Last week's post looked at how employment might actually change. The TL;DR is that while people should be able to survive without work, it will be basic survival. There will still be an incentive for people to work and companies to employ them.
This week I want to mentally explore how UBI might actually work from a back office stand point. How does the government ensure that the right people get the right amount? What existing and/or emerging technologies might be use to make it happen? Read on...
D-Cash and D-Hash
Right off the bat, I am gong to make the assumption that the world has moved to a digital currency. A crypto-currency in the current parlance. Even with the dollar, we're half way there already. Most of our transactions are done by agreeing to transfer money without actually handling money: be it through credit card or EBT or PayPal or whatever. The difference between that digital form of a physical currency and a crypto-currency is two fold.
First, Bitcoin and its ilk are usually not backed by a government. For my fiction, I'm throwing that part out. While I agree that there is a place for non-governmental mediums of exchange, I do not think that it works when the government is the institution handing out the basic income. Maybe that's the wrong choice and everyone should join a crypto-currency that hands out it's own income, but that's too far down the rabbit hole for me.
The other major difference between traditional currencies and crypto-currencies are how the ledger of transactions are kept. Instead of large institutions recording them and centralizing their databases, these newer currencies distribute that ledger to everyone who owns some of the currency. At least, that's the idea. The reality is a bit more complex, but suffice to say that there is no central database to hack. That there are multiple records of every transaction and that they all have to agree for a new transaction to take place. This makes the whole system much more secure. These ledgers are being called Smart Contracts (Bitcoin's is Blockchain), and newer versions of them are being used to manage much more than mere monetary transactions. Shipping manifests and locations, time-bound contract requirements and their ilk can all be built into these automated ledgers.
Currently, in my writing, the currency is called D-Cash (for, shockingly, Digital Cash) and it is backed by the Identity Hash (D-Hash) Smart Contract.
Identity Verification
The reason that I chose to call the Smart Contract D-Hash is that identity verification becomes a big part of this. Who has what amount and spent it where and when on what is part of this ledger system. It is all recorded. In a very real sense an individual and their ledger are the same thing in the eyes of the government.
This means that there needs to be something like a national ID. I've written about this and recognize that this is a big step towards dictatorship and other privacy intrusive measures. But in the world that I'm writing about, those are the prices that people pay for a guaranteed income, whether they work or not.
So what is a secure means of identification? The system that I'm dreaming up involves a palm-embedded chip (imaginatively called E-Palm) that is placed under the skin of the left hand palm. This then uses a second verification through bio-metrics. In the novel, this is a fingerprint, but if it were to be implemented IRL, then it might be the end user's choice of biological ID: retina, a random fingerprint, DNA. I chose to make my novel system less complex because I need some holes to work the plot through. However, even in the simpler novel system, the bio part also needs to be verified by things like a pulse to prove that the chip was in the palm of a living person.
Holes
Is this perfect? Absolutely not. If I can't find holes in it, then there isn't room for conflict within this system, so there have to be ways to criminalize it. That's next week's topic.
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