When computers and robots advance enough, legacy governance will look awkwardly quaint. If they can build almost everything, why can't residents submit proposals, vote on them, and have them built? Instead of years of theater, projects can be completed in days. Want a high-speed railway? It costs X joules and hours to construct and Y joules per day to operate, with options A, B, and C. The full blueprint is attached for verification. No endless fake tax-raising campaign to fund something that does not exist. You pay with the electricity bill. No additional income or property taxes. Obviously, places with cheap electricity would have more build-out than places that don’t. Once started, every agent can access the real-time status. It may seem like fantasy, but the technology is almost there.

In Iain M. Banks's books, the Culture solves envy—a crux of humanity—by letting every citizen experience what they have not yet via tremendous compute (a world where citizens have no token limit). Citizens quickly realize envy is pointless, as different life experiences mix good and bad; the grass of others is not any greener.

In Ian Banks' Culture books, the Culture is a civilization of compute abundance. Each General System Vehicle is a loose sandbox environment practicing different ideologies, and citizens freely move between ships to experience different lifestyles. Want communal life? There's a ship. Ultra-orthodox religion? Another. Beach chilling? One famous for its beaches. With enormous compute, you don't need to trade off who decides the trajectories. Just launch another docker station for another rollout. In that world, your autonomy is backed by the compute.

Money is better earned than given. Giving kids a free allowance versus making them earn it through chores—dishwashing, clearing the table, taking out the trash, or mowing the lawn—shapes their understanding of rewards. The former, once grown, would be more likely to believe money is theirs to take; the latter would be more likely to respect others’ property and the effort to earn it. Stochastically, we could observe similar behaviors in reinforcement learning. After all, our world is not that different from a sandboxed simulation.

It's exceedingly rare for people to dedicate their lives to creating something both affordable and beautiful. Those prioritizing affordability see beauty as eroding their margins, while those prioritizing beauty aim to maintain its exclusivity. Those who seize it rarely redistribute it. In the Paris Commune of 1871, left-wing revolutionaries toppled the Vendôme Column and burned public buildings rather than opening the city’s existing beauty and craft to wider use. During the French Revolution, radical factions dismantled churches and melted down royal silver and artworks, not to spread refinement but to erase it. The result was not wider access but the deliberate elimination of beauty itself, leaving luxury—if any remained—only for those who held power.

Humans are born with an innate world model: an evolutionary prior shaped by genetics and biology that scaffolds perception, prediction, and action. This model updates continuously through experience, especially rewards that reinforce or extinguish beliefs, behaviors, and interpretations. Though all beings share the same physical universe, each has a distinct world model. Differences in genetics, development, culture, and personal rewards create divergent ways of seeing, predicting, and acting. What one treats as obvious, another may see as invisible or false—not because the world differs, but because their models do.

The world increasingly depends on its most productive people. If they stopped producing at that level, the drop in quality would be immediate and unmistakable. Too often, we grow numb to mediocre work and accept it as normal, never realizing how much higher the quality of life could be if we simply let productive people stay productive.