I remember when I watched the Zeitgeist documentaries and had my first contact with this 'resource based" society. Weeks later I had dinner with a friend who was a director in a Spanish consulting firm specialized in the banking sector. I tried to impress him with what I had seen in the documentary. In the end, it was like having an atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions.
I remember speaking with Jacque in Miami at one of his lectures. He was a very honest and sincere man (but not to the point of trying to demean you to get his point across).<p>He will be missed.<p>Roxanne Meadows penned a lovely open letter concerning this: <a href="https://www.thevenusproject.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thevenusproject.com/</a><p>Their vision and ideology is an interesting one, but may take a few hundred years before viable for implementation. Too many growing pains still involved in earth culture.
I think as a whole his vision is little too "non organic". I don't think society can be planned to the degree he wished. However disassembled there were some solid ideas, many of which are becoming realities today. He represents one of my favorite parts of the 50's and 60's. Which struck me as a time where people imagined that it was totally possible to just upend society, and rebuild it in a better way. The level of optimism where if you can accomplish only 20% of the vision, you've done something significant.
"if property rights were respected by all, “humanity would become fantastically wealthy.”"<p>This comment by Robert Murphy is a weird non sequitur apropos of not much in the article. If property rights are respected by all, some small fraction of humanity will indeed become fantastically wealthy, but the vast majority would be on the tail end of a very thinly tailed distribution as humans become worthless for production - leading to quite a bit of aggregate unhappiness.
I've met his followers in Berlin once, "naive" - the best word I can find to describe them. In the end, they struggled to answer the core question: "Why would anyone take seriously a man, who can't prove his idea in a lean way?".
Please, build a city where everyone is happy and everything is handled by the machines, show the rest of the world you're right!
Reminds me of wantrepreneurs who can't scrape together 10k to build an MVP for their startup idea. If you can't find money to build a prototype, then no sane investor should trust you.
He always reminded me of fellow utopian Paolo Soleri (who died in 2013) -- even though their ideas were impractical (at least in the short term), we really need dreamers like them to make people question whether current society is really as good as we can hope for.
STAR TREK<p>Gene Roddenberry was inspired by Fresco's ideas. A world where people could focus on personal development and nobody would have to be in this rat race anymore, enabling a higher standard of living for all people.<p>Jacque was a great visionary, inventor and systems thinker - he will be missed.<p>You should watch his documentary Future by Design [0]. He was talking about 3D printed houses, holistic transportation systems, smart cities, etc<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk</a>
This is a true loss for the world. Although his revolutionary ideas were IMHO by times a little over the edge, he envisioned and fought for a world without poverty and war, where earth's resources are not being depleted by hunger for money and power; A resource based economy.<p>Thank you Jaques Fresco for opening my eyes to this and RIP.
This guy basically reinvented communism and gave it a fancy name and apparently city designs. What's so special about this, honestly?<p>I'm all for more people supporting socialism (even under a weird name), but I never understood the point...
Marginal unit cost of production moving closer to zero, the sharing economy, AI replacing human labor, descentralized crypto-currencies, universal minimun income, autonomous transportation, clean energy, space travel.<p>Fresco was right on the mark.<p>RIP wise man.
Far more interesting (to me) than a specific Venus project concept art was Jacques Fresco interviews and stories about his life. I once sent them to Noam Chomsky to listen as a fellow elderly guy and child of the Depression from a different perspective.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U</a>
Once you realize politicians do an actual hard job running things by using deception, and when you realize money is just a tool we use to measure what goes where with accounting, then you realize we use money because even the best ideas don't work because humans are natural competitors. Money is not about corruption or running numbers, it's about counting sheeps in a complex human society. That's it. Currency is not bad in itself, it's just that the world is so large, and since it's not possible to organize such a large place, we use currency so that things self-regulate. People are already trying to not use money, and have more simple lives, but everyone realizes that we all are feet deep into our sweet comforts and we can't let it go.<p>It's great to have ideas, it's another to execute them. I felt a little more interested by what kind of city Fresco was proposing, and all the architectural details, than the leap of faith into less poverty and less war. By all means, if you have ideas to reduce poverty in any place in the world, and reduce conflict in Syria, I'm sure the UN and most western governments want to hear about what you want to say.<p>It's time to let the ideology go, and work on more fine-detailed, feasible objectives. Local politics or organizing a neighborhood seems much more realistic to me, than building new cities from scratch.
It's interesting to note that Jacque, while definitely a little out there on execution, has been warning us about the effects of automation for 50 years. His proposed solution of a planned economy will not work, but his vision of what the future will look like when we have robotics and automation as the main future forces of economy are spot on.<p>He also envisioned centralized (and distributed) computing and governmental computing systems, something that will have widespread implementation within the next half century.
RIP Fresco. I really like him and his work. But I never understood why he was convinced about the Resource Based Economy. Shouldn't a RBE have the exact same problems as any Central Planned economy? Wasn't this refuted in 1920 by Mises? <a href="https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation%20in%20the%20Socialist%20Commonwealth_Vol_2_3.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation...</a>
While Mr. Fresco idea seems very reasonable, I think his mistake is attributing altruistic traits to everyone. Not everyone is altruistic. If there's a computer system governing everything, there will be a strong incentive to build bias into it, or use for mass surveillance or even tyranny. Then, there are aspects in which radial cities would not be good:<p>- Epidemiology: you have everyone in this nice dome sharing objects. But one of them has a serious infectious disease. Now the entire population is at risk.<p>- Defense: An adversarial force including but not limited to extremists would just target the center dome, a place accessible by everyone.<p>You could argue that everyone would have what they need because of this egalitarian system, and there would be no violence. But take a look at communist countries and see what happens in practice.<p>However, it is true though that we are very inefficient and wasteful in terms of how resources are used.
Jacque will be missed. Fantastic communication, patience and ideas. I actually wrote Jacque in once as my vote for president as well as donated to the Venus Project.<p>This should be front page news, good to hear it at least is on HN and NYT.<p>He has said in the past he didn't think our current society would make it to his ideas in his lifetime and that it may take a 100 years or so. He knew he was playing the long game and was laying the ground work for society many years out. A true visionary unbound by the scars of modern civilization.<p>Jacque (and Roxanne) have deeply affected my life and direction. I will continue to strive towards the ideas brought forth by them.
While I really thought that Venus Project ideas was interesting but a little bit naive, there is something going on with cryptocurrencies. They can save us from eternal deflation of our money as the Zeitgeist documental expose. That means that our central banking system (in every country) would have troubles trying to produce more money over thin air (causing inflation). An inversion of control could happen here. Who knows.
>>Robert Murphy, an associate scholar at the Mises Institute, which promotes the teaching of Austrian economics, wrote in 2010 that idealists like Mr. Fresco were “wrong to blame our current dysfunctional world on capitalism or money per se.” Instead, Mr. Murphy wrote, if property rights were respected by all, “humanity would become fantastically wealthy.”<p>I read this sort of claim by the 'serious and sober' and realize they're even more gassed up than the 'idealists.'
I think society values good intention way too much. This man fought his entire life for what amounts to Marxism with robots. His intentions may have been good, his heart in the right place, but his ideas were bad, and if implemented, they would be disastrous.<p>If we judge him by his intentions, he was a good man. If we judge him by what he wished upon the world, he was a horrible human being. Though we should keep good intentions in mind, I strongly believe that we should also judge the outcome of what people are proposing.
the fire consumes all the fuel that it receives.<p>Although his concepts look nice on paper I dont understand what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially. And then we are back to the same problem we have now.
When I was about 14 or 15 my first exposure to different schools of social organisation was Fresco, I found him through the Zeitgeist documentary (which I was foolish enough to believe in conspiracies with). I then looked at the Venus project and various of his videos and interviews on Youtube. He seemed like a great man, and although I think his ideas didn't put much into action, I really admired them. For the past 8 years or so he had passed out of my mind, I barely thought of the Venus Project, and it was surprising and saddening to read this news.<p>RIP Fresco.
You mean someone who understands the complexities of the markets and the financial system wasn't convinced by Marxism with robots? I can't imagine why.