What Happens When Money Becomes Obsolete?
Yes, it’s been with us for a very long time, but money is not some sort of God-given reality of Nature. Around the time we first set foot on the Moon, a very “unnatural” act, we started a countdown to the inevitable demise of this imaginary substance we call money. For we ushered in the Space Age, the Computer Age, the Information Age and now the Age of Automation and AI that follows. You can read my book, Wealth and the End of Money to find out exactly why money becomes obsolete or essentially goes extinct as a meme of no intrinsic value. These consequences are so monumental that many will not be able to accept them and will cry “nonsense.” But keep in mind, I’m not advocating for this but rather predicting this as a logical outcome of Global Automation. We already see calls for Basic Universal Income. This is the beginning of the process of Demonetization of Society and Life.
Taken to its logical conclusion, Global Automation can permeate any and all energy production, mining, logging, farming, manufacturing, transportation and distribution as well as white collar jobs in law, accounting and even medicine. This essentially puts a downward pressure on the cost of production since robots work without pay and benefits and with no time limit on shifts. As time goes by it becomes obvious that the displaced, unemployed workers can’t be expected to even buy goods produced by the ultra-productive robots for any significant amount. A high price would be ridiculous and an ultra-low price would also be pointless, not helping anybody. In fact, at some point, when all the patents have expired, it won’t even make sense for someone or some business to “own” the robots and collect profits from their work while unemployed masses grovel. In a nutshell, that’s how money dies.
What I discovered in examining this process is even more fareaching than the End of Money itself — it’s also the end of all things attendant to and dependent on Money including: For-profit Business, Banking, Taxes, Interest, Insurance, Loans and Debt, Advertising, Scams and Spams, Robbery and other crimes of money, Stock Markets, Social Security and much more, including even Ownership. This is not some dystopian Authoritarian Communist nightmare I am predicting but to the contrary, the beginning of creating a sustainable, quasi utopia where we regain control over our lives and our purpose in living which, believe it or not, is not to work 40 hours per week squandering our most precious resource, time — just to keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies.
A society that operates without money is by no means a new idea and numerous tribal cultures have subsisted without money for centuries if not millennia. Right here in America, once a year, at the cultural event in the desert, Burning Man, nearly 70,000 people live for a week where money is not even allowed. All goods are gifted in an act of mutual trust with no expectation or requirement of a return gift. It seems to go off without much of an issue each year and only grows in popularity. The Global Citizen movement doesn’t sell tickets to its headliner events featuring the likes of Janet Jackson and Queen. They require entrants to have participated in a social activity that furthers their agenda of environmental protection, ending poverty and voter participation. This get to the heart of any real value we have as humans—how we spend our time.
Science fiction, the alter ego of who we could become, dispatched with money a long time ago. In Star Trek, Captain Picard could get “Earl Gray tea, hot” on demand from the replicator, a fancy nano-technology 3-D printer of sorts. We never saw him swiping his payment card and in fact Star Trek was a moneyless society by design. We never see Kirk or Spock whipping out a wallet except in an awkward time machine episode when they are stuck in a primitive past. This didn’t stop them from having fulfilling and very interesting lives!
What is new, very new, is we have hit an inflection point in our technological capabilities where we are on the cusp of teaching machines to be smarter than ourselves. Smarter, faster, more dextrous, stronger, more accurate, more knowledgeable. Even if they lack the one gift we possess, that of consciousness. That’s a good thing! Let them toil like the Sun toils and let us enjoy their production like we enjoy the sunlight on our face.
It’s no mistake that wages are expressed in terms of Money per Hour. That’s because it takes time to achieve something, whether it’s a business or personal goal. The common denominator of all human (and animal) activities is time. Time IS Money—the ultimate coin of the Realm. So we must spend it wisely, in pursuit of things that enrich our lives and those around us. We can be anything we want to be in a future world without money. We can be our true selves, not the self who is forced into Wage Slavery, as Thomas Jefferson called it.
Of course, money may find a way to survive its meaninglessness and we may create newer, more meaningful forms of money such as a Social Credit system or Titles of Stewardship for property but it’s clear that as money becomes more and more intangible (it’s digital 1’s and 0’s already) we will drastically change our relationship to it and so discover our next stage of development as a Civilization.
