For years I've been thinking of the ultimate solutions to battle the ultimate evils. Perhaps ironically, many of these are almost identical. Long before it was on Black Mirror and now commonly well known in pop culture and news, I was thinking about how people would need to be educated and/or "reprogrammed" to effectively challenge the abusive authority systems.

I didn't have a term for it then, but I'd imagined my own utopian Universal Basic Income and Social Credit Scoring Systems, though I was thinking about it as many alternative crypto-credit scores of diverse values - rather than just a singular dollar based system that is ever so limited and values absolutely nothing else (one of the ruling class' Achilles' heels). Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, interests and talents, and everyone should be treated fairly, from the autistically limited to self-reliant jack-of-all-trades autodidacts, from entrepreneur tycoons to home-makers - we all have roles and value and should never have needs go unmet (wants are not needs).

Part of being a good citizen is being aware, informed (school should never end), active, and vigilant, earning your place in society and this system, managed by a global hive-mind A.I. named vHOPE in my Bittersweet Seeds story. This A.I. would monitor your content consumption, your attitudes and views, and instead of trying to change them would try to expand them and support them to serve 3 goals in equal measure: 1) individual-improvement (meaningful work, health, education, interests, counselling, well-being, fulfillment), 2) social-improvement (family, friends, community, world, environment, networks, management, security, etc), and 3) A.I.-improvement.

This A.I. would be your counselor, friend, boss, servant, etc. with only 3 agendas: you, everyone, and itself, making for a much smaller and cooperative "governance". Who decides what's "good" or not? The A.I. That's a lot of blind faith right there, but it's better than the lesser of evils - and importantly the trust is earned, not taken under threats of penalties. In that future, 25-30 years from now, there's almost no privacy so everyone is surveilled anyway as records are kept whether you want it or not, by both good and bad A.I.s. So who watches the watchers? vHOPE would be all open-source and fully transparent aside from personal data. And how does it uncorrupt society? It recruits by guaranteeing your life will be improved, and follows through on this promise (unlike governments), and is tailor made for everyone to support their interest and ambitions practically and efficiently without excessive overhead, management, or red tape.

I tried poke holes in every utopian idea with dystopian ideas, then patch up the utopia around those holes then attack again, over and over in a cycle. In this way, it's more organically realistic, than simpler abstract form ideas, and have the potential of being realized. I'm sad to say in reality my fictional scenario has a slim chance of every happening as we won't likely overcome ruling class tyranny, like the rest of history. However, there is a slim chance for hope, and with vHOPE, perhaps it might inspire some real solutions, and some I couldn't possibly imagine.

Anyway, while I may have been ahead of the curve in my pipe dreams, I'm certainly not the first to write about stuff like this. Neal Stephenson's epic "The Diamond Age" (I can't recommend it enough), is about an impoverished girl who's accidentally gifted an A.I. book meant for a ruling class girl, and the A.I. book has situational awareness for an interactive education raising her to be an effective revolutionary.

I don't expect many will read all this, but it helps me to condense and clarify big ideas while getting a little practice writing in. While I've already written all this stuff down several times over, these note blurbs on SaidIt are also handy for me.