Automated “Government” Transactions
Filed under: economy
Most people have some type of experience with automated payments. About ten years or so ago, I remember people starting to talk about direct-deposit of paychecks, and I bet a lot of people get this by now. Many banking and financial services institutions also offer automated bill payment. You can set up your bank account or credit account to pay bills automatically. There are a bunch of “banking 2.0″ companies trying to streamline the process: Making the web into a banking platform.
Another interesting thing happened to me the other day, where I went to send a FedEx package and payed with credit card, and they didn’t ask me to sign. Just like many places (e.g. Starbucks) won’t require you to sign if your purchase is below a certain amount, FedEx also allows you to forgo signing, but for any amount.
What would prevent everything from being automated? Assuming one had enough income coming in, one could setup all services to be paid automatically, and whatever mechanism is used to pay, can be paid by another mechanism. You could walk in to a store, pick something up, and walk out.
The key to this happening is proper notification and threshold management. Credit cards do a pretty good job of notifying people in the case of fraud, but that is only a small part of what is necessary. Strict rules need to be applied as far as setting up automated payments, discontinuing after a certain period of inactivity, and more.
Instead, what we have now is a mishmash of different institutions, each with its own login and policy regarding notification. Why can’t I have a bunch of popups that says “Pay bill?”, and click yes ten times, and be done with it? Then, I can set rules, such as after a certain number of notifications (perhaps after first signing up for a service), it becomes automated, and then just presents the most important ones.
What is strange about this, is that whatever that system is, starts to look like a government entity. However, it’s not particularly clear what form of government (socialism, capitalism, etc.). Someone could lead life subscribing to a bunch of services by different groups and organizations, a “bundle” of public works coordinated by geolocation, and enterprises. Everything beyond basic services would be investment, and it’s just a matter of what kind of investment in what type of enterprise bearing what attributes.
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 0 people and commented on 0 times showPosted on April 8th, 2008 by David Thomson
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