, it stands to reason that there may be aspects of society that are frozen in development due to the lack of monetary incentive to invest.

In a sense, there is truth to this. First world superpowers such as the United States and United Kingdom have built their societies off of the backs of third world countries who governments have exploited for resources and profits at the expense of human life. 17 of the 51 most productive countries in the world are actually 'Corporations'. The majority of them coming from the United States. Wall-mart is actually more productive economically than Denmark and Norway. Governments are beholden to big business, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan killed millions of people are displaced millions more; it led indirectly to the rise of terrorist organisations such as the Taliban and ISIS who took advantage of the vacuum and void left by the invasions.

In a resource-based economy such as 'the Venus Project' this would be eliminated. In fact the very core of it would mean that stuff like that would be deemed negligible. Without the motive of profit and economic sustainability, the mentioned would never happen. In the vision founded by Jacque Fresco, everything would be automated and available to everybody at any time. Everything alleviated by machinery and technological advancements in AI. Cars would drive themselves, sewage and water systems run by smart artificial intelligence, buildings similarly repaired by robots and our food sources by AI.

The trickiest part would be how resources would be gathered and distributed efficiently. Solar power, wind energy, wave energy, hydro, geothermal; these are all renewable energy that can be tapped into in order to fund this society. There is no doubt that the planet has enough energy in abundance, we just haven't had the will nor the motivation to pursue such endeavours. The only worry whether it's possible to fully change the mind-set and culture the dog-eat-dog, hard work prevails society we currently are so accustomed to. Can we really expect everybody to play by the rules? Prisons and the police force would not exist in a society such as this so what happens when somebody doesn't want to play ball and decides to hog resources or rebel against the system for selfish gain?

It's very unlikely we will see the realisation of a society such as this in our lifetime however it makes for an interesting take on what can be achieved with the correct vision and attitude.