Saturday, May 29, 2010

Imagining the Future...The Venus Project



I would like to tell you some stories... First two individual stories of Henry and Nitin... 

Henry were having a treat at their home because his daughter, Jane got admitted into Yale University. But the next day the family was aghast to know that they cannot send Jane his daughter to Yale. The reason was that Henry was laid off when his corporation downsized sending some of their jobs to offshore. Henry's job was fitting the precision gears in a car manufacturing company. It was a very specialized job and Henry was proud of it. He pretty much worked on the same thing his whole life and now suddenly he was left jobless. All the competitors of his company had also outsourced that job to some other country. There was no way he could get a new job so soon. All of his family's dreams were finished now. He just took a home loan to buy housing which was available cheap due to the collapse of the housing bubble. In just a few days his life became upside down..!!!

Nitin loved dancing but his father always wanted his son to study in IIT and hence pushed him. He would never allow him to practice dance and added to that he sent him to various coachings for IIT entrance from VIII standard itself. Grudgingly, Nitin moved forward till his +2. And the pressure from his father was increasing daily. On the results day,  Nitin's corpse came home. He couldn't pass his +2 exams. People who came to pay their last homages reminisced how well he had danced in the annual day celebrations in his college. 

So what did you fee? Did you feel that those two were unfortunate lot among all of us or that these are general trends in the society? 

What happens if all the jobs are outsourced and they have more people who don't have any work? What happens if the creativity of every child is nipped out in the bud and they are not allowed to do what they want to? What if a whole country has more people dependent on government subsidies rather than the money they earn? Do you find it difficult to imagine that in the future there might be water wars? What happens if a country doesn't have any energy and also doesn't have money to import it? These and many other thoughts were swimming in my mind before I gave up those thoughts. But by chance I discovered something called 'TheVenusProject' a project started by a scientist called   JACQUE FRESCO  who feels that we have all that is required to solve all the problems in the world. He says that we can go beyond politics, war and poverty and achieve a high quality of living for everyone. 

To give you a short summary of it. You all know that all the things we consume are coming from the earth only. If we need to produce something, everything physical is only coming from the earth. Money was invented as a means of exchange of value. But that is not sufficient now as with money it is possible to artificially alter the balance of correct exchange. Just imagine if there is no money. We can just walk into a shop and get whatever we want. See how much pressure it relieves on Henry's life. That means he need not worry about their food. If there is no obligation of earning money then why would anyone be stuck at a job which he doesn't like or why would Nitin's father push him to study in any particular college? It would grant human's enormous freedom to do what they want. Yes you might think then how will the work we do get done? There he takes the help of highly developed AI based machines which do most of our work. No, don't think tangentially like the bad robot in I, Robot. Robots are always machines and they just follow our instructions. You might get the doubts like how will people and what about the scarcity of oil and water? Jack again tells us various renewable energy alternatives and talks about building houses on the oceans. Now think about it again. Don't you think it is possible?

I certainly think that we are going in that direction only but the thing is that it might take a lot of time before people realize that money is not being used correctly. And the people who are at a a powerful position always want to maintain a status quo and hence it won't be short of another revolution before government stops using money. But then we would have moved into a  different phase of human evolution. It might not happen in our lifetime but surely it will happen. What do you think ?

There are couple of books available from his website. 
I it is way ahead of its time, but surely one day or the other this condition will be reached. And we as hopefuls can speed it up by spreading it. 
I am super excited about this. Hope it reaches majority of people in the world.

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