Good stuff, thanks for posting.
To me something crucial is missing from every analysis we see of utopia. This thing missing is masked, by the question of riches, and where the wealth would come from. That question is never answered, short of requiring still some kind of slavery and colonialism, which defeats the purpose.
Personally I think we need to extend our thinking to include what we are seeing now, that money is energy, and to understand that there has to be a distinct input of energy for any sustainable utopia.
To date capital, has been the main source of wealth.
This is what fundamentally requires colonialism and slavery.
Capital, because money is energy, is just stored energy.
As such it is a finite pie, and whilst it is the sole source of wealth, only a minority can have the benefits of it. This is the only physically possible outcome, of surviving on capital.
As we are seeing, it eventually becomes existential, since all capital comes extracted from Earth, itself a finite store, so now we see what we see, and should not really be surprised. But technology is delivering something new that we never had before, the energy of the sun.
Now that is scaling up, it is starting to have effects in economy that we can't carry on ignoring much longer.
The problem for capitalists, is that it is donated.
They / we seem to hate the idea that we are moving towards all being dependent on something donated from a grand donor, as opposed to something we made for ourselves, that we carved out from Earth for ourselves by our own "righteous" toil, sweat, and guile. Anything of value, in our experience, is never given for free.
Yet this is exactly the case for every Joule of solar energy, nothing is asked in return for them, only that we "push open the door" to allow them in (ie build the appropriate infrastructure).
There we might see the real righteous work required, and it seems expensive, relative to things we built in the past, many tens of thousands of dollars per household need to be spent, especially when we include hydrogen backup.
But it is happening, slowly.
Now that it is partially done, the fundamental difference between donated energy and extracted energy are starting to become apparent, because actually these two different kinds of energy are mathematically the opposite of one another, in terms of their effects on Earth and capital.
One depletes capital, whilst the other supersedes it completely, being the original energy we used capital to simulate the effects of.
This problem is manifesting by money having to represent both kinds of energy.
As solar energy collection and use necessarily ramps up, and utilities energy use correspondingly ramps down, money, issued only as debt, in other words requiring any kind of return, is increasingly coming to represent... nothing.
Hence we see inflation.
The only antidote for that inflation is for money to be issued for free.
We even saw proof of this during the massive stimulus of covid, when the dollar was actually going up in value at the time of issue.
The act of issuing it, is what made it go up in value, because by this it was enumerating physical economic product created historically for free, from the only donated source of Joules, solar.
So there we see how to fund utopia, whilst identifying and correctly valuing the donated energy source needed for it.
There is only one, and the only thing standing in its way is our mistaken view that we can all get all the energy we need from capital.
We can't.
We never could.
The truth is Utopia, due to the way energy works, is the only sustainable scenario.
This is the existential lesson we are learning right now imho.
I hope and actually trust Ai is what was always needed, to help make the message, and the lesson on how energy really works, sink in.
Amazingly, religions, at least the ones not polluted by profit, seem to have known all along.
