Imagine that the basic needs of everyone on Earth were taken care of. What would society be like? American futurist Jacque Fresco, who turned 98 last week, has spent his life thinking about this.
Needs are at the root of capitalism. You have something that somebody else needs; that person has something that you need; you trade these things directly or exchange them for money. You need something you can’t pay for now, so you borrow someone else’s capital and exchange your work for money until you can pay it back.
If there are no needs, Fresco says, then capitalism has no place.
Hunter-gatherers do not live in a capitalist society. The forces of nature do the work of making the plants and animals grow. The hunter-gatherers simply take what they need and share the rest. They do not have a concept of “work” or “free time” or “vacation” or “stuff”; they just do what comes naturally.
Our future may look like this, only much better, when poverty no longer exists and when machines do most of the work that humans do now.
The Venus Project
Fresco argues that Earth’s resources are abundant, but that they are either squandered as a consequence of capitalism (through waste, redundancy, and planned obsolescence) or artificially made scarce (in order to influence prices and maximize profit).
Suppose some land and ocean were set aside and given an infrastructure that delivered the maximum amount of renewable energy possible, he says. Intelligent factories, completely automated, could work day and night to produce everything a society needs. There would be no cost because the amount of energy consumed would always be less than the amount of energy available. Everything is recycled, so there is no waste.
Robotic construction systems would be able to build houses cheaply and automatically. Vertical farms, maintained by robots, could grow food, and high-speed transportation would be available for free. Instead of rewarding greed, society could emphasize the education, health and well-being of everyone.
Fresco believes that advances in robotics and machine intelligence will lead to greater and greater efficiency and autonomy. The robots will not rule us, but they will provide for us and take care of their own repairs. In this “resource-based economy”, we will be free to learn, teach, care for each other, and innovate.
Fresco calls his plan The Venus Project, after Venus, Florida, where he lives. It gained a lot of attention among the online community when mentioned in Peter Joseph’s films Zeitgeist: Addendum (2008) and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (2011). A non-profit organization called the Atlas Initiative Group aims to use open-source ideas to make The Venus Project a reality. Volunteers using open-source methods hope to design and build a prototype in America called Atlas City.
The Venus/Atlas concept sounds like ancient Greece, where a lot of needs were in fact taken care of (by slaves), leaving educated people free to make advances in science, technology, and well-being.
An experiment
It would still be a sociological experiment. Would people really be equal? Would they want to be? Will people bother to learn things if they know they won’t have to get a job? Will they learn to distinguish between wants and needs? Will their demands exceed what the automated city can provide? And will political forces arise that incite people to act against their own interests?
We still have time to figure all this out. Fresco has been working on The Venus Project for 75 years, but at a snail’s pace. He didn’t appreciate Joseph’s efforts to popularize the idea, fearing that it could get out of his hands. And when asked in an interview when The Venus Project could become reality, Fresco said confidently, “In about 500 years.”
For now, it looks like we’ll all have to keep our day jobs.
Language note: The Shape of Things to Come was a novel by British science-fiction writer H. G. Wells. Written in 1933, it described a human society ravaged by decades of war and ultimately brought into a new age of peace and prosperity by a global government that emphasized science, technology and well-being.
