James thanks for writing this story, though I don't know if you will even see this reply. I've been writing about this subject as someone also into VR / Metaverse technology, as you seem to be, it was during a PhD candidate research project I began writing about this in 2017, with now more than 300 stories on the subject. I am also a long practicing systems Engineer, which maybe helped me realise early it is all down to an energy problem, but our awareness of it first comes about by realising firstly that everyone is forced to work, and it shouldn't be this way.

I don't seem to get even a single reply to most stories, even with more than a thousand followers, but you've got 54 replies here in only a couple of weeks with 150 odd followers, so congratulations there.

The answer, whilst fixing the energy problem, is a UBI based on Joules received and put to use from solar.

If you ran or owned a platform, for example, instead of taking revenue from users, you supply them with revenue, getting your own from solar power. You just distribute the excess of what you don't need from your solar hydrogen facility, which also supplies all the power needed for your servers hosting the platform.

I've shown how a whole ecology could run like this, resulting in fuel for all transportation, and even clean drinking water, and of course everyone having generous funds.

Everyone funded like this would give those seeking more (Ambitious / creative folk like maybe us), ample funds to turn all good ideas into reality.

Markets change, when folk are trading with free money, they lterally buy companies that might be going bankrupt, whose products might be still loved, by buying up all their bankrupt shares, therefore taking the company into public ownership. We saw a little of this during covid though it wasn't acknowledged much, folk with no interest in profit buy very different things in markets than traditional investors, making things like oil go negatively priced.

And it changes the rules of Ai. No longer would we be building it to make profit, it would truly be for human and planetary benefit from that point on.

Anyway there is a lot more I could say about this, but it is mostly said already, in one or more stories I've written (Or in one of the thousands of replies I've made like this one).

I hope you see it :)