All businesses have costs, cost of labour, raw material, energy and the upfront cost of the machines or factories. When the cost is eliminated, the business can potentially give the produce away for free.

Free Ice Cream shows you how emerging AI [Artificial Intelligence] will make all factories fully automated, thus removing the labour cost; how the finished product of one factory becomes the raw material for the next downstream, thus removing raw material cost; how energy is just another output from a factory and can be made cost-free and how a bootstrap strategy of facilitating market investment in select industries delivers free machines for all industries, thus removing the upfront capital cost.

With the advent of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in almost all facets of life, experts estimate 20 to 30 million jobs will be lost by 2030. These are expected to come from a range of industries including manufacturing, logistics, finance, automotive, healthcare and so on.

If we don’t do anything different, the majority of the global population is likely be jobless in the foreseeable future. Many of us will be unemployable and will be classed as “useless”. Machines running on algorithms will deliver a more efficient and effective output at a fraction of the cost. So, what do we do? How do we live without a job and the associated income?

The best solution being proposed to counter this predicament is the wishful thinking that something else will come along. True, we have lost jobs in the past decades. Manufacturing jobs did migrate from developed countries to other places where labour was cheap. While this led to loss of jobs, other opportunities did emerge, and most people ended up being gainfully employed.

But it is less likely to happen today for one simple reason: Moore’s law.

From 1980s to today, the computing capacity has increased a million times, for the same price. Many of the tasks that required a human being earlier can and will be done by the more powerful computers of today, propelled by artificial intelligence. AI is here to stay, and the market will adopt this technology. In the near future, there is a very good chance that your job will be gone.

As a society, we are bobbing along in a canoe, in this tumultuous river of progress. We can hear impending automation as the roaring sound of the waterfall downstream. We know the waterfall is a potential killer. Some in the canoe are furiously trying to paddle back, trying to stop progress, close doors, stop trade, stop offshoring, go back to the pre-automation days. Others in the canoe are transfixed, like rabbits caught in headlights, waiting for the fall, hoping that something will come along and save them.

So, what is the solution?

Free Ice Cream addresses this issue head on. It shows the reader how to effectively navigate this issue and take care of the impacted people during this transition. Instead of trying to slow down this impending change, Free Ice Cream proposes that we accelerate automation, use that change to slingshot ourselves over this killer waterfall and safely land in the calm waters further downstream, the calm waters where we do not need a job, do not need that income, to live our lives.

Free Ice Cream shows the reader how the post-transition world can be glorious, once we slingshot over this predicament: a world where machines serve and take care of human material needs; a world where humans are relieved of mundane repetitive tasks; a world where we are able to utilize the collective brain power of 7 billion heads, relieved of mundane tasks, to discover and create new and amazing solutions.

Most people in the world live in poverty. Around 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day and two-thirds live on less than $10 per day. Overall, 10% of the population lives on less than $1.90 per day, defined as extreme poverty.

In our current economic model, poverty is defined as a dollar figure indicating one’s ability to consume, be it food, clothing, shelter or other needs. At $1.90 per day, a person is very limited on what they can purchase and consume.

By making everything free for everyone, Free Ice Cream breaks this nexus between material needs and the dollar. Each person is able to avail of all material needs including food, clothing and shelter for free, totally unrelated to their ability to make a dollar.

Free Ice Cream shows the way to end world hunger, a Utopian dream for humanity for ages. Free Ice Cream delivers this free economic paradigm where we are able to feed, clothe and satisfy the basic needs of every citizen in the world and end global poverty.

Poverty is currently defined as living on less than $1.90 per day. By making everything free for everyone, Free Ice Cream breaks the relationship between material and the dollar. The monetary basis becomes irrelevant when material things are made available for free.

On this basis, Free Ice Cream proposes transition from a money-based to an energy-based definition of poverty. Energy consumption is a good indicator of a person’s standard of living. The average citizen of a developed country consumes around 10,000 kWh of energy per year, per capita.

In the new free economy, Free Ice Cream shows the way to abundant clean, green, renewable energy generation. And with abundant energy generation under the new economy, Free Ice Cream envisages all of global population to be living to that ‘developed country’ standard, as a minimum. As such, Free Ice Cream proposes a new definition for poverty, as having not less than 10,000 kWh of energy consumption per year, per capita, globally.

Globally, the distribution of wealth has not been equal, across the population. While an average American income is around $85 per day, over 700 million people, around the world, live on less than $1.90 per day. In the US, the top 10% of households control 73% of the total wealth. Globally, the 26 richest people own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the population: over 3.5 billion people.

There are a range of material factors that promote economic inequality including food, clothing, shelter, access to good quality education, sanitation, healthcare and so on. Access to these factors depends on the geographical, social, filial and political environment that a person is born and lives in.

In the new economic paradigm, Free Ice Cream enables each and every global citizen to avail of all of these material factors for free, irrespective of their living environment. And by making sure all people have access to these factors, we effectively bring down the barriers of inequality and the negative influence of the same that holds people back from realizing their full potential.

Free Ice Cream shows us that we need to make energy free to make everything free for everyone. Interestingly, for the FrICE concept to work, we do not necessarily need clean, green, renewable energy, just free energy from any source. Strictly speaking, we could move into the new free economy on fossil fuels.

But Free Ice Cream clearly recognizes the looming disaster of climate change; any further dependency on fossil fuels and continued emission of greenhouse gases is a recipe for a global catastrophe. Free Ice Cream proposes that we transition to a clean, green, renewable energy model, generate it in abundance and make that energy free.

Further Free Ice Cream acknowledges that stopping further greenhouse gas emissions alone is not going to suffice in reversing the damage caused to-date. Free Ice Cream proposes methods to extract and sequester CO2 with the abundant clean, green, renewable energy.  Free Ice Cream further explores feed-based systems and methods to reduce methane emissions from cattle.

Note: There are a wide range of potential solutions being proposed globally to address and reverse the impact of climate change ranging from CCS, to geo-sequestration of CO2 through regenerative agriculture, to Thorium-based molten salt nuclear reactors generating clean energy, to shifting from animal protein to plant-based or cellular protein for human consumption and reducing methane emission. While Free Ice Cream may refer to a particular solution, there is no specific preference for that solution over others. Free Ice Cream makes the point that, with abundant free, clean, renewable energy, it is feasible to deliver any or all of these solutions to manage climate change.

So, we have implemented the new free economy, and everything is for free for everyone. The Utopian dream has been realized. Now what? What are people going to do? More to the point, why should anybody do anything when everything is for free.

With drudgery eliminated and people made time-free, Free Ice Cream proposes a structure for people to get creative, think different and bring about innovative solutions to the next generation of needs, wants and quests. A key input for that is a well-educated population with a range of interdisciplinary skills and expertise that promote creativity and innovation. And that calls for a new educational curriculum.

Our current education system trains students to function in a pyramid power structure preparing students to engage in a 19th-century industrial economy, taking orders and following procedures. With the advent of AI, such jobs will be done by computers.

As most of the issues and solutions in real life are multi-dimensional, Free Ice Cream proposes a new educational paradigm that promotes innovation through an ongoing education stream, incorporating a multi-disciplinary approach and based on the principle of collaborative knowledge gain.

If manufacturing is automated and machines deliver all that we need, where is the incentive for someone to make something new, a better product? Free Ice Cream proposes a system where we maintain status quo with new ideas; innovators are suitably rewarded by a time-limited free market system where the innovation transitions to public domain, thus making the product free for all, under suitably crafted intellectual property laws.

If everything is free, is there no more money involved in transactions in the future? In a free economy, is money redundant? Will there be other tools to peg value and enable transactions? On what basis do we value something as demand and supply both become irrelevant? What happens to banks, stock markets and the financial system? How do we track performance of countries? Will money-based GDP be a relevant metric? Free Ice Cream raises these questions.

In a free economy, with no monetary transactions to track transfer of custodianship, how do we trace the material movement? How do we know who has custody of a material thing at a given time? Who is responsible for the safe disposal or recycling of that material?

Free Ice Cream proposes a system of material transaction information captured in and managed through blockchain registers to enforce integrity, transparency and compliance of transactions and associated accountabilities.

The key issues for recycling are material pollution due to synthetics and the issue of finite resources. We need to recycle synthetics and stop the pollution; that is a given. Metal deposits, which may potentially run out, are also finite, limited and eminently recyclable. It would be irresponsible of us, as a society, to not recycle material, where possible.

In Free Ice Cream, recycling is viewed as the final step in a production process that occurs at end of life of the asset; we produce, we use and we recycle. Free Ice Cream proposes systems and technology including embedded sensors, coding and blockchain registers to track material movement, enforce  accountabilities and effectively recycle material in the new free economy.