Welfare Without Taxation

Autonomous Public Benefit Corporations

Up to 25% of the revenue of many local and state governments derives from parking fines and speeding tickets. Autonomous vehicles will decimate the ancillary income streams built around traffic enforcement -- law enforcement personnel, attorneys, court staff, DMV employees, the insurance industry, and more.

The traffic court system is a major income stream for local and state governments. Many lawyers and bail bondsmen will find their bread-and-butter work drying up alongside it.

In a world of autonomous vehicles where very few people drive, or even own a vehicle, how will cities replace this lost revenue? Especially when truckers and taxi drivers are simultaneously facing irrelevance.

I have doubts as to whether many municipalities can adapt quickly enough to avoid substantial shortfalls, and the risk of Detroitification.

It may be possible to use the same technologies sweeping away our traditional assumptions to open new public revenue opportunities.

An autonomous entity -- the vehicle itself -- can become a source of capital. A car you drive as a taxi is a job; a car that drives itself is an asset. While you are busy, your car can ferry others around and earn money (maybe for you, maybe for its own personal corporation). These new economics mean that businesses are, for the first time, becoming wholly automated.

Smart contract technologies enable new ways of specifying and formalising agreements through self-executing code.

Smart Contracts with AI on top can form a Decentralized Autonomous Organization -- essentially a business that runs itself. A DAO can conduct trades and even hire humans to do work for it (first you hire one HR professional to hire the rest).

In the past we saw machines eat working-class labour, then middle-class clerks. Next, they may usurp the C-suite itself.

We are likely to enter an age of the iCEO, a Cambrian explosion of commerce, with AI-controlled ventures providing services in perfect competition.

Executing on an idea is about to become an order of magnitude simpler -- feasibly from a crazy idea to a global profit-making venture in less than a day. Disruptive innovations will hit the market even more rapidly.

These DAOs have huge promise. Because they are autonomous, they can run a charity for free. We will see mutual insurance funds that basically run themselves. Any area with a low profit margin that typically holds no interest for human-led organisations can be organised through these new means.

DAOs might also provide a kind of alternative welfare system, since they can pay dividends to humans. No government required, all in the free market.

There is a lot of discussion of whether Universal Basic Income will be required for folks who are unable to compete meaningfully in successively more advanced and talent-driven economies.

The assumption is that heavy taxation and redistribution will be required -- to a degree that may not be financially feasible, and certainly may not be politically feasible, let alone desirable.

I believe that there are other alternatives. The power of DAOs and AI CEOs running companies in the cloud that may be bootstrapped within days, means that we can create wealth voluntarily within the free market, yet serving the public good and those with need.

Something akin to the maxim of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ can actually work quite nicely, but only when participation is voluntary. The Free and Open Source Software movement powers many of our smartphones, servers, and cyber security. Our world runs on it, but not exclusively. There remains plenty of room for proprietary software also.

Many of these FOSS contributions (with some corporate exceptions) were created by random nerds producing things for free -- for a little status within a very small community, and out of a desire to see something exist in the world.

This same spirit will enable free and open source businesses run by AI that can trade, arbitrage, and perhaps even provide micro services, almost entirely autonomously.

These businesses, producing real value for real people, can also produce dividends for real shareholders. Those with capability and the FOSS mindset can bootstrap an open business in a few days, and common people can receive a real lifestyle boost via ‘Doge Corp’ or whatever. No taxation or coercion necessary, and whoever creates one gains huge, lasting props for their noblesse oblige. Those with virtual virtue, discerned via machine ethics technologies, will have first dibs in the bestowal of alms.

We have companies today like this already, such as Newman’s Own, and co-operatives, but with the power of AI and decentralized structures we can spawn similar ventures at a huge rate. Traditional companies will remain, thereby creating a mixed market of for-profit and public benefit ventures. Something like a Windfall Clause for autonomous corporations could provide enormous social benefit.

Autonomous Public Benefit Corporations, tokenised forms of cooperatives, and Autonomous Basic Income methods may become an essential crutch for pressured public welfare systems in the years ahead.