In 1789, Benjamin Franklin identified death and taxes as the only things we can be certain of. It wasn’t a completely original quote, but it seemed a permanent truth, with no one betting against the continued presence of graveyards and other shovel-ready projects. Some Futurists would like to make a liar of the most famous kite flier, delivering to our doorsteps a-mortality and post-scarcity, like a couple of pizzas lowered gently by a drone.

On the economic side of things, Transhumanist Presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan, not a fan of tariffs, recently found a kindred soul in visionary Venus Project architect and theorist Jacque Fresco, who even at 100 years old still hopes to radically remake our cash-and-ownership economy into a resource-based one.

In a Vice “Motherboard” piece, Istvan argues that Fresco’s far-out ideas, which would not only eliminate taxes but also currency, may be the best means to preventing violent upheaval should the robots devour all the jobs. An excerpt:

Over the next 20 years, I see automation taking nearly all jobs, and I doubt capitalism will survive that. As a result, I advocate for beginning the process of eliminating taxes and doling out a universal basic income—one that swallows welfare, Social Security, and all health services. Otherwise, I see inequality dramatically growing and an even larger befuddled welfare system than we have now. When robots take all the jobs, I also see civil strife and revolution occurring if corporations and the government don’t give back enough to society.

For me, the most important aspect of the future is to actually get there, and I worry that without giving something to unemployed humans, a dystopic society of violence and chaos will come about. The last thing America—and the scientific community—needs is a civil war.

Some experts have predicted that fully automated luxury communism is the way to go, and it’s a term increasingly being thrown around. Basically, it argues that humans should be pampered by technology, and to do so, communism should finally become the dominant economic system. Fresco doesn’t buy this.

He thinks that if we could just get rid of money and ownership, most of the humanity’s problems would disappear. And he claims only a resource-based economy—an idea he said he’s been working on since he was 13 years old—could do this.

The resource-based economy goes like this: In the future robots will do all the jobs (including creating new robots and fixing broken one). Now, imagine the world is like a public library, where you can borrow any book you want but never own it. Fresco wants all enterprise like this, whether it’s groceries, new tech, gasoline, or alcohol. He wants everything free and eventually provided to us by robots, software, and automation.•