Project, to get answers to any question from the network, to play totally immersive games. You could meet with people in VS, and some of the meeting places were quite bizarre. You could meet in weightlessness in a space station. You could meet underwater. You could meet while walking under the canopy of a redwood forest. Linda’s favorite “place” to meet was flying through the air, like Superman. In her Virtual Space, you could fly in the traditional arms-forward Superman pose, or you could stick your arms out and use them like wings to control your flight. Or you could ride on a flying carpet. The flying sensation was remarkable.
You also ordered everything through the Vertebrane system. You could try on clothes, see and taste food, try out products, choose housing and vacation options. It made shopping incredibly easy, and you knew exactly what you were going to get.
The funny thing was that Vertabrane was like every other technology I had ever used. During the first couple of days it was miraculous. Each new feature was surprising and amazing. But after a week or two you got used to it and it became a part of your life. Think about any technology — the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, the refrigerator, the home computer… These were all miracles the first day people saw them and used them, but a week later they were passe. By the end of orientation I didn’t even know Vertebrane was there — it seemed completely normal to me.
One thing I did think about more and more was the security of this whole system. Computers had been plagued with bugs and viruses since the beginning, but the Australia Project seemed to suffer from none of these problems. One day I asked Linda about it.
“What’s to stop someone from taking over the system and turning us into an army of zombies?” I asked.
“I’m no engineer,” Linda said, “But here’s the best explanation I’ve heard. Why can’t someone take over your brain?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why has no one ever been able to take over billions of human brains and create an army of zombies that way?”
“Well, it’s inside of me. How would they take it over?” I replied.
“Why can’t they just upload a program into your brain, and that program takes over your brain and turns you into a zombie a minute later? Why does that never happen?” She asked.
“Because there is no way to ‘upload’ a program into my brain. And my brain does not execute programs anyway. It is not a computer.” I replied.
“Yes.” She said. “Everything you learn comes in through your eyes and ears. It passes through your conscious mind one piece at a time, and your conscious mind evaluates it. Then your conscious mind ‘executes’ the things you learn consciously, thinking about each one. If someone were to try to teach you to cut off your own arm, your conscious mind would reject that as ridiculous when the lesson came in, and your brain would certainly never cause you to cut off your arm except in the most extreme situations. The Vertabrane system is operating in the same way. It is learning things, not running programs. It acts consciously rather than being ‘programmed’, and it has a far more rigid moral code than most human beings do. The Vertebrane system never blindly ‘executes’ a program, so it cannot be taken over. That’s true of all of the robots here. The Australia Project would have collapsed long ago if this were just a bunch of computers blindly executing code that humans had written. That is how things were in the beginning, or course, but we advanced beyond it fairly quickly.”
Once Vertebrane was installed, orientation became much easier. Everything happened in VS and we covered a huge amount of material over the remaining five weeks — the economic system, government, voting, housing, credits, travel, crime, punishment, rules, interpersonal interactions, referees, education, ordering things, designing new things, news, awards, social responsibilities and so on. There were lessons on the nine core principles, what they meant and the effects they had on the community as a whole. There was a lot of emphasis placed on treating other people with respect, and understanding the basic humanity of the people around you.
It was very interesting to compare this new world to the world I had known all through my life. The biggest difference, of course, was the economic system. It had effects on everything — the psychology of people living in Australia, the way people worked with each other, what people bought and why, the level of innovation, the way resources were allocated, etc. One of the more interesting features of the economy from a psychological standpoint was the fact that no one had more than you did, or less, and everyone knew it. That removed entire layers of negative emotions. The fact that you could have pretty much anything you wanted, anytime you wanted it, meant that you placed far less importance on material things. You would expect that, given essentially free access to everything, people would go nuts. Actually, the opposite happened. Suddenly there was no condition of “want” or “envy,” so people had no need to show off.
This will sound surprising, but one of the bigger differences was the lack of advertising. The robots did not care whether you bought one style of clothing or another, ate in one restaurant or another, lived in one kind of housing or another… It was all the same to them. Therefore, there was no need for advertising. If a fad caught on — whether it was a song, a book, a style, a pair of shoes, a restaurant — it all happened by word of mouth. And everyone knew that. If you tried something and it was good, you told your friends about it.
Innovation was incredibly interesting and important, and in orientation we discussed it extensively. I had never really thought of innovation as a part of society. Here it was actually something that people thought about and talked about as part of the “better and better” principle. But the reason for the discussion was surprising.
What became clear after several weeks is that a big part of the Australia Project was living, and understanding what living meant to you. Perhaps for the first time, a huge group of people had the freedom to decide exactly how they wanted to live their lives, and then make it happen. A big part of orientation was helping people realize that fundamental feature of the Australia Project, and help you work through the questions. It reminded me a little of the process of setting an animal raised in the zoo free in the wild. If you’ve been caged your entire life, actual freedom is a completely new experience.
Every single person in the Australia Project was different, and no one focused on one thing exclusively, but there were some general patterns. Some people chose to focus their lives on friends and family. For example, lots of people with children wanted to spend time with the kids. Many others had extensive networks of friends and spent much of their time with friends socializing in a variety of ways. Many people loved to travel, and spent a great deal of time traveling to different parts of the country and the world. Some people enjoyed art — music, writing, painting, sculpture, dance, etc. — and spent a great deal of their time at their art. Athletes spent their time training and competing. For each different person, a different type of lifestyle brought fulfillment.
A surprising number of people found fulfillment in creating new things — inventors, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, designers, architects. In the Australia Project, these people could find true fulfillment. Because of the “better and better” principle, the Australia Project set quite a bit of its resources aside to help people interested in innovation. All “known” product categories were under constant improvement. All unknowns were being researched.
For example, take any “known” product — shoes, clothes, food, housing, furniture, appliances, housing, restaurants, parks, etc. People were constantly coming up with new ideas to make them better and better. For example, if you came up with a new style of clothing, you would submit it and the robots would put it in the catalog. There was no way to know whether your new style would resonate with 100 people or a million, and the robots didn’t care. The only way to find out was to let people have access to it. If someone had a new idea for a restaurant, the robots would simulate it and ask 1,000 people about their level of interest. If there was any interest at all, the robots would try one copy of the restaurant out. If it took off, they would make copies of it in different regions. In this way, restaurants were constantly changing and improving. The same thing was true of housing — there were thousands of housing styles, and you could move whenever you felt like it. If someone had a new way of doing things, the robots would try it out.
Another thing that helped innovation was the elimination of profit. In the Australia Project, the robots made everything and delivered it. The only “price” for anything you wanted was for the resources consumed. The robots could make one copy or a million copies of anything in the catalog, and they did not need to make a “profit” from any of it.
In a profit-driven society, a huge range of innovative products never saw the light of day because they could not make a profit. A technology or a product had to have enough people using it to cover the costs of the people working on the product, the advertising, the legal bills, the rent, etc. That meant that a lot of people had to be
