Neither the great political and financial power structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded professionals, nor the population in general realize that...it is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on earth at a “higher standard of living than any have ever known”. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable...

– R. Buckminster Fuller, 1981

Well first let's establish what is the standard of living billionaires enjoy today, and though not every billionaire lives the same way, let's just try to imagine the best-case scenario:

• They likely have a really nice house with all the latest technology and innovation the world can offer.
• They likely have many cars, probably also yachts, and various airplanes.
• They likely have a great deal of support staff to assist them in their lives, such as personal chefs who cook delicious meals for them every day, cleaning staff who keep their large house spotless, car drivers, butlers, maybe a personal pilot or two to fly their jets, perhaps even a dedicated PR team to handle all their social media.
• They probably have access to the best healthcare not limited by any money or insurance plan
• Their money can buy them the best education on the planet; most universities allow big donors to effectively pay for admission.

That's more or less the essence of it — access to the world's best technology and comforts. Sounds wonderful, right? Sure, but keep in mind that billionaires live in the same world the rest of us do and the technology and comforts they use depend on the innovation from the rest of us, and the fact is that the vast majority of people are not really in a position to innovate. Most people around the world are quite poor, they are not particularly healthy, and have limited or no access to education. According to Oxfam:

• Almost half of humanity is living on less than $5.50 per day. Almost HALF! That's nearly 4 billion people.
• 1 out of every 5 children will not be allowed to go to school at all.
• Every day, 10,000 people die because they lack access to affordable healthcare.
• Each year, 100 million people are forced into extreme poverty due to healthcare costs.

As I stated in the introduction, according to Unicef 1 in 3 children globally will not go beyond an elementary school education, while 1/2 will not go beyond middle school. According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, over 2 billion people on the planet are subsistence farmers, which means most of their farming efforts goes towards providing for themselves and their family, with little to no surplus. It's not a bold claim to say that by and large, the lives of these people provide virtually no benefit to you, and the same can be said for the lives of billions of other people in the world who aren't necessarily poor farmers. In the United States — a country widely considered to be one of the most developed and productive countries in the world — anywhere from 50-75% of people are living paycheck to paycheck, and by any reasonable interpretation these people are in poverty. By and large, people in poverty do not have the luxury to pursue their passions or innovate to any great degree — certainly not to the same degree they could if they were thriving. Though the inequality in "wealthy" countries like the United States is not as extreme as it is in others, there is still a massive gap in wealth, health, and education between those at the top and those at the bottom.

What does this mean? Or more precisely, why is this bad for you specifically, especially if you are reasonably well off (or a billionaire)? The answer is because of the nature of human progress and innovation. Virtually all of the technology you see today, all the progress we make in science—and to a great extent the arts as well—comes from people who are in a place in their lives where they are capable of inventing and advancing science. Science is done by scientists, most of which have extensive educational training. New technology is invented not by poor farmers, homeless people, or those enfeebled by their lack of healthcare, but by people who have the education, healthcare, and resources to do so. Even the ability to pursue art is somewhat of a luxury today, not something that is often able to be taken up by those who don't have homes or regular access to food, let alone access to musical instruments. The point is: The progress of humanity is really only being pushed forward by a relatively small fraction of people on the planet—we could be generous and say the top 10% of people on the planet meaningfully contribute to all the technological and scientific innovation in the world (and that's pushing it). Billionaires are rich, yes, but that's because they live in a world that favors the few at the expense of the rest, and at great cost because what we end up with is a world in which there exists only a small fraction of people who are really in any place to push humanity forward.

Now imagine that wasn't the case. Imagine instead of today's economic system (which allows a few people to thrive while most people languish) we designed our system to spread resources equally. Instead of 10% of the world innovating, we had 100%. Think of just how much faster science and technology would advance, how much better our lives would be if we had 10x more people working on things, and with collaboration instead of competition between ourselves and our companies, we could see unrivaled levels of productivity and human progress...

This is the kind of world we at Infinite Love want to create: where everyone will be able to live in houses filled to the brim with the latest technology and comforts. Entire walls will be TV screens, our digital assistants will actually be smart and useful (and we can have an infinite amount of them), our cars and planes will drive and fly themselves, even our food will eventually be prepared by robotic chefs that cook as well as any human can. Our healthcare will be better because we'll know so much more about human physiology and our diets will be tailored to our individual needs to a degree we simply can't do today. The best education will be freely available to anyone online, and everyone will have access to it. Most importantly, people will be free to pursue their own passions because they won't be forced to take just any job they can get to survive, since they are already provided what they need to thrive. The world will be truly a world of abundance, and it will enable a standard of living far, far better than what billionaires enjoy today.

For an awesome video that perhaps describes this idea even more clearly than us, we highly recommend you check out Egoistic Altruism by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell.

It's easy to understand why one might believe that money is crucial to our continued survival: Money is everywhere, and it is needed for virtually everything. But you should understand that it has not always been this way, and in fact, money is a relatively new occurrence. Humans in our current form have existed for around 300,000 years, in which most of the time goods were gifted to others or exchanged for other goods. Money in the form we think of it today ("representative money") likely first came into existence around the time of the first cities like Mesopotamia in 3000 BC. As of this writing it is the year 2021, so 3000 BC is 5021 years ago, which means money has existed for approximately 5021/300,000 years, or 1.67% of human existence. We clearly do not need money to survive.

So why does it exist today? Well, because it was very useful for a long time: it is a convenient way to exchange goods and services. There's nothing wrong with money in and of itself, it's just how the system co-evolved with other changes in society throughout history. At the same time as money entered the picture, there immediately began to exist great disparities in wealth between people. Before money, before the agricultural revolution, you could only possess what you could carry with your family or social group as you moved from place to place, hunting and gathering and living off the land. With the agricultural revolution we discovered how to sow crops and make farms, which made it so staying in the same place was largely more desirable than constantly moving around because we could simply grow what we needed in place instead of having to forage for it naturally. Instead of hunting wild game, which moved from place to place with the seasons and fluctuating availability of resources, we could raise our own livestock in one place as well. Staying in one place also meant you could erect more permanent housing structures and storage units for all the crops you were harvesting. Very quickly over the course of just a handful of generations there became a massive difference in wealth between individuals, with some having owned farms and many assets that had been passed down for generations and others starting off with next to nothing. We can see evidence of this simply by looking at great monuments and structures that have survived from ancient times: for example, the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed in approximately 2600 BC, just 400 years after money was first introduced. Such structures were all built by emperors and rulers who had amassed great wealth, while most others had very little.

As time passed, these differences in wealth did not disappear; in fact, in many ways they became more entrenched. The challenge for everyone else was that people with wealth also have influence, which ultimately translated to power — they can afford to pay people to do virtually whatever they need, whether that means recruiting mercenaries and raising armies, paying assassins to kill rivals, bribing politicians to write laws, etc. — and with that they could ensure that they remained wealthy and powerful. And this is exactly what happened and exactly where we are today — in fact, we still have countries with royalty — ancient lines of families with great wealth — and they enjoy much the same privileges today as they did in the past. To be clear: there is nothing wrong with having wealth in itself, the problem is (as we stated in the answer to the previous question) that when wealth is unequally distributed—especially to the degree it is today—then we end up with many people who are not thriving and thus not not in a position to meaningfully contribute to human progress. We are only hobbling ourselves by hoarding wealth. We need a better system in place to ensure resources do not get concentrated and so that everyone can thrive and contribute to the progress of humanity, and such a system does not need to involve money at all, for what purpose would money have if everyone had the exact same amount of it? As soon as you introduce money, you create the conditions for some people to have more and some people to have less — and clearly this is not what we want.

How do we move away from it? Many argue for a natural law/resource-based economy (NLRBE) in which all resources in the world are established as the common heritage of humanity. The idea is to take a rational, scientific approach to intelligently managing and distributing resources in a way that is best suited for the long-term sustainability and growth of our planet and everyone on it. However, at the end of the day all we really need to do is restructure the world economy so we produce things for everyone, rather than merely doing it for ourselves (companies generally produce goods to make profit for the owners, not for the benefit of their consumers). As a species we have no trouble producing enough goods for everyone: factories pump out thousands of products every day with minimal human involvement. Most of the packaged food products you see in grocery stores were made in a factory that produces vast quantities of those foods that can feed far more people than is required to keep the factory running. Virtually everything in our lives is the same way, from our shoes to our cars to our cell phones, so there is no shortage of our ability to create things in bulk — we simply need to redirect our efforts from creating things to make personal profit to creating things to help people thrive, and in that way we won't be creating junk food and crappy products that are effectively planned to fail because the goal would not longer be to make the most money but to provide the most benefit to people. Obviously getting the world to switch to this alternative approach would be challenging if we were to merely try to convince politicians and business leaders in each country to make the change, which is why one of our goals at Infinite Love is simply to build a self-sustaining community ourselves and demonstrate that it's possible (to have a high standard of living without money). Once we do that, it's only a matter of time when more communities popup doing the same thing, and eventually the rest of the world will follow suit, for why would anyone want to live a life of tedious wage labor when they can have all the comforts of modernity and the freedom to pursue whatever life they want?

First of all, to be clear we have no issue with labor in itself, we take issue with forced labor. Forced labor happens when you have to work simply because you otherwise won't be able to keep a roof over your head and food on the table, and so you get whatever job you can—you're lucky if that also ends up being the job you want to do. In our current economic system, this kind of labor is also largely work where the benefits primarily go to someone else and not the laborer — the executives at the top make far more money and more often than not do far less actual work than the people at the bottom. It is no less than modernized slavery, which is what the term "wage slavery" refers to. So when we say "people won't have to work", we're saying people won't be forced to work to survive, but that doesn't mean everyone's going to be sitting in hammocks doing nothing with their time. Of course people will be working on things, because that's our nature as humans: we are curious creatures, ever trying to understand the world around us and to make things easier for ourselves — the difference is that we'll be working on things that we want to work on.

Although it may be hard for some people to imagine—especially those who have only ever worked uninspiring and tedious jobs they have never had any passion for—but there are in fact many people who love doing their jobs. For society to function smoothly, various things need to be done: roads maintained, public transportation kept running, water and energy needs to keep flowing, recycling centers need to be operated, etc. The trick to doing it optimally is not by forcing whatever people you can to work and maintain those systems, but instead by matching people who like to do those things in the first place with those very things that need to be done. There may be a few undesirable tasks that no one desires to do in their own right, perhaps trash- or sewage-related jobs, but do you really think in a world of abundance where everyone is provided for and able to thrive that we won't have enough volunteers to do those remaining tasks to keep the system running smoothly? Do you really think that everyone will just let the trash build up and society collapse? We have zero doubt whatsoever that we'll have all the volunteers we need, and divided among many people this means very little actual work per person — certainly no one will be working 40 hours per week doing this kind of work. What's more, these systems won't require manual labor forever — in time no doubt our engineers will design better ways to manage such undesirable tasks so everyone is completely free to work on whatever their hearts desire.

Now does that mean everyone will be working on something all the time? No, almost certainly not. Some people may work more or less than others, some may prefer lives of leisure, and that's okay, because we don't need everyone working to keep society functioning, we just need a small subset of people — a subset that (like we said) will decrease over time as our technology gets better. The reality is that eventually, whether 50 or 150 or 1000 years from now, people will not have to work at all because of improvements in automation and AI. This isn't some overly-idealistic prediction; this is reality, and it's been happening at an increasing rate for a while now, especially in the last 100 years. Factories require fewer and fewer people, cars are getting closer and closer to being driverless, and automated kiosks are replacing service people in grocery stores and restaurants, in some cases almost entirely. Technology is getting better and increasingly less expensive to produce, and it's only going to be easier and easier to buy a machine and pay a slightly increased electric bill versus hiring and training a human to do the same task. A machine can operate virtually 24/7/365 without breaking a sweat — no human can come close to that performance, and we're not even going to go into the differences in the speed, accuracy, and power machines can have compared to humans, let alone computation ability. We estimate that within 50 to 100 years, machines will exceed human performance in virtually every task and human labor will no longer be necessary at all. It's true, people have been making predictions of this sort about AI for a while now and not all of them have panned out, but what cannot be disputed is that technology and automation have nevertheless been getting better and better over time, so — unless we manage to kill ourselves in global nuclear war first — it is all but inevitable that AI and automation will reach a point in which all human jobs are replaced, however long it takes. Do you think it's just going to reach some level where it can't get any better, and we'll throw our hands up and say, "Okay, let's just stop improving AI from here!" No, that will almost certainly not happen. Humans are a stubborn bunch and there will always be some of us with the passion and drive to improve our lives. So unless we wipe ourselves out by destroying our planet or some other means, technology will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. This is a fact of reality we are going to have to face someday, and probably sooner than most people think.

Once this happens, it won't matter what people do, people can just do what they want to do. In fact, the very concept of "laziness" won't really have the same meaning, it'll just be a choice you make. Some people will do things which help advance humanity, while others will prefer a life of leisure, but can we really say whether one is "better" than the other?

In terms of whether people will tend to be lazy in general if they had no requirement to work... we can say without a doubt that's not the case for most people. You can be sure that after being overworked as most of us have been our entire lives, many people will want to take a break for a while if we were suddenly given the opportunity to. However, many of us have already experienced something like this: for many of us there were times in our life when we didn't want to face the struggles of the real world, when we may have worked but only with the bare minimum effort to keep our jobs. Those times when we sunk most of our free time into video games or binge-watching TV or self-medicating with drugs to avoid having to think about the difficulties of the real world... After a while though, this is generally not fulfilling to us; eventually, we want to move on. Humans get bored of the same things eventually — whether it's a song played over and over or one mindless video game after another. We tend towards novelty, towards change and growth. Although some people will certainly work more than others, we don't believe that in general most people will lead lazy, unproductive lives. But again, it won't matter in the long run. The debate over whether humans are naturally lazy or not is irrelevant because it is an inevitability that our machines will exceed human performance in all tasks, likely in the next 50-100 years but even if it takes longer, it will happen eventually. Factories today already pump out products at rates far exceeding what a human can do for the same product and we are only going to make them better and better until such a time when humans can no longer do any task better than a machine, and it's not going to just stop there! We will continue to make them better and better (why wouldn't we?) and so eventually humans will be so inferior to a machines in doing work that there'll be no need for us to. Life from that point on will just be about doing what we want to do; there will be no work that we "have" to do anymore.

We won't use money amongst ourselves, but that doesn't mean we won't have money that we hold on to in a shared account in order to continue buying things from the rest of the world (while it still depends on money). So while the goal of the community is ultimately to be entirely self-sufficient — we will grow our own food, we will have our own doctors, engineers, construction workers, and whatever we need to maintain the community — in the beginning we will still likely have to pay for certain things such as access to the internet, buying various things like equipment, vehicles, building supplies, and things like that. With proper planning, the initial funding should cover all of that since we will simply scale the community design to fit comfortably within our budget. But once we have the community built and people are able to live happily and freely, do you think it will just stop there? With a community of people that are provided for and taken care of, with all the efficiency in how the community is organized and operated, and with everyone free to pursue our passions, do you really think we will not be able to produce anything of value? We're not making a 17th-century farming village, we're making a highly sophisticated modern community that will be filled with bright minds from all over the world. Many of our members will likely be running companies within the community, making amazing products for the world, and the income from those projects will be more than enough to sustain and grow the community. The thing is, once you are part of a community like the one we propose, there's no need for personal wealth: all the money would simply be pooled and used in a way that best enhances everyone's lives. So all the money that other people make from the things they do, whether they start a company or make awesome music or design products, all of that will go back into the community to help us grow and flourish even more. There are numerous projects we want to start — starting the Infinite Love non-profit organization and building our community is just the beginning!

Fail? This question is kind of nonsensical to us, because failure implies giving up. Despite the challenges we face, the vast majority of adults in the world successfully manage to live largely through our own individual efforts. It's not always luxurious and certainly far from the ideal situation for most of us, but ultimately we are able to find places to stay, get food and money for ourselves, and do what we can to make ourselves comfortable. Do you really think that when 20, 50, or 100 of us get together that we'll do a worse job of living than we do on our own? Though there are some obvious challenges that can arise when any group of people are living and working together, with a reasonable organizational and leadership structure there is effectively no chance that the community we ultimately create will be worse than living in today's world by ourselves — the question is simply how much the improvement will be at each of the phases. Communities like the one we aim to build are inevitable; we are not the only people who recognize the failings of capitalism and wage labor and it's only a matter of time until enough people are made aware of the issues and more communities pop-up like we propose. The real question you should be asking yourself is: Why wait any longer when we can start now?

Absolutely! We are currently in the process of drafting our own whitepaper, but in the meantime we recommend reading the whitepaper of our sister group The Zeitgeist Movement, which provides an in-depth examination of many of the issues we've talked about. If you prefer to pick up a book from your local library or bookstore, we recommend checking out The New Human Rights Movement by Peter Joseph. We are currently in the process of compiling a list of related projects and resources which we will add here as well when ready. Stay tuned to our YouTube channel or podcast for updates! 🙂