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for a moment. Our current way of life brings suffering, war, poverty, hunger, social stratification,
violence, and stress to essentially the entire world. Even someone who is 'succeeding' in our current
system will often have to spend much of their time performing socially pointless tasks they'd rather not
do, while contributing to environmental destruction and slave labour in developing nations. The new
way of life that an RBE advocates would bring sustainability, global prosperity, health and freedom,
where every person is able to pursue fulfilling tasks without worry. Is our current way of life worth
keeping in the face of this new way? Are we so afraid of change that we'd rather go on suffering under
an oppressive system than even thinking about trying something else? As usual, there is no 'right'
answer to this question. It is up to every individual human to decide for themselves which way of life is
more desirable: Pointless toil, environmental destruction, and human suffering, versus relative freedom,
environmental balance, and human prosperity. It may seem that I'm intentionally making a biased
comparison here, but I honestly can't see how this comparison could be made any more objective.
 What if I enjoy performing labour tasks? Not everyone hates working with their hands.
If you enjoy performing labour tasks, then perform them. You could do this by either joining
one of the non-mainstream communities, where labour tasks might still be rewarded with some form of
currency, or you could just do them for fun in an RBE. Let's not forget that one of the purposes of this
new system is to allow people to freely pursue activities they find enjoyable. If you enjoy building
things with your hands, for example, there would be nothing to stop you from doing so. We should also
remember that many of these kinds of tasks require an artisan-like skill, and these are skills which are
important to keep alive in our society. No matter how well-prepared we are for disaster scenarios, there
is always the chance that for some reason, we might suddenly find our technology useless or destroyed
(solar flares come to mind), and thus the ability to craft things manually is not a skill that we would
want to lose. It would be very wise for us to include lessons on such things in the Global Knowledge
Database, so that they would always be available to curious humans. Our species evolved as a tool-
making animal, and so most of us have a desire to create things with our hands. This is a desire which
will likely always exist, so I have no fear that the ability to create things manually will ever be 'lost' to
our species. So, if you enjoy making things with your hands, I would strongly encourage you to
continue doing so in an RBE; it's a valuable skill that our society would be 'poorer' for losing.
 What if the technology breaks? Who would fix it? Isn't this a disaster scenario?
What would we do if the computers started to malfunction? Would this spell the end for our new
society? How could we convince someone to fix them without money, or without the fear of that group
trying to 'take over' our computer network? If there is one thing that modern computing has taught all
of us, it's that computers malfunction. Granted, the computers being used in an RBE would be the
highest quality computers that could possibly be created, but there is still always the chance that there
could be some kind of breakdown. Fortunately, an RBE is innately set up to prevent the disaster that
might stem from such a situation.
All of the Global Databases would be distributed throughout the world's computers without
being concentrated on a single system, much like the Internet of today. This is why the entire Internet
doesn't go down when a single computer or website goes down; the network is distributed across an
entire planet's worth of systems. Therefore, the odds of the entire global network 'crashing' are very
small. But what if things do go awry? This is why education is of the utmost importance in an RBE. We
need to ensure that humans as a whole will possess the knowledge necessary to deal with any computer
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problems that surface. Luckily for us, this is a society in which education on every subject is freely
available to everyone; the odds that there will not be any humans who are knowledgeable enough to fix
the problem is extremely low. This same logic would not only apply to the field of computing, but to all
fields of human knowledge; even if computers are doing all of the background 'thinking' for us, we as a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]