I learned this today. A society without money is not only possible, it is probably the best way that society will survive the rise of automation and AI.
Money has been with us for about 5,000 years and our entire society is based on money. The majority of our time is spent trying to earn money so that we have enough money to buy the things we want and need. We generally base the hierarchies in our societies by how much money someone has.
Automation is currently replacing jobs and the corona virus seems to have increased the speed with which this is happening. A lot of manual jobs, such as store clerks, have gone and every day we seem to get closer to the introduction of driverless trucks and vehicles. Estimates for the number of jobs that disappear by 2030 range from 9% to 49%. However, the topic we are discussing today isn’t looking at the next ten years but the future in general. It is probably safe to say that at some point, be it 20 years or 300 years, robots and machines will be able to do the majority of the jobs that we currently do. What then?
The general idea of money is that it allows exchanges in an economy and acts as a unit of account. It is a measure of the value of various goods and that value rises or falls depending on market factors that are usually tied to the amount of the thing being valued. For example, if there is a bad harvest, the price of wheat goes up. If there is a great harvest, the price of wheat goes down. This is all to do with the amount of wheat that is being sold.
A monetary system has some inherent problems. It creates competition because we are brought up to think that more money is better than less. It depletes the world’s resources because companies have to make more things for us to buy so that they can get more money and people can earn more money by making them. Then these things must be thrown away so that the cycle can continue. Also, when we use money, there will always be an extreme wealth gap.
Some people say that if we didn’t have money, we would have to come up with a barter system or some other kind of exchange system. We would need to have something to trade for that wheat. The wheat farmer wouldn’t just give it to us. However, that seems to be looking at the problem from our current mindset. If money disappeared from the society we have now, that would very well be the case, but what if we weren’t in the society that we are in now? What if we were in a society where there was always enough wheat for everybody?
There is a movement called Paradism. They envision a society where technology can free humanity from the slavery of work and money. They see new technologies, such as robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnologies that can automate almost all of the basic jobs that humans do now. These automated systems would be able to produce enough of any food or product for every person on Earth. Poverty would be eliminated and there would technically be no need to “buy” anything.
In such a society, there are two possible routes to take. One would be that a single group of people could limit access to this unlimited food and force people to do meaningless jobs to earn “money” to buy the food. Another would be that we would have access to whatever we need, and money would be relegated to history.
The question that seems to be raised most often of a society like this is that if people had no need to work, would they work? By looking at current society, I think we can safely say that people would “work”, but it wouldn’t be meaningless for-money work. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are uploaded to the Internet. A large amount of this consists of people uploading free content that they have created. Even now, in a society where we have to work for our money, people spend a lot of time working on things that interest them. In a society without money, machines would free us to enjoy a life of education. The world would be full of more educated people who are focused on human and natural welfare. War, hunger, poverty, and most crime would be eliminated.
There are some places on Earth that already have moneyless societies. Anuta, an island in the Solomon Islands, is a moneyless place. They practice a philosophy they call Aropa, which translates as “love”. Everything is freely shared and no one goes without. Everyone is responsible for farming and all the food is given out freely. If someone makes money outside the island, this money is used to buy machinery or things that benefit all of the islanders. Paradism imagines this kind of society but where people don’t need to farm the land or work to produce what they need.
It doesn’t look like a moneyless society will appear during my lifetime. The evidence both for and against are mixed, but it does seem that a moneyless society is possible and most likely probable in the future. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monetary_economy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zeitgeist_Movement
https://medium.com/@FOTONBANK/moneyless-society-is-it-possible-2ae40e20f8eb
https://www.jstor.org/stable/29769267
https://money.howstuffworks.com/moneyless-world.htm
http://www2u.biglobe.ne.jp/~nagaryu/indexenglish.html
https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/job-loss-automation-robots-predictions.html