A lot of us are nervous about the direction the world is heading. It often feels like we are on the tipping point between a dark dystopian future where Pepsi and Exxon control the government and a bright utopian one where all people live in a state of comfort and enlightenment.

Don’t worry too much about it. We have the tools to get to that bright future. There are five specific ideas/technologies that I believe can get us there:

Universal Basic income

EcoVillages

Hyperloop

Remote Work

Sharing Economies

I will go through each idea, and then describe how I see them all fitting together at the end. So if you‘re already familiar with these concepts, please feel free to scroll to the good stuff at the end.

Let’s get into it.

Universal Basic Income (UBI)

Income redistribution never looked so good. From Scott Stantens’ website.

Universal basic income is the economic idea that all citizens should be guaranteed a minimum income that puts them above the poverty line. It is a form of income redistribution that would ensure everyone — rich, poor, or middle class — will be able to afford food and housing.

I don’t have time here to delve into all of the details of UBI. Like any other revolutionary economic idea, there are so many layers and details that one blog post could never adequately explain it. Instead, I recommend you check out the FAQ on Scott Stantens’ website. Stantens is one of the foremost UBI advocates, and has been raising $1,299 a month via a Patreon account, $1,000 of which provides him a basic monthly income while the remainder goes to support other UBI projects.

UBI is both a protection against severe income inequality and a necessity of an increasingly automated world. Working class jobs such as coal mining, truck driving, and manufacturing are disappearing because robots can do them more efficiently than people at a lower cost to the business owners.

Productivity is up and jobs are down, thanks to automation technology. The old school capitalist thinking would say that people who lose jobs to technology should just deal with it. Survival of the fittest, right?

Wrong. We have the potential to ensure quality of life for everyone through basic income. UBI represents a form of freedom that many people have never seen. It allows you to live without fear that you and your family will go hungry. It allows you to pursue your passions without doing a soul-crushing job just to keep a roof over your head. It allows us to sleep at night knowing that fewer people are living in poverty.

It’s the only economic policy that makes sense to adress the growing unemployment and poverty that technological advances create.

EcoVillages

This concept is an alternative to the environmentally unfriendly, isolating urban conditions that have become the norm in much of the developed world. Robert Gilman, an influential researcher in the Global Ecovillage movement, defines an ecovillage as a,

human-scale full-featured settlement in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development, and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.

The way I define an ecovillage is a community that is developed in harmony with the environment instead of in defiance of the natural world.

Ecovillages tackle issues with sustainability, food production, and conservation. They provide an alternative model for sustainable development that can be applied to urban or rural settings in any country regardless of its level of development.

Up until now, America’s urban and suburban development has been out of harmony with nature and it leads to a lot of living situations that disconnect and isolate us from our neighbors. If we can learn to live as neighbors in a community instead of a bunch of disjointed conflicting social units, then the world will be better.

Another reason ecovillages appeal to me so much is that they offer an alternative to our current lifestyle, in which we rely entirely on external sources for resources like food and energy.

A key component of ecovillages is self-reliance. Solar panels and permaculture farms shift power away from big corporations to the people. Imagine a future where factory farms and oil pipelines are nothing but a distant memory.

Ecovillages can help us create that future.

Artist’s rendering.

Hyperloop

America has pitiful public transit system compared to many parts of the world. Rest easy, though, because Elon Musk has a solution.

Musk, the man who brought us Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla, unveiled plans for a levitating high-speed train called Hyperloop back in 2012. This innovative transit system uses a sealed, depressurized tube and magnetic levitation to reduce friction and travel at airline speeds or even faster. According to the website, Hyperloop’s goal is to be moving cargo by 2020 and people by 2021.

This technology is not a new idea. Ideas for similar transportation mechanisms that utilize sealed, depressurized air tubes date all the way back to 1799. Hyperloop is the grandest application of this idea yet, though.

Hyperloop is exciting because it promises fast transportation, lower energy consumption and a more connected world. Given our D+ grade in infrastructure, some innovation like this might be exactly what we need to get our public transportation to the level we need.

I’m excited about Hyperloop not only because it is a cool new technology (though I do like shiny new things) but because it is a manifestation of our desire for a better transit system. People like the idea because what we have now is not good enough, and most people lack the vision to really revolutionize the way we travel.

Everyone is complaining about our infrastructure, but few people are creating innovative solutions. Even if Hyperloop as we currently understand it is never fully realized, it is a catalyst for revolutionary transportation technology. That, my friends, is something that we sorely need.

Remote work

This one’s not really a new idea. Tim Ferriss wrote The 4-Hour Workweek back in 2007, and remote work has become increasingly common since then.

More people want to work remotely because it is just a better way to work. Whether you are an employee or an employer, the freedom, comfort, and peace of mind that remote work offers makes it, in my mind, the only way to work in the future.

Everyone hates cubicles. Everyone hates 9–5. Everyone hates gridlocked rush hour traffic.

Remote work erases all of these problems.

Honestly, with all of the recent advances in communication technology it’s pretty foolish to keep doing business the old way. All of the tools we need to create remote workplaces already exist. The only real obstacle between us and an entirely remote business culture is tradition. The bosses are used to doing things the old way, and change is difficult.

Remote work is freedom. You don’t have to sit at home in your pajamas to be a remote worker. If that’s what makes you happy, though, grab those fuzzy slippers and get to work.

But if you read The 4-Hour Workweek, you’ll understand the real appeal of remote work: freedom of location. You can go anywhere and still get work done, get paid, and live in comfort.

Imagine getting your work done on the train through Switzerland on your way to a ski trip. Or spending the morning snorkeling in Costa Rica before going back to your hotel to finish that quarterly report. Or replying to customer service emails before getting to work on a landscape painting or carpentry project that you’ve been putting off because you had to spend so much time commuting to that depressing hole of an office building.

That’s possible right now. We just need to make the shift to remote work.

Sharing Economies

Despite all of the problems Uber has been having, I still think the sharing economy is a great idea.

Couch surfing and car sharing have been common practice in some circles for a long time. But many modern tools allow us to not only share our homes and vehicles, but to tap into the vastly underused labor potential to get chores done, manage investing and find pet sitters.

Apps like Airbnb and Lyft allow people to make extra money using their existing belongings. TaskRabbit helps you find people to get chores done if you’re always busy (or traveling because you’re a remote worker).

There are also couchsurfing apps that allow you to stay for free on other people’s couches with the caveat that someday you will allow them to do the same.

These apps and services that allow us to share also help us build communities. Airbnb hosts and Uber drivers can become friends and business partners. They’re also exciting for corporations like Amazon, which recently started a delivery service called Flex, to crowdsource their labor needs and give more people a chance to work and support themselves.

The sharing economy has changed the way we think about work and ownership. Shared goods are now the norm, and will continue to be for a long time.

How it all fits together

At this point you might be wondering, “ Jeremy, how does this all fit together? You just listed a bunch of random ideas!”

Allow me to describe my vision of a mobile, sustainable, happy future based on these five big ideas.

This picture is a metaphor. No jigsaw puzzles are required to make this work.

Imagine waking up in an Ecovillage in Southern France. You go on Airbnb to leave a quick review of your room, which you booked on the Hyperloop trip from Shangai to Paris. After you finish your breakfast of eggs and greens from the village’s permaculture farm, you check your bank account online.

After some quick math, you figure out that your basic income is enough to cover the rest of your Airbnb stay in France, but if you want to bring back souvenirs for your family you’ll need to get some work done.

So you log in to your work portal, find a contract for some online accounting work, and start crunching numbers. By 3 pm, you’ve made enough for a decent shopping trip, so you go on a carpool app and get a ride into town.

One of the other passengers tells you about a great community they just stayed at in Brussels. They refer you to the host, and give you contact info for some friends they made during their stay.

You have some appointments back in Chicago, so you reserve a trip home on the Trans-Antlantic Hyperloop and go to sleep.