Alfred Ruth: Fermi’s Filter
Universal Basic Income — how will we distribute wealth?
Full Worlds is an ethnography podcast where we meet the worlds of its creators. In this episode, we talk to Alfred Ruth about the world of Fermi’s Filter. The book is currently only available in Swedish but under translation.
Alfred Ruth set out to write a book to change the world. After an exit with his technology startup, he started to think about the future. How will Artificial Intelligence, digitalization, and automation change society? And, what scared him most was how this was not a part of the governmental or democratic debate. It was, almost solely, a topic for the tech ecosystem and some economists.
In the first book of Fermi’s Filter, it is the year 2048, and it is meant to be an “extrapolation” of our current world.
Technology has changed the job market. People can do more whatever they want as they are not at their “day job”. Sci-fi fans will find that the world has changed a lot less than they are used to. The subject the book is exploring is a reconstucted economy through universal basic income. That solves the problem of providing for people from a material sense, but what I am curious about is what then happens.
Universal Basic Income
In Fermi’s Filter, most of the world has implemented universal basic income (UBI), but in different flavors.
It is pretty hard to just “hand out the money” so that everyone gets an equal share, as it would be perceived as “unfair”. People want to have some kind of control of their income. As a citizen you can still provide value to society. Why would you educate yourself if it didn’t lead to a higher paying job. But, society would be very unstable if people didn’t educate themselves.
Alfred created a world with multiple economical systems of universal basic incomes (UBI), and in the first book, we get to see the Scandinavian and American systems.
In Scandinavia, the UBI system is called “The Knowledge Ladder” and is based on education. Essentially if you want to stay home on the couch you get the basic level, but if you educate yourself and provide value for society, you “climb the ladder” and get a higher income. This also makes the system be perceived as more fair.
The US system has less emphasis on education and more on entrepreneurship and creating your own luck.
The American system is created to fend off poverty. People get the basic “survival level”, but anything extra that people want, they have to create for themselves, basically through entrepreneurship.
The role of Government
One of the questions the book wants to pose to the reader is how you should judge a system; by the amazing people it creates, or how it leaves off those who don’t succeed?
I think people should be rewarded for hard work. But, at the same time, I am torn. Inequality is objectively bad. A system is better where everyone has the same starting positions, independently if you are born intro a rich or a poor family. If you look at the actual outcomes, while the US thinks that it is “pure play” meritocratic, the outcomes show that it is a lot less meritocratic than many of the EU states.
China has used its history of birth planning programs to limits its population, which is a great advantage in an economy where the GDP is decoupled from the population, but the costs are not.
A nations gross product is no longer a function of its inhabitants. It is almost a reverse effect as the product is completely automated so it is a product of natural resources. In fact, a country would be more competitive if it could keep its population down. It would make financial sense for a country to impose family planning, which plays well into China’s history.
The Hedonic treadmill and the future of unhappiness
Some people have opted out of the system and “disconnected” to find meaning.
The “neo-Amish” use their UBI, the money get from the government, to buy seeds and tools to grow their own crops to survive and accomplish self-sustainability. In a sense, what they are doing is “buying a job”. They could have been better off, from a material sense, if they didn’t, but they have realized it makes them happier this way.
The book is written to help make society aware to make sure we don’t face disaster.
The pace of change is accelerating, and Old jobs are going to go away faster than we can match people with the needed competencies. We will basically fill the group of technologically unemployed faster than we will empty it. At a tipping point, we’ll have to change our view that it is the individual’s responsibility of being unemployed when it rather is a systemic problem.
I fear this tipping point a lot, as it redefines the contract between individual and state. We are probably ten to fifteen years away from this, so the political debate needs to be about this rather than immigration — which owns the agenda now.
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