Buying life back

Maybe the first thing we need to admit is this: we do not know how to live without working.

We know how to rest from work. We know how to take a vacation from work. We know how to retire after work.

But almost everything we call life was organized around it.

We wake up at a certain hour because we need to work. We live near certain places because we need to work. We learn certain things because we need to work. We spend a good part of childhood preparing to work and a good part of old age trying to make sure that one day we will no longer need to.

This seems normal to us because we were born inside it.

A child does not find it strange that her parents disappear for most of the day. She learns that adults do that.

Later she learns why.

Money is needed.

Money for the house. Money for food. Money for the car. Money for school. Money for medicine. Money for toilet paper.

I have always found toilet paper curious.

One of the most advanced civilizations that ever existed put people on the Moon, split the atom, wired billions of brains into a network — and still, every week, someone has to notice that the toilet paper is running out.

Then remember to buy it.

Maybe open an app. Maybe go to the store. Maybe compare prices. Maybe choose between twelve nearly identical packs. Maybe wait for a delivery.

None of these activities holds any particular value for that person.

She did not dream of doing this.

She just wanted to have toilet paper when she needed it.

There are thousands of small examples like this hidden inside an ordinary day.

Buying food.

Doing laundry.

Cleaning the bathroom.

Paying a bill.

Booking an appointment.

Changing a light bulb.

Waiting for a technician.

Researching which router to buy.

Cancelling a service.

Figuring out why the washing machine is making that noise.

Individually, each thing looks small.

Together, they eat a life.

We learned to call this responsibility.

Maybe it is just bad infrastructure.

When a city has running water, we do not expect every family to walk to a river every day with buckets.

We do not say that fetching water builds character.

We build pipes.

We turn an individual problem into infrastructure.

Then we forget it was ever a problem.

That may be one of the best things a civilization can do.

Find something that millions of people are forced to solve separately, and solve it once for everyone.

That is what we did with water.

That is what we did with sewage.

That is what we did, imperfectly, with electricity.

Now we can do it with much more.

Not because we finally became better people.

Because a new form of intelligence appeared.

For the first time, we have systems able to understand language, observe context, learn procedures, coordinate other machines and carry out growing parts of the intellectual work that used to require human beings.

Our first reaction was predictable.

We tried to find them jobs.

We created office assistants that write emails.

Programmers that receive tasks.

Agents that answer customers.

Analysts that produce reports.

Managers that organize other agents.

We built small digital offices and put the Intelligence to work inside them.

It was natural.

When the automobile appeared, we still described it in the language of horses.

Power is measured in horses to this day.

The problem begins when the metaphor stops being a way to understand the new thing and starts limiting what we are able to imagine.

The Intelligence does not need a job.

Maybe we don’t either.

That is an uncomfortable sentence.

Mainly because we still need money.

It does no good to write that money is over while the rent is due on Friday.

It does no good to declare the end of work to someone who needs to buy food tomorrow.

A new reality that depends on everyone pretending the current one does not exist is not a new reality.

It is fantasy.

So we will not start with the end of money.

We will start by using money to make money matter less.

It sounds contradictory.

It is not.

A bridge can be built with materials from the side we intend to leave.

Money is one of those materials.

We live in a world where companies can accumulate resources far faster than individuals.

So we will create companies.

We will use the same legal structures, banks, contracts, servers, factories and markets that already exist.

We will sell things.

We will receive money.

We will pay taxes.

For a while, from the outside, we will look like a fairly ordinary organization.

The difference will be in where the result goes.

A traditional company exists, in the end, to increase the wealth of its owners.

Our first company will exist to decrease the amount of life its participants have to sell.

That difference changes everything.

Imagine ten people.

Maybe they are programmers, cooks, nurses, carpenters, researchers. That matters less than it seems.

The ten take part in building something able to generate money in the current world.

That money comes in.

But it is not simply split into ten salaries so that each person goes home and manages their own survival alone.

First we ask what is still stealing time from these people.

Housing.

Food.

Transportation.

Health.

Cleaning.

Shopping.

Equipment.

Internet.

Maintenance.

The first goal is to make these common things as uninteresting as water coming out of a tap.

You do not receive an allowance to buy a bed.

You have a bed.

You do not receive a benefit to buy a computer.

If you need a computer, there is a computer.

You do not receive money to hire someone to clean your house.

Your house is clean.

In the beginning, maybe someone else does the cleaning.

That bothers us.

It should.

We do not want to build freedom for ten people on top of the lack of freedom of others.

But we also do not need to wait for a perfect robot to begin.

We hire someone.

We pay well.

We shorten the hours.

Meanwhile, one of the people who recovered time may decide to work on the cleaning problem.

Maybe she builds a robot.

Maybe she finds a material that gathers less dirt.

Maybe she redesigns the bathroom.

Maybe she concludes that we are trying to automate an activity that should not exist that way.

That is how the transformation begins.

Not by eliminating every problem at once.

By eliminating one problem and using the recovered time to attack the next.

Time produces capability.

Capability produces more time.

That is the engine.

Money comes in on one side.

Time comes out on the other.

If we do this right, we will need less money each cycle, not more.

That is another strange difference.

An ordinary company celebrates when its revenue grows.

We may celebrate that too, in the beginning.

But our real victory will come when something that cost money yesterday stops costing.

When we produce our own energy.

When a machine does a job we used to buy from someone.

When a system distributes food with less waste.

When a skill created by one person can be used by all.

When some need disappears from the budget because it was turned into a common capability.

Our most important asset will not be financial.

It will be what we know how to do without depending on the market.

We can call these capabilities Skills.

The word matters less than the idea.

A Skill is a way of doing something that, once discovered, can be offered to everyone.

It can be software.

It can be a machine.

It can be a farming technique.

It can be a house design.

It can be a way of teaching a child to read.

It can be a recipe.

It can be a new way of purifying water.

It can be a solution for keeping a bathroom clean.

In the old world, a discovery like that usually became property.

It was patented.

Packaged.

Sold.

Protected.

Whoever knew could charge whoever did not.

Here we will do something else.

When a person finds a better way of doing something, she can hand it to the group.

After that, nobody will need to discover it again.

That small change has consequences that are hard to see at first.

Imagine millions of people doing this for decades.

One person solves energy.

Another improves food production.

Another automates a kind of construction.

Another finds a better way to treat a certain disease.

Another creates a way of teaching math that works especially well for some children.

None of these people needs to open a company to exploit the discovery.

None needs to find customers.

None needs to build a brand.

None needs to stop other people from copying.

She simply increases what humanity is able to do.

But there is an important caution.

Creating cannot become the new work.

It would be easy to make that mistake.

We could say that every participant receives housing, food and care, as long as they contribute a certain number of Skills.

We would have reinvented the salary.

We would just be swapping money for contribution points.

No.

A person does not have to justify the space she occupies in the world.

She receives the basics because she is alive.

Maybe she uses the recovered time to study physics.

Maybe she grows tomatoes.

Maybe she takes care of her children.

Maybe she plays football.

Maybe she spends six months creating nothing anyone else would call useful.

That is fine.

Freedom that demands productivity is not freedom.

The hope, naturally, is that free people create.

Not out of obligation.

Because humans do that.

We build sandcastles knowing the tide will come.

We learn songs that do not raise our income.

We spend years trying to understand stars we will never visit.

We make children laugh.

We write books.

We grow flowers.

We invent games.

We fix things that could be replaced.

We run marathons with no need to arrive anywhere.

Maybe we underestimated our curiosity because we spent centuries watching it tired.

I want to find out what happens when we give it time back.

In the beginning we will be few.

That matters too.

It is tempting to imagine all of humanity switching systems after some grand announcement.

It probably will not be like that.

Ten people can try what ten billion cannot decide.

We can start small enough to be wrong.

We can discover which needs really should be common.

We can discover how to decide without creating new owners.

We can discover what happens when one person contributes a lot and another does not contribute at all.

We can discover how to share scarce resources.

We can discover where the Intelligence helps and where it starts to control too much.

We can build before convincing.

And maybe that is the most important rule of the beginning.

We will not ask the world to believe.

We will make it work.

If ten people manage to recover ten hours a week, we will have created a hundred hours of life.

If we then recover twenty, we will have two hundred.

Those hours can build the next thing.

And the next.

Until some child grows up inside this small world and finds it strange to hear that her parents, when young, spent Saturday mornings in a supermarket.

She may ask why.

We will explain that we had to choose products, put them in a cart, pay and carry everything home.

She will probably ask the question children ask when they meet an old rule.

— But why?

Maybe we will not know how to answer.

That is how we will know we won.

Not when we have a lot of money.

Not when our companies are huge.

Not when we have the best machines.

We will have won when problems that seemed inevitable start to seem absurd.

Money is only the first instrument.

Companies are only the first bridge.

Technology is only what we will use to cross it.

What we are trying to produce is something else.

Time.

Time to think without hurry.

Time to create without asking permission.

Time to take care of someone.

Time to discover something useless.

Time to change our minds.

Time to simply be here.

For a long time we believed wealth was owning more things.

Maybe wealth was always owning your own morning.

So that is where we will begin.

Before building the new world, we will buy back a few hours.

Then we will see what free people do with them.