In this podcast, Daniel Schmachtenberger brilliantly lays out how our system works according to 3 generator functions, and that those generator functions are driving us into extinction if we don’t change them. I’d recommend anyone remotely interested in the future of our society to have a listen, it’s really great & eye-opening in many aspects.
In short, the generator functions that Schmachtenberger describes are (how I understand them):
- Rivalrous Behavior: We are always competing in win-loose games, which creates group-thinking and causes conflicts. Those conflicts now grow to such a scale that even the winner would loose (destruction of the whole world)
- Extractive Behavior: We’re using way more resources than what we create or recover (recycle). This will sooner or later lead to depletion, be that Oil, Minerals, (drinking) water, air or species extinction. We have to close the cycles and become sustainable.
- Exponential Tech: There’s so much progress, and technology changes & improves so fast, that we can’t keep up with our decision making capabilities. That will lead to increasingly more bad decisions, and the ability for bad actors to use that technology (often with good intend) to bad effects.
Each one of these functions have potentially catastrophic risks and could lead to our extinction. In order for humankind (or even any kind) to survive, we will have to solve each of them.
There are various sub-layers of this, and concrete implementations enhance some or all of these functions.
- Free Market: creates winners & losers + enhances extractive behavior
- Democracy: winners & losers + can’t keep up with exponential tech
- Ownership model: Products don’t get reused (more extraction to satisfy a bigger market) + competition about who has more
- …
Some core problems come along with ‘incentives’. According to Schmachtenberger, we would need to create a system that works without the need for rewards. This is because incentives always create competition, which in turn creates winners & losers. I assume that he’s talking about incentives in terms of ‘finite pots’, where there’s either a single or limited amount of winners, and where multiple ‘winners’ have to share the reward with each other, so would get less if there are multiple winners, which in turn gives an incentive to sabotage competitors.
However, at this point I would argue that it is possible to have an unlimited incentive-based system that does not promote competition, and which could help to solve those generator functions. (Not a complete solution though).
How do we create infinite incentives?
Aren’t incentives finite by definition, and if there is an infinite incentive, would that not decrease the value of that incentive towards zero?
Actually, it’s not, and we are already using an infinite resource as incentive: Money. That’s right, money is in principle infinite. We can print as much as we want of it, and in fact we’re printing more of it constantly. Of course, we’re not printing to our capacity, and it’s also not “us” who’s printing the money, it’s managed by the government, and they’re controlling the amount so that there’s no massive in- or deflation. The average Joe will never have an immediate experience of this infinite reservoir, because all his first-hand contact points are several degrees away from the source, so for him it will always seem like it’s a finite resource with finite availability.
However, what if we could create a system where there’s a decentralized ‘money printing facility’, that prints money on demand for everyone who deserves to get some? And, in order to counter inflation, we’d have another facility that destroys a dollar for every dollar that’s printed somewhere.
Of course, it won’t be physical money in that case. So no actual printing. And no physical destruction either. That would be hard to do anyway, how’d we determine whose money to take?
Instead, it could all be electronically managed. Most of the money that anyone has doesn’t physically exist anyway, it’s mainly numbers in our bank’s accounting systems.
This is just a very tiny aspect of a broader system I envision, but let me lay out some of the basic principles:
We could use a cryptocurrency of some sort to give out this ‘infinite rewards’. On a globally accessible online platform, anyone (who’s registered) can create tasks/incentives. Everyone can vote for those tasks they want to promote, and then anybody can work on it. Everyone who achieves the goal and can prove it would get value tokens as defined in the task and depending on the amount of votes (= importance) for this task. This is the ‘printing’ part of it. The amount is not finite, so will not diminish as soon as a party receives it; so everybody gets the same and they will not need to compete with each other.
Furthermore, to avoid inflation, every token has some mechanism of depreciation. That could either be a tax on transactions, or a built-in timer, where each token would lose a certain percentage / [unit of time].
Of course, personal transactions will still be made in the traditional way where tokens are limited. But those transactions where there is no one particular beneficiary could be handled in this infinite way.
This would also reduce the tragedy of the common goods that Schmachtenberger mentions: If a common good (e.g. air) can’t be traded for benefit, we don’t care about it. We’d pollute it because it’s free, until the moment we can’t breath any more. A mechanism where we can incentivise people to keep the air clean without having to pay for it (remember: no-one actually pays anything for those tokens that get created for working on tasks), a system where we assign value to something by means of ‘creating it out of thin air’ instead of performing a transaction where one side has to decrease a value corresponding to the other sides increase, a system like that will be incredibly valuable to preserve what everyone wants, or needs, to have, but no-one is willing to pay for it.
For example, there could be an issue that gives credit to anyone who uploads proof of planting a tree, or for installing a filter on a car or factory. The amount of tokens received would need to be defined by the community, based on various metrics (custom values + participation + votes …)
Generally speaking, this system will help us to transition away from a flawed world where the value of something is determined by it’s (scarce) availability (market) towards a world where we assign value to what we actively decide should be valuable, no matter how available this good (or service) already is. Good air quality is valuable, even though the market doesn’t assign any value to it because there is no (apparent) scarcity.
This system can then be further utilized to e.g. specifically address our extractive behaviour and other worthy tasks.
What do you think this could do and achieve? (More on that hopefully soon in Part II.)
Leave your comments and let me know whether you agree or not, and where the flaws are!
