We’re all getting nicer are we? Then tell that to those poor zombies in The Typing of the Dead. (Guest post by Chris Moseley)

This is a guest post from Chris Moseley, Owner and Managing Director of Infinite Space PR

There was a time when British bobbies rode bicycles, dressed in full fig policeman’s uniform, complete with Coxcomb helmet and brightly polished buttons on their tunics. This antediluvian fellow – let’s call him PC Pinkleton – would nod to Mrs Peartree, a spinster of this parish out for a walk in her sensible brown brogues, twin set and real pearls, and then wave to the local vicar as he pruned his roses. The worst ‘crime’ that PC Pinkleton might encounter would be a few young lads scrumping for apples in Squire Trelawney’s orchard. A clip around the ear, and a stern lecture on the moral perils of ‘thieving’ and PC Pinkleton’s duty and day were done. Then along came clashes between Mods and Rockers, pitched battles with skinheads, fights with bikers, football hooligans and flying pickets. Throw in a few rioting miners and poll tax protestors and for about a 30 year period life for the English bobby became pretty tough. Just at the point when PC Pinkleton was morphing from Dixon of Dock Green into Robocop, complete with padded riot gear, guns, mace and a US military style helmet, it appears that the uncivil civilian has become tamed.

This is the news, announced this week, that rates of murder and violent crime have fallen more rapidly in the UK in the past decade than many other countries in Western Europe. The UK Peace Index, from the Institute for Economics and Peace, found that UK homicides per 100,000 people had fallen from 1.99 in 2003, to one in 2012. The UK was more peaceful overall, it said, with the reasons for it many and varied. The index found Broadland, Norfolk, to be the most peaceful local council area but Lewisham, London, to be the least. The research by the international non-profit research organisation comes as a separate study by Cardiff University suggests the number of people treated in hospital in England and Wales after violent incidents fell by 14% in 2012. Some 267,291 people required care – 40,706 fewer than in 2011 – according to a sample of 54 hospital units, its report said. BBC home editor Mark Easton called it the “riddle of peacefulness” and said the fall in violence was “perhaps a symptom of a new morality”.

Well, I am just a bit sceptical about all this and more than a little annoyed that the BBC deliberately skirted a really interesting debate and chose instead to pursue an extremely anodyne and rather risible line of discussion. In essence, Mark Easton’s BBC TV and radio pieces concluded with the argument that perhaps as a society we had come to abhor violence. A lovely thought, and while the prospect of peace breaking out all over the place is an attractive one, and I don’t doubt the veracity of the findings of The UK Peace Index, I am more than little dubious about the notion that human nature has altered so markedly in such a short time. Perhaps one of the reasons that the UK in 2013 is more like A Brave New World than the dystopia of A Clockwork Orange is that nearly all of today’s violence is rendered sublimated and vicarious thanks to computer games, combined with the soporific influence of cheap, supermarket-procured booze. Computer games, particularly the violent ones are, after all, a form of Aldous Huxley’s Soma (“All of the benefits of Christianity and alcohol without their defects”), although rather than allowing one to drift into a peaceful state, they act as a cathartic vent. One can enter a virtual world of almost any description, reach for a virtual sword, gun or mace, and proceed to blitz the hell out the “enemy”, which is arguably a form of proxy violence that could instead by directed at one’s boss, a driver in a road rage encounter, the bank manager, even an annoying neighbour. One of the most popular games in the UK today, The Typing of the Dead, confronts the would-be gaming hero with hoards of zombies. Using a keyboard words flash up on the screen which the player needs to type as quickly as possible, thereby killing as many zombies as possible. What a relief to wipe out all those irritating pillocks who inevitably emerge from everyday life without once having to get one’s hands dirty (and what a great lesson in typing too).

Isn’t it possible that we’re just as violent and angry as we used to be? We just express our rage and violence, well, virtually.

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Coal power is making a comeback – an own goal by greens

I tweeted recently that Europe has the stupidest greens in the world.  I meant it. Today I have time to explain.

The Greens of course are political party in many countries now, but the term green applies generally to left wing environmentalists where things only ever seem to benefit the environment if they simultaneous result in wealth redistribution. It is that entire group that I am talking about here. There are lots of environmentalists who aren’t socialist and lots that aren’t idiots, with a very strong overlap in those groups. Many are very smart and support policies or develop solutions that actually benefit or protect the environment. But the greens do seem mostly to fall into the idiot camp. Sorry, but that is a fact of life.

Thanks to green pressure and proselytising of their CO2 catastrophist religion, the EU has gone nuts implementing ludicrously expensive policies to reduce carbon emissions, but has demonstrated mainly negative effects after hundreds of billions investment, often achieving exactly the opposite of what was intended. The greens’ almost universal refusal to engage in proper science or logical reasoning has resulted in very clear demonstration that nature doesn’t care about political ideology or intent, only what is actually done. Some examples are called for:

Many people have been driven needlessly into fuel poverty, their energy bills rising dramatically to pay for wind farms that often actually increase CO2 emissions over their life because they are built on peat-lands. Solar panels on UK rooftops produce more CO2 than they save too, again the opposite of the intent, while managing to successfully divert cash from the poor to the rich, also presumably the opposite of the socialist greens driving it. Industries have been forced to close or relocate overseas due to rising subsidies for renewables, severely damaging the economy and destroying working class jobs, where the intention was to revitalise with a green economy and create jobs, while again pushing up CO2 emissions when the relocation is to countries that produce more CO2 for the same energy. Recession and economic misery has been far deeper and longer with slower recovery thanks to the huge costs resulting directly from green policies, with the poor taking much of the burden. Millions in far away countries have also been pushed into starvation by rising food prices or have been forcefully relocated to make room for palm oil plantations to meet the demand caused by European regulations that biofuels must account for 5% of the fuel in our cars. The peat bogs drained and the rainforests chopped down to make space again increase CO2 emissions.

You couldn’t make it up. The evidence now seems incontrovertible to all but the looniest of greens that CO2 doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as was suggested, and we are certainly not threatened by environmental catastrophe due to global warming. But if we were, all the activities of the European greens so far would have made a huge contribution to making catastrophe worse and much earlier. Green is rapidly becoming synonymous with stupid. Greens are repeatedly shown to be the worst enemy of both the poor and of the environment, both of which they aim to help. Stupid almost isn’t a strong enough word.

Meanwhile, in the USA, where they refused to sign up to the worst of the policies, simple capitalist market forces forced the development of shale gas, reducing energy prices dramatically and stimulating the economy, making people richer and creating jobs, while replacing dirty, CO2-producing coal with clean CO2-light gas. Many business are relocating from the EU to the US, the only successful but entirely unintended CO2 reduction resulting from EU policy so far.  Meanwhile, greens even there have managed to get the government to throw billions away on futile projects to create a mythical green economy, with remarkably few actual jobs to show for the huge investment. It is the diametrically opposite force that has created them in any numbers.

However, because the USA has made so much progress reducing CO2 via shale gas, and is benefiting from greatly reduced energy prices, even it that wasn’t intentional, the price of coal there has been forced down so far that Europe is buying it in. Germany is now reinvesting in coal fired power stations that will greatly increase CO2 emissions, hilarious considering how much cash they have so far wasted on renewables to supposedly reduce them. Meanwhile, although large reserves of shale gas have been found all over Europe, the greens have managed to prevent and delay development of this abundant resource that would revitalise the economy while reducing CO2 emission and reducing pollution. Only now are some mainstream politicians starting to realise the stupidity of such policy and encouraging development of shale gas. In a decade or two the greens might finally understand too.

Japan too is now making a dash for coal. Having closed their nuclear stations, they have to make up the power deficit and with coal being so cheap, is their new fuel of choice. Again, the indirect result of environmental policies have caused a rise in demand for the worst CO2 emitter of them all. But at least the Japanese can also demonstrate that they are exploiting methane clathrates, which would have a CO2-reducing effect while reducing energy costs.

It seems to be Europe where the policies are greenest and stupidest, with the most harm and the highest costs for the least benefit and the consequential wealth redistribution from poor to rich. The only good thing is that since it tuned out that CO2 doesn’t matter as much as they claimed after all, at least they haven’t yet managed to bring about environmental catastrophe. If the greens had been right about CO2, given the policies they’ve so far forced through, we’d really be in a mess.

I rest my case. Europe has the stupidest greens in the world.

22nd century speculative sci-fi super-chemistry

Helium is unreactive, because it has two electrons in a shell that holds two electrons. It doesn’t want any more, and doesn’t want to lose any.

Well, stuff that! There could (and should) be a physical state where it shares those electrons with another atom. On checking the web, it turns out that in plasma conditions it can exist (excimer), though it isn’t much use in ordinary everyday life.

OK, so helium can be forced eventually to play, even if not especially nicely. What about carbon? Carbon has 4 electrons in its outer shell and wants 8 so is happy to form 4 covalent bonds with other atoms. So it is much nicer to play with than helium. However…..

Suppose, just suppose, that having shared its outer electrons, we can do some sort of sub-chemistry with its inner ones. OK, I know that isn’t quite the norm. What sort of thing would we have to do to make atoms engage in some sort of super-chemistry with their inner electron shells? Stupid question, possibly, but I am a futurologist, not a historian, (or a chemist) and know that old barriers don’t always last.

The reason I am interested in is that I am brainstorming new kinds of carbon materials, just for fun. We already have several allotropes with some great and useful properties. Diamond is quite strong, graphene is stronger, but a bit thin, so wouldn’t it be nice to have a 3D material like diamond but which has better bonds? I was drawing some pretty pics of graphene and noticed an optical illusion appearing, where it starts to look cubic, except that some of the lines are missing. Each point in a cubic array has 6 links, or bonds, not 4. Diamond has 4 , but if a super-diamond had 6, it might be better still.

So, we can get 4 carbon bonds with the outer electrons easily enough, but IF we could somehow get the two inner ones to play in some sort of virtual excimer as well … what should happen is that we could make a cubic form of carbon. Which, idly speculating, should exist as a sort of solid plasma. At very high temperatures, far beyond what diamond could cope with. Being able to withstand high forces at high temperatures, and conducting electricity, it would be possible to build one hell of a plasma rifle with it. Or an electron pipe that could carry a billion times higher data rates than optical fibre. http://thisshouldbeok.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/electron-pipe/

We can’t do it yet, but just for the record, you saw it here first.

Isn’t graphene even more fun? Carbon chainmail

Thought for the day:

Graphene, picture from cnx.org

 

A Chainmail structure, picture from 123rf.com

It’s a bit easier to see how the links overlap in this pic:

 

pic from mediafocus.com

So, just thinking out loud, perhaps the rings in the chainmail above could be rings of carbon, just 6 atoms each. If so, would this be better than graphene at anything useful, or not? Would longer rings work better? The idea of carbon nanotube chainmail is about a decade old.

 

Powerpoint really is not designed as a proper drawing tool and not having a week to spare, I didn’t bother doing the link overlaps or even the bonds properly in my pic, but together with the other two, I think you will get the idea fine.

I don’t know if this will work or not, but it might be an idea worth looking at further.

 

 

 

The rise and fall of the web

This is my part of a joint newsletter with Rohit Talwar, his was published just now as a guest blog.

The rise and fall of the web

20 years ago, the web was in its infancy and the first conferences appeared where we could all discuss what was coming next. Even then the need was obvious for search engines, portal sites, firewalls, social networking, online shopping, auctions, discount buying schemes and so on and even the seedier side of the web was already obvious back then. Not much around today on the web wasn’t being discussed 20 years ago. It just took that long to emerge and evolve into what was anticipated. What has happened is exposure of the naïve optimism of some of the early debate.

Over the coming years we saw the expected creation of companies like Amazon and ebay, Facebook, Twitter and Google, and the rise of already existing companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Samsung, in some cases from niche player to market dominance. Without exception, the companies I mentioned deserve praise for struggling through the difficult phases of market creation and the sometimes huge and prolonged losses leading up to break-even and eventual profitability. They all started with a dream and made it happen, knowing they would succeed if they worked hard enough at it.

Without wanting to remove any of that praise, it is hard not to wonder if at least part of the dream is starting to turn sour. Is there evidence now that power corrupts? Does possession of a strong market position always lead inevitably to market abuse?

In each case, there are recent examples of less-than-saintly behaviour, but some issues are spreading as a problem, so rather than pick on individual companies, I’ll focus on the issues. In each case, a large company with little effective competition is in strong position to force these policies since they know customers and clients can’t easily just walk away. There is no cartel, but if a problem happens to affect all the main providers for a service, or it is a de-facto monopoly, you really have no choice.

Privacy invasion or at least scant regard for privacy is the biggest issue for some, introducing policies that make it hard for users to remain private. In this case, the reason is obvious. Privacy conflicts with extracting maximum market value from a customer’s personal data. I don’t personally want everyone to know what I just bought online, what I watch on TV, what games I play or what music I am listening to, or to have full access to everything I ever typed on a social networking page. The choice we seem to be presented with is simple. If you don’t want to be fully exposed 24-7, either don’t use the web or a mobile app, or be prepared to spend time frequently to check every site you use carefully for their latest policy changes to make sure an oversight doesn’t allow your privacy doesn’t fall through a new hole they just dug. But even that may not be the real choice now. The emerging pattern seem to be that changes may be introduced retrospectively, eradicating any value in privacy commitments in existing policy. If that behaviour spreads, then any privacy you think you have today is merely an illusion.

Burning the candle at both ends is another recent issue. Although the web has few of the costs associated the with high street, large web companies are charging high fees now to companies to sell via their site, much the same as property developers with the best locations can charge high fees to shops. That end of the candle is well alight, but customers are finding the discounts offered are often far less now too. Now that they have been psychologically hooked by the web empires, prices are rising.

Walled gardens were a consideration for regulators when mobile and broadband networks were emerging – I took part in several workshops discussing their merits and drawbacks. Telecoms regulators understood well that dominant telecoms companies might try to force customers to use only services within their own areas of control, i.e. to stay in their walled garden, and they legislated accordingly to protect customers. It was presumed that competition would suffer greatly if people were not free to wander as they pleased and exploitation would follow soon after.  However, although some of the web giants are heading rapidly and determinedly down exactly that path, the authorities are either looking the other direction or unable to do anything about it. It seems that any regulators that do exist have too vague boundaries on their remits, or the companies fall outside their jurisdiction geographically, or they simply have too many issues to deal with and can’t keep up. It is unacceptable that we now by default have arrived at a business platform that lends itself to abuse but isn’t being properly controlled by the normal regulator processes that apply as standard elsewhere.

Arrogance is a term we hear thrown at web giants frequently now, and it does seem appropriate when a large company ignores protests by its customers and imposes policies that significantly affect the terms and conditions that applied when they first became a customer. Even incrementally small changes can add up to large change in a short time, but if customers have invested time and effort building a profile or establishing a place or network on a site, the personal costs of migration can be too high. There ought to be equivalent rights protecting the interests of customers online just as in the physical world, but online providers appear to be able to make their own conditions of use with much greater scope for abuses, knowing that very few customers will read many pages of small print. Especially where websites feature heavily in everyday use, and where not being a user might even may be a career or social impediment, there should be more protection from arrogance and unilateral determination and management of user rights. Some regulatory body should be making sure terms and conditions are fair and balanced because the market isn’t doing that by itself.

Another aspect of arrogance is the enthusiasm to avoid taxes by exploiting holes in the law, and reading between the lines, it is as if the companies think they know best how money should be spent for humankind’s best interests, not governments. They may be right about government, but that doesn’t excuse arrogance.

Reintermediation is a direct consequence of walled gardens but is an issue in its own right. Early analysis of the web suggested it would lead to perfect markets, where people would be in direct contact with suppliers, thereby cutting out the middle man and his costs while forcing perfect information and hence maximum competitiveness. With good search, it would be easy to find all potential suppliers for something and compare them directly, and there would be no need to go via an agency. What we have now is interesting in that the search sites have themselves become intermediaries, and comparison sites another layer of that, listing results from a subset of suppliers. So instead of removing an intermediary we generated two new ones, three if you use an app store to do it. Everyone wants a slice of the pie of course, but the web was meant to bypass that, and it simply hasn’t. People can go direct, but it doesn’t take long to discover that using a search engine will often put hundreds of pages of the wrong sites before the one you search for. Most of the listings on the first several pages will often be intermediary sites.

In spite of all this, the potential of the web hasn’t gone away. It still allows word of new sites to spread rapidly, for reputations to be made and lost, for empires to spring up overnight, and for old ones to crash and burn. Boredom is under-rated as a motivation to change too. Social network sites in particular are highly vulnerable to their customers simply getting bored and leaving, but new designs and novel ideas can present a real threat to any of them. The sword of Damocles hangs over all.

For all their size and momentum, none of the web giants is guaranteed longevity. As some of yesterday’s giants discovered, a startup can replace them in just a few years. Maybe the first generation of web giants has climbed high, but decadence and abuse of power have made them ripe for conquest. All we need now is to wait for the imminent emergence of the second generation.

Technology Convergence – What’s your Plan? Guest post by Rohit Talwar

Rohit is CEO of Fastfuture and a long-standing friend as well as an excellent futurist. He and I used to do a joint newsletter, and we have started again. Rohit sends it out to his mailing list as a proper newletter and because I don’t use mailing lists, I guest post it here. I’ll post my bit immediately after this one. I’m especially impressed since his bit ticks almost as many filing category boxes as it uses words.

Here is Rohit’s piece:

Technology Convergence – What’s your Plan?

I have just returned from South Korea where I was delivering a keynote speech to a cross-industry forum on how to prepare for and benefit from the opportunities arising from industry convergence. South Korea has made a major strategic commitment starting with government and running through the economy to be a leader in exploiting the potential opportunities arising from the convergence of industries made possible by advances in a range of disciplines. These include information and communications technology, biological and genetic sciences, energy and environmental sciences, cognitive science, materials science and nanotechnology.  From environmental monitoring, smart cars, and intelligent grids through to adaptive bioengineered materials and clothing-embedded wearable sensor device that monitor our health on a continuous basis – the potential is vast.

What struck me about the situation in Korea was how the opportunity is being viewed as a central component of the long-term future of Korea’s economy and how this is manifested in practice. Alongside a national plan, a government sponsored association has been established to drive and facilitate cross-industry collaboration to achieve convergence. In addition to various government-led support initiatives, a range of conferences are being created to help every major sector of the economy understand, explore, act on and realise the potential arising out of convergence.

I am fortunate to get the opportunity to visit 20-25 countries a year across all six continents and get to study and see a lot of what is happening to create tomorrow’s economy. Whilst my perspective is by no means complete, I am not aware of any country where such a systematic and rigorous approach is being taken to driving industry convergence. Those who study Korea know that this approach is nothing new for them – long term research and strategic planning are acknowledged to have played a major role in the evolution of its knowledge economy and rise of Korea and its technology brands on the global stage. Coming from the UK, where it seems that long term thinking and national policy are now long lost relatives, I wonder why it is that so few countries are willing to or capable of taking such a strategic approach.

Rohit on the Road

In the next few months Rohit will delivering speeches in Oslo, Paris, Vilnius, Warsaw, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Denver, Las Vegas, Oman, Leeds and London. Topics to be covered include human enhancement, the future of professional services, the future of HR, transformational forces in business, global drivers of change, how smart businesses create the future, the future technology timeline, the future of travel and tourism, the future of airlines and airports and the future of education. If you would like to arrange a meeting with Rohit in one of these cities or are interested in arranging a presentation or workshop for your organisation, please contact rohit@fastfuture.com

Isn’t graphene fun?

I’ve just been checking up on progress on supercapacitors to see if they are up to the job of replacing car batteries yet. It looks like they will be soon. Supercapacitors have lower energy density than lithium batteries, but can be charged extremely quickly.

My favoured technique is to build mats into the road surface every 50 metres (i.e. same as streetlights), and to charge the supercapacitor bank using induction as the car passes over them. That means that even a small energy capacity would be adequate. It wouldn’t have to power the car for 100 miles or more like a battery, but only for the first and last few kilometres of a journey where there are no mats. Otherwise, range wouldn’t be limited as it would charge all the time on the trip.

However, a few minutes ago I had another little spark of enlightenment. Why not also use the pads for propulsion too, using a linear induction motor?  (I like those)

If the pad gives an impulse to the car as well as a capacitor recharge, then the capacitor won’t need to be as big. And if the impulse is gentle enough, passengers won’t feel a jolt every time they drive over one.

Another little insight, hardly worthy of the name, is that with trains of self driving pods, the pods could be so close together on most journeys that they effectively have a continuous circuit from one end of the train to the other. That means that public transport pods that are only used locally and on certain routes might be able to get by with tiny capacitor banks.

Culture tax and sustainable capitalism

I have written several times now about changing capitalism and democracy to make them suited to the 21st century. Regardless of party politics, most people want a future where nobody is too poor to live a dignified and comfortable life. To ensuring that that is possible, we need to tweak a few things.

I suggested a long time ago that there could be a basic income for all, without any means testing on it, so that everyone has an income at a level they can live on. No means testing means little admin. Then wages go on top, so that everyone is encouraged to work, and then all income from all sources is totalled and taxed appropriately. It is a nice idea. I wasn’t the first to recommend it and many others are saying much the same. The idea is old, but the figures are rarely discussed. It is harder than it sounds and being a nice idea doesn’t ensure  economic feasibility.

The difference between figures between parties would be relatively minor so let’s ignore party politics. In today’s money, it would be great if everyone could have, say, £30k a year as a state benefit, then earn whatever they can on top. 30k doesn’t make you rich, but you can live OK on it so nobody would be poor in any proper sense of the word. With everyone economically provided for and able to lead comfortable and dignified lives, it would be a utopia compared to today. Sadly, it doesn’t add up yet. 65,000,000 x 30,000 = 1,950Bn . The UK economy isn’t that big. The state only gets to control part of GDP and out of that reduced budget it also has its other costs of providing health, education, defence etc, so the amount that could be dished out to everyone on this basis is therefore a lot smaller than 30k. Even if the state takes 75% of GDP and spends most of it on the base allowance, 10k per person would be pushing it. So a family could afford a modest lifestyle, but single people would really struggle. Some people would need additional help, and that reduces the pool left to pay the basic allowance still further. Also, if the state takes 75% of GDP, only 25% is left for everything else, so salaries would be flat, reducing the incentive to work, while investment and entrepreneurial activity are starved of both resources and incentive.

Simple maths thus forces us to make compromises. Sharing resources reduces costs considerably. In a first revision, families might be given less for kids than for the adults, but what about groups of young adults sharing a big house? They may be adults but they also benefit from the same economy of shared resources. So maybe there should be a household limit, or a bedroom tax, or forms and means testing, and it mustn’t incentivise people living separately or house supply suffers. Anyway, it is already getting complicated and our original nice idea is in the bin. That’s why it is such a mess at the moment. There just isn’t enough money to make everyone comfortable without doing lots of allowances and testing and admin. We all want utopia, but we can’t afford it. Even the modest 30k-per-person utopia costs at least 3 times more than we can afford.

However, if we can get back to an average 2.5% growth per year in real terms, and surely we can, it would only take 45 years to get there. That isn’t such a long time. We have hope that if we can get some better government than we have had of late, and are prepared to live with a little economic tweaking, we could achieve good quality of life for all in the second half of the century.

So I really like the idea of a simple welfare system, providing a generous base level allowance to everyone, topped up by rewards of effort, but we will have to wait before we can afford to put that base level at anything like comfortable standards.

Meanwhile, we need to tweak some other things to have any chance of getting there. I’ve commented often that pure capitalism would eventually lead to a machine-based economy, with the machine owners having more and more of the cash, and everyone else getting poorer, so the system will fail. Communism fails too.

On the other hand, capitalism works fine when rewards are shared more equally, it fails when wealth concentration is too high or when incentive is too low. Preserving the incentive to work and create is a mainly matter of setting tax levels well. Making sure that wealth doesn’t get concentrated too much needs a new kind of tax.

The solution I suggest is a culture tax. Culture in the widest meaning.

When someone creates and builds a company, they don’t do so from a state of nothing. They currently take for granted all the accumulated knowledge and culture, trained workforce, access to infrastructure, machines, governance, administrative systems, markets, distribution systems and so on. They add just another tiny brick to what is already a huge and highly elaborate structure. They may invest heavily in their time and money but actually when  considered overall as part of the system their company inhabits, they only pay for a fraction of the things their company will use.

That accumulated knowledge, culture and infrastructure belongs to everyone, not just those who choose to use it. Businesses might consider that this is what they pay taxes for already, but that isn’t explicit in the current system.

The big businesses that are currently avoiding paying UK taxes by paying overseas companies for intellectual property rights could be seen as trailblazing this approach. If they can understand and even justify the idea of paying another part of their company for IP or a franchise, why not pay the host country for IP for access to their entire culture?

This kind of tax would provide the means needed to avoid too much concentration of wealth. A future  businessman might choose to use only software and machines instead of a human workforce to save costs, but levying taxes on use of  the cultural base that makes that possible allows a direct link between use of advanced technology and taxation. Sure, he might add a little extra insight or new knowledge, but would still have to pay the rest of society for access to its share of the cultural base, inherited from the previous generations, on which his company is based. The more he automates, the more sophisticated his use of the system, the more he cuts a human workforce out of his empire, the higher his taxation.

Linking to technology use makes sense. Future AI and robots could do a lot of work currently done by humans. A very small number of people could own almost all of the productive economy. But they would be getting far more than their share of the cultural base, which must belong equally to everyone. In a village where one farmer owns all the sheep, other villagers would be right to ask for rent for their share of the commons if he wants to graze them there.

I feel confident that this extra tax would solve many of the problems associated with automation. We all equally own the country, its culture, laws, language, human knowledge (apart from current patents, trademarks etc. of course), its public infrastructure, not just businessmen. Everyone surely should have the right to be paid if someone else uses part of their share.

The extra culture tax would not magically make the economy bigger. It would just ensure that it is more equally shared out. It is a useful tool to be used by future governments to make it possible to keep capitalism sustainable, preventing its collapse, preserving incentive while fairly distributing reward. Without such a tax, capitalism simply may not survive.