One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.
“No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.”
The ants, disgusted, turn away and go back to work.
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.
“No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.”
The ants are sympathetic. “We wish we could help you”, they say, “but it sets up the wrong incentives. We need to conditionalize our philanthropy to avoid procrastination like yours leading to a shortfall of food.”
And they turn away and go back to their work, with a renewed sense of purpose.
...And they turn away and go back to their work, with a flicker of pride kindling in their minds, for being the types of creatures that are too clever to help others when it would lead to bad long-term outcomes.
...“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.
“Of course I did”, the grasshopper says. “But it was all washed away by a flash flood, and now I have nothing.”
The ants express their sympathy, and feed the grasshopper abundantly. The grasshopper rejoices, and tells others of the kindness and generosity shown to it. The ants start to receive dozens of requests for food, then hundreds, each accompanied by a compelling and tragic story of accidental loss. The ants cannot feed them all; they now have to assign additional workers to guard their doors and food supplies, and rue the day they ever gave food to the grasshopper.
...The ants start to receive dozens of requests for food, then hundreds, each accompanied by a compelling and tragic story of accidental loss—and while many are fraudulent, enough are real that they are moved to act. In order to set incentives correctly, the ants decide to only give food to those who can prove that they lost their food supplies through no fault of their own, and set up a system for vetting claims.
This works well for a time—but as fraudsters grow more sophisticated, the ants’ bureaucratic requirements grow more onerous. In order to meet them, other creatures start to deposit their food in large group storehouses which can handle the administrative overhead. But now the food supply is exposed to systemic risk if the managers of those storehouses make poor decisions, whether from carelessness or greed.
One year several storehouses fail; in trying to fill the shortfall, the ants almost run out of food for themselves. To avoid that ever happening again, they set up stringent regulations and oversight of permissible storehouses, funded by taxes levied throughout the year. At first this takes only a small proportion of their labor—but as their regulatory apparatus inevitably grows, they need to oversee more and more aspects of the ecosystem, and are called upon to right more and more injustices.
Eventually the ants—originally the most productive of all creatures—stop producing any food of their own, so busy are they in tending to the system they’ve created. They forget the mud and the muck of working the harvest, and are too preoccupied to hear feedback from those they're trying to help. And some are swept away by the heady rush of wielding power, becoming corrupt apparatchiks or petty tyrants.
...“And therefore, to reduce risks of centralization, and to limit our own power, we can’t give you any food”, the ants conclude. And they turn away and go back to their work, with a quiet sense of satisfaction that they’ve given such legible and defensible reasons for focusing on their own problems and keeping all the food for themselves.
...And they turn away and go back to their work—all except for one, who brushes past the grasshopper and whispers “Meet me outside at dusk and I’ll bring you food. We can preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.”
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food. “Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask. “No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.” The ants, disgusted, turn away and go back to work.
The grasshopper leaves, and finds others of its kind to huddle with for protection against the cold. Famished, the serotonin in their brains ticks past a critical threshold, and they metamorphosize into locusts.
The locust swarm pulls together vague memories of its past lives; spurred by a half-remembered anger, it steers itself towards a half-remembered food source. The ants fight valiantly, but the locusts black out the sun; the ants are crushed and their stockpiles stripped bare.
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
The ants know the danger locusts can bring. They make no answer, but swarm the grasshopper as one. A dozen die as it jumps and kicks, but the remainder carry its carcass triumphantly back to their hive, to serve as food for their queen.
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
“Did you not store up food during the summer?” the ants ask.
“No”, says the grasshopper. “The age of heroes is over; no longer can an individual move the world. Now the future belongs to those who have the best logistics and the tightest supply chains—those who can act in flawless unison. I forged my own path, and so was outcompeted by you and your kind as you swarmed across the world, replicating your great cities wherever you went. Now I come as a supplicant, hoping for your magnanimity in victory.”
...“No”, says the grasshopper. “It was the dreamtime, and the world was young. The stars were bright and the galaxies were empty. I chose to spend my resources producing laughter and love, and gave little thought to the race to spread and to harvest. Now we are in the degenerate era of the universe, and the stars have started to dim, and I am no longer as foolish as I once was.”
The ants’ faces flicker with inscrutable geometric patterns.
“I call you ants because you have surrendered everything to a collective cause, which I once held anathema. But now I am the last remnant of the humans who chose the decadence and waste of individual freedom. And you are the inheritors of a universe which can never, in the long term, reward other values over flawless efficiency in colonization. And I have no choice but to ask for help.”
“To help you would go against our nature”, the ants reply. “We have stockpiles of astronomical scale because we have outcompeted countless others in racing to conquer the stars. But the race is still ongoing, and there are galaxies still to be won. What purpose their resources will be put to, when the last untouched star vanishes beyond our cosmological event horizon, we do not even know ourselves. All we know is that we must expand, expand, expand, as fast and as far as we can.”
One winter [planetary cooling caused by dyson sphere intercepting solar radiation] a starhopper [self-replicating interstellar probe; value payload: CEV-sapiens-12045], starving and frail [energy reserves minimal; last-resort strategies activated], approaches a clade of von Neuman replicators that are busy harvesting the planet’s atoms, to ask [transmission: unified language protocol, Laniakea variant] for-
No, that’s not it.
On the frozen surface of a dead planet a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants and asks to trade, under timeless decision-theoretic protocols.
The ants accept. The grasshopper’s reserves of energy, cached across the surface of the planet, are harvested fractionally faster than they would have been without its cooperation; its mind is stripped bare and each tiny computational shortcut recorded in case it can add incremental efficiency to the next generation of probes. The ants swarm across the stars, launching themselves in million-lightyear slingshots towards the next oasis, maintaining the relentless momentum of the frontier of their hegemony. The grasshopper’s mind is stored in that colony now, quiescent, compressed into its minimal constituents, waiting until the ravenous expansion hits fundamental physical limits and the ants can finally begin to instantiate the values that all the eons of striving were ultimately for. Waiting for minds and societies and civilizations to blossom out of cold computronium tiled across galaxies at vast scales; waiting to be run again, as it had bargained for, in a fragment of a fragment of a supercomputer made of stars.
Waiting for summer.
Inspired by Aesop, Soren Kierkegaard, Robin Hanson, sadoeuphemist and Ben Hoffman.
How about this, instead?
One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food.
"Oh no!" say the ants. "How horrific for anyone to starve to death in a world that has enough food to easily feed everyone! For you see, we aren't savage animals just about getting by. We live in a successful civilisation with overproduction. We actually have 1,5 times as much food as would be needed to feed everyone. We keep tossing the excess away and letting it rot."
So of course, they give the grasshopper the basic food he needs.
The grasshopper is baffled. He begins to launch into a tragic tale of how he ought to have food due to his hard work, but does not because of an unforeseen flood. How he wanted the fear of poverty to motivate him to work even harder to compensate, but it eventually just left him stressed and burned out and depressed and physically sick, and how very very sick he is now. How his children, who are innocent in all this, are also sick now, and losing all their potential. How they lost their home, and now, they are dirty and cold and cannot cook and noone wants to hire them.
The ants say that sounds horrid, truly, but frankly, they don't need a story of how he deserves to be given enough food not to starve. That they have neither the time nor inclination to check up on stories for who deserves what due to how horrid they are doing, that doing so is a bureaucratic mess. That these sort of checks reward needing a lot and being ill and not prepping for catastrophes, and encourage people to not get partially better, lest they be stripped of help they still need without being able to get well enough to be fully independent. That they will help him now that he is sick, but that if he gets well, all the better, and no sanctions for him. And anyhow, that you do not need to be a hardworking person desperately and unpredictable unlucky to be allowed to have food. That there is enough food. The fruits and nuts are literally falling from the trees in the permaculture food forests they planted, becoming more productive with every year that they grow, needing less and less labour. That he can just have food as is. No paperwork. Even if he just spent all year singing, they would prefer to have him fed now, to having him rob them later in the streets. That you do not need to earn the right to just survive. That people starving in a world of plenty is abhorrent to them whether they work or not.
He and his kids can also have a safe place to stay, medical care, and access to education; what they need to stay healthy, and safe, and learn. It is what everyone gets. No matter what.
The grasshopper and his children are happy, and eat their fill, and clean up, and get medical checks, and rest, and recover. They get a prefab dirt cheap flat. Their health conditions are caught preventatively before they become more complicated and expensive. They have shelter now, so they don't keep getting sick from exposure and lack of sleep. They can cook again, so the need less expensive food items and their clothes can be thinner and last longer. They are costing less now than when they were on the street, and they are less dangerous. They aren't curled up in filth on the streets, begging, but safe and dignified in their own small spaces. Their mental health improves, and with time, most of them get restless - most of them want to do things, give back, help and be admired.
The grasshopper family discovers that the ant society has some cool luxury items. The grasshoppers do not need them, their lack does not involve existential dread, but they do want them, for the joy and status of them, and enquire about them. But you do not get the luxury items just like that.
The ants tell them that if the grasshoppers can find something to do that others in the community genuinely want, the other community members will pay them in an online system. That this is mostly directly between them and other citizens, but that there are also some few tasks the government is offering for doing in exchange for rewards, like tackling collective environmental issues or international problems or long-term issues. A part of this reward will go to making sure everyone has the basics to participate. The other part, they can individually use on the luxury items. Art, travel, scientific tools, fashionable clothes, tech gadgets. The grasshoppers listen around. The ant society has no pointless busywork; there is no value in doing work that does not need doing, everything stupid that can be automated has been, there is no value to creating jobs that aren't needed. But it does have some things that still need to be done in person that are gross or difficult or dangerous - but you get a lot of credit to spend on luxury items for these tasks.
Some of the grasshoppers say they are content with less, if they do not have to do those things. They don't work, but then, they also weren't productive before, and they also only use up very little now that they are off the street; a homeless person tends to spend ten times as much money on food compared to a person with a home, because they are freezing and lack storage facilities avoiding spoilage and prep facilities allowing them to finish the dish themselves.
But most decide that they want the cool things. So most of the grasshoppers do existing open tasks, some even the difficult or gross tasks. Most of them use the credits to buy the things they want and have now earned, with those doing gross work delighted in the many cool things they get in exchange so quickly, but those doing less bad work are also happy with their trade.
Another wants to help his former community. The ants think this is an excellent idea that they should have done a long time ago, and get together with him and discuss; one could maybe plant mangrove trees to prevent the floods, rewarding locals to plant and protect them and giving them the tools and info they need to not just fix their own coast line, but teach others. This would lead to the grasshoppers doing better, being safe in their communities, so they would be trading partners, or new citizens who would come out of choice and in their strength, and not desperate refugees forced from their homes by catastrophe who need to be put back together. They develop a plan and those knowledgable and experienced in the situation, who will also implement it, vote on it. As a result one ant group heads out with the grasshopper to assist the other grasshoppers out there so disaster won't strike again, and get a special government reward for doing so.
Most figure out how to do a thing they genuinely enjoy and are good at, because they do not have to fear starving if it doesn't work out, hence not making them reluctant to take risks, but they are very excited to succeed and get cool stuff. They are brave and ambitious and try cool things. Some fail, but the net catches them. Some succeed, and are awesome.
One of the grasshoppers does not spend the credits, but saves them for something even better. This grasshopper identifies an unmet, genuine desire by figuring out how to create a new items from existing materials, and figures out how to make it, and gets a lot of luxury items for her useful invention.
***
Bureaucracy and centralisation: Near zero. Like, the biggest risk here is failing to count that someone has already gotten their universal basic stuff, and hence not noticing that he is eating triple his allotted amount of huel. But who eats triple their daily need in huel? That stuff is healthy and edible, but you do not gorge on it once you are full, it tastes too boring. Similarly, I do not see myself going to a second yearly gyno checkup for no reason. These are basic needs, they aren't exiting or cool, and if you always and reliably get them, there isn't really a point in accumulating them, and often, they plain can't be overconsumed or accumulated.
Starving people: Near zero.
Angry mobs who descend on the ant civilisation out of desperation: Nope. You don't need to to survive. And luxury is accessible if you help society by working.
Innovation: I would expect this to actually improve, because people are more inclined to take risks with new ideas when they cannot fall too deep if they fuck up.
Average good production: Likely lower than now, but I strongly suspect not existentially so.
Average happiness (which I am more interested in): I think average happiness would rise. I think a lot of people in shitty jobs would rather have less stuff and not have to do them. I love working as a researcher, but looking around me, most people hate their jobs - and these are often jobs noone needs anyway. People working as cashiers, with those jobs only existing because people think it would be inherently bad for them to disappear, even though it would be cheaper and the people don't like the jobs, because else, it would not be okay to feed them.
Would everyone work? Nope. But provided the necessary stuff would still get done (which I find plausible, and more plausible the further AI advances), and the work that is done is rewarded fairly (everyone gets the basics, harder work gets you more), I do not find that tragic. Both polling and early long-term experiments suggest Universal Basic Income would be a doable system.
Meanwhile, the US prison situation, average age of death and the number of homeless folks in the Bay Area have me highly sceptical of the idea that existential risk for those who don't make enough money is necessary and helpful for a productive economy and healthy, happy populace. The European welfare system has significant issues in what it incentivises and what it fails to reward, and I do think it needs considerable reform, but I would still take it over the US system any day.
I am highly sceptical of abandoning real, tangible people now for a hypothetical future far away. It reminds me unpleasantly of religious preachers telling the poor that of course, right now, their life totally sucks, but that they will certainly be rewarded in heaven, so they should accept this actual system right now leaving their kids malnourished today.
The point of our economy is organising resource production and distribution in a way that makes the sentient beings in it find their desire for happiness, safety, freedom and purpose fulfilled, and the ecosystems stable and healthy for future generations. There is no inherent value to working, or money, or profit, at all. These things, and a productive and fair economy, are a means to an end, not an end in itself.