# The Future of Stuff (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [239], part 2 of 3. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Book), 2020 (book imprint), https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Moral and economic case for the contracting layer: honest information about goods, which Mattereum supplies.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Cyberpunk (1984): The 1980s cyberpunk culture that came first; first computer a ZX81 in 1982.
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things.
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: contracts / companies / value (29%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (21%); Rural poverty & development infrastructure (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: The Future of Stuff (5 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); Future of Stuff (5 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); right to know (3 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); consumerism (4 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Gandhi (7 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); agro-industrial (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); coronavirus (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); automated morality (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); recycling (2 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); ecocide (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): coronavirus
- Importance: core-text score 0.71 (1.00 is the top), number 29 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [793] [COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md): same career work: The Future of Stuff
  - [562] [Vinay Gupta at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015 (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/562.md): same career work: Cyberpunk
- On the same works, just before: [253] [Goldsmiths talk on life extension and fluid language (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/253.md); [777] [CCForum London 2019/Vinay Gupta. Blockhain and the... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/777.md); [718] Conversations #5 - Vinay Gupta (2019)
- On the same works, just after: [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md); [760] [Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md); [771] [Vinay Gupta talks about Myths and Fears (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/771.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: The Future of Stuff, document, 2020, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [239], https://guptaoption.com/texts/239.md.

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[p. 35 to 36](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) We lay our hands on the raw matter that fell from the skies, and we use it to carry information. The tools of the hunt and the field carry our DNA by helping us survive and reproduce, just as oil paint carries our dreams. Biology and culture, winding around each other down through time for millions of years. What makes the stuff important to us is its ability to modulate and carry the signal. And the signal? The signal is life itself. Life is replicating information. Instinct and Desire: I want that! Desire is the most primal interaction we have with our environment, and therefore our stuff. Back at the start, before life was people, our ancestors flowed along chemical gradients towards life and light, towards sustenance and opportunity. What those creatures wanted was good for life, because only the ones who felt desire for what was good for them survived. And so life exists, and life goes on. Now compare this to our modern experience. Cunning minds on the other side of the world guess what we want for a living, and commit the kind of resources which could have built a university campus to building factories and designs for that consumer product they imagine we want. I’m writing this book on just such a device: silicon and aluminium, the bitten apple and, below it in the operating system, a dull reflection of Richard Stallman’s dreams. You may not have heard of Richard Stallman. It is my considered opinion that he will be remembered far longer than Gandhi, and I’m quite a fan of Gandhi. Stallman is an American computer programmer, and the elder statesman/ embarrassing uncle of the Free Software movement. I cannot explain in detail Stallman’s philosophical struggle, but we can talk about what came from it: hundreds of billions of dollars of assets, in the form of software and information repositories including Wikipedia, which are available without any payment, and with legally guaranteed rights for users, all over the world. Linux, Android and the Macintosh OS itself are all built on Free Software, or its dilution, Open Source. This movement is one of the most successful examples of mass collaboration in human history. However, Stallman is a personal hero really only to those who write software for a living: an industry-specific hero. But the fundamental reason that anything is Free on the Internet is Richard Stallman. Stallman figured out that our future cognitive and political freedom depended on our ability to control the software that manages our lives. That process has been partially successful: many high-quality zero-cost applications and operating systems which respect the rights of their users now exist, even as behemoths like Facebook, Amazon and Google have tried to

[p. 37 to 38](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) claw back control of user data. The struggle continues, and the tactics change with each new generation of technology. All these computer systems are packed with information, the spectacular information density of the microprocessor, and the vast information system that manages to keep this document entirely safe as I type it, every character immediately backed up on the Internet’s largest machine, the great cluster in which all our email is stored, which gives us search. The pattern of information is so powerful, the capability is so powerful, that most of us use it every single day with as little thought as we give the workings of our socks. And yet, to see what makes that machine work is to see a scale so far beyond the human, the pastoral, our ancestral villages. A single global machine which knows and tells, that sings and gives us stories, that we would miss every day more than fire. We are a long way from home, humans. We are far, far from our roots. But is the fundamental impulse that we feel when we see beautiful stuff, this I want that!, any different from those early single-celled organisms climbing up the chemical gradient towards life? Is the thing that makes me want things different from the thing which made them want things? Well, we’re all just made of cells, right? And cells want stuff that makes them happy, and that started out as sunlight to make sugars, and wound up with Coach handbags. We are just assemblages of those tiny primal life shapes, those cells, in the same way that we are just assemblages of atoms and forces. It’s all bedrocked on this same fundamental desire. To life! Think about the last thing you bought because you just wanted it. The last thing that had that immediate, primal sense of desire. This is beautiful, this is good, this is right, this belongs with me, this should belong to me, this must be mine. Sunlight to make sugar, that desire filtered by the aeons, into this. Now, here’s the question: go back 50,000 years. Could your ancestors even recognise what this thing that you want is?! I got a pretty cool high-tech blanket when I was in America just before the coronavirus hit. I bet my ancestors could figure out what that is for. But the next thing I bought after that, a flexible tripod, is not something a cave-dweller could relate to at all, except as a lousy club. So somehow we have spun up an enormous edifice which takes these basic chemical imperatives to preserve and duplicate information in genes, and it has given rise to abstract needs and infinitely complex culture. We are running up some strange exponential ramp, but to where, and why? Cells like energy. Sugar is energy. DNA wants to replicate, because the DNA which didn’t want to replicate is not here too much any more, and DNA needs energy to replicate. Desire is biology, and shopping is metabolism.

[p. 38](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) given rise to abstract needs and infinitely complex culture. We are running up some strange exponential ramp, but to where, and why? Cells like energy. Sugar is energy. DNA wants to replicate, because the DNA which didn’t want to replicate is not here too much any more, and DNA needs energy to replicate. Desire is biology, and shopping is metabolism. But somewhere here we have created a machine, a vast apparatus, which takes these relatively simple desires and makes Fabergé eggs. What’s going on? This isn’t a neutral question in an easy

[p. 39 to 40](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) time to be alive. This virus we call consumerism is wrecking our world by threatening those fundamental biological processes. Consumerism in no way drives life or creates life, but in fact poisons our lives and the planet itself: it’s almost like a cultural cancer or an auto-immune disorder. All these things we make which do not give life or give satisfaction to life, the things which clutter and consume us as much as we consume them: how did we wind up surrounded by these parasites? Someone sold us to them, in the act of selling them to us. And it is not that I am against things or beauty, but if we are to think about the future of stuff, we must have a wizard’s eye for the present. Nobody is going to tell us how the cage we are in was constructed, unless they too wish to escape. I want that, but, really, did I want this? The world has become cluttered with things which are neither useful nor beautiful, and we don’t seem able to stop buying them. What junk food does to bodies this new consumerism does to hearts, minds, souls and wallets. In a sense, modern overconsumption is as evil as tobacco: an addiction with huge lifedestroying externalities like credit card debt. This giant information machine on which I type this message to you, it also watches me type and tries to sell me the things that I write about! It’s the price I pay for instant backup to the cloud of every character as I write it. It would literally take a cosmic event for me to lose one character of this text. ‘Life is information’ and, well... what is more appealing to the mind than the backup? Information which will never be lost, permanence, eternal truth, security against forgetting: information loves to be durable. Risk management penetrates every layer of our minds. And yet, the externalities of feeding this addiction we all have to stuff are horrendous. That addiction fills the landfills and sweatshops of the world every single day, making things we do not really want or need, and crowding out the real needs in imagined ones on a truly epic scale. Right now, I’m writing at the start of the 2020 coronavirus epidemic. I can walk across the street to the Tottenham Hale Retail Park and find 20,000 shirts and jackets, and junk food in every possible permutation. But not a single face mask. Fake needs and real needs are competing for space in those stores, and in our minds, and the confusion between the two is as toxic as crude oil. Reification of Symbols Pooh Bear wants honey. We’ll forget, for the moment, the struggle of the worker bees, seen only as little black dots around his honey-addled head. Focus on the symbol: what Pooh Bear wants, this primal seed of desire. The roly-poly little fellow wants honey! It is inborn: Pooh is a Bear, and Bears want Honey!

[p. 41 to 42](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) We, of course, see Pooh’s Honey as a symbol, because we are not storybook bears, but humans. And if there is one thing humans love it is symbols, perhaps as much as bears love honey. To us, Pooh’s life is a story about desire, about avarice, about foolishness (at times), and always, of course, about friendship. But a version of Pooh Bear that does not want honey is barely Pooh Bear. Desire defines him. We all have our Honey. It is apparently the nature of life to want things. Plants want sun, because sun is sugar, and sugar is energy, and energy is needed to store and duplicate information. The bees store the honey to live! To a bee, honey is liquid summer, the light and heat of the long days, stored up in the hive away from the coldness of winter and the night. So Pooh Bear desires a thing which is precious indeed! But where in this story does the $35,000 handbag emerge as a thing that a person looks at and says, I want that! How did our primal, metaphysical need to store and replicate information – the core function which makes us alive – become so damn abstracted? The truth is, nobody wants a handbag that expensive to carry their keys, lipstick and Glock 42. What people want is to be desired, to be respected, to show they have attained a social standing in which the biological needs of their distant descendants are likely to be met – to show, in short, that they have won the biological game so completely that they can spend the labour of a year for an ordinary worker to make things with no immediate survival value. The tail of the peacock is there to show potential mates that the peacock is alert, agile and aggressive enough to manage in the world with so much of its energy manifested as beauty, as wonder, as, indeed, biological art. The individual peacock may not consciously make art in the same way a person does, but the peacock genes make art as surely as Michelangelo. The $35,000 handbag is a staff of office. I can’t tell you the purposes of such instruments – I understand the lives of the women (and the few men) that wield such instruments about as well as I understand the lives of bees. But I can say this: the handbag says unambiguously, ‘I can afford this,’ and that opens up a lot of doors! In an expensive venue, it says, ‘I am a guest and a customer,’ not a rubbernecking lowlife to be hustled out of the store. In some cultures it says, ‘You will treat me well, or there will be real consequences.’ And everywhere it says, ‘I don’t need you for your money, Honey.’ Wealth is to humans what honey is to bees – liquid summer – although we seem to have become weirdly addicted to the stuff. Can you imagine bees with swimming pools full of

[p. 42](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) some cultures it says, ‘You will treat me well, or there will be real consequences.’ And everywhere it says, ‘I don’t need you for your money, Honey.’ Wealth is to humans what honey is to bees – liquid summer – although we seem to have become weirdly addicted to the stuff. Can you imagine bees with swimming pools full of honey, enormous reserves the size of beaver dams? That does not seem to be the way bees think. Why is it the way we think? Compare the collectors of classic cars against the nomads of Mongolia, or ask how much yacht is enough yacht?

[p. 43](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) It’s all stored life. It’s all capital. The tears of the sun, gold. One principle, one story, one symbol – at the heart of things, hot, energetic, fiery, valuable, filled with potential. Liquid summer. The light of the sun! It’s all in pursuit of life, but the cultural feedback loops of our strange game of civilisations have left our poor ape brains addled as people and machines teach us to want what we don’t need, because, where we are now, wanting what we don’t need is part of the game that gets us to the higher strata of society. When I went from academia to the periphery of the City of London, I bought a watch. Nothing fancy, and nothing new. I’m Scottish working class, albeit a Hindu hybrid with strong monastic tendencies. I was not going for the Rolex: that’s a car on your wrist. But once I had that watch, and a pair of shoes and a suit to match, and lost the beard and a few other things, something changed. Suddenly I was a person of the City. I was somebody who had done something worthy of notice before, but I was not noticed because I did not have the trappings. The symbols of the office were required before I could be recognised as a very junior part of the City of London scene. Symbols are socially real. In a world with strict environmental limits, this fact is our nemesis. Our peacock tails reach to every nook and cranny of the earth, making the display.

[p. 44 to 45](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) SECTION TWO: DESIRE AND DESTINY If we have a role in the future as human beings, we must learn to desire in a way which is compatible with the story of our species continuing far into the future. If we cannot want what is biologically good for us, maybe robots will ‘read’ this book as they assimilate the human cultural archives on their way to the stars. Right now we do not have that framework. In fact, we are heavily restricted in our ability to see our way to a biologically sustainable future because of overconsumption. It’s that simple: we want the wrong things and we satisfy those desires at the cost of our core biological agendas around staying alive and keeping our genes in the world after us (either directly or not). How are we to survive and prosper through this? How are we to overcome the limits that evolution has left us, in willpower, in perspicacity, in cognition, fundamentally in mastery? How are we to get on top of this avalanche of problems unleashed by building the industrial society which feeds us all (well, many of us) and could feed the rest, if we could just organise it a little better? I have an answer: we are going to automate morality. Machines that Work for Us Versus Machines that Work on Us Machines made this mess. Very literally, industrial mass production made this mess: we can make more than we need, and we take more than we need, and the result is chaos and biological damage to our bodies and to the world. Consider our worst offender, the car. The car hasn’t actually had to be made of two tons of steel for safety reasons for several decades, but we are trapped by the slowness with which regulation catches up with new technology. We massively overbuild heavy steel cars because using modern lightweight materials is a regulatory nightmare. But while this situation continues, every mile driven makes it less likely that your great grandkids will ever see grass. What kind of crazy monkey gets caught in such a trap? The answer is very simple: a monkey ruled by bad machines, not by people. To all intents and purposes the things are in charge of us. This fear is manifested in popular culture as the fear of artificial intelligence, the feeling that in some way the robots of the mind are going to overwhelm us and destroy our ability to determine our own destiny. The argument is often made that corporations and governments are actually examples of such artificial intelligences, but with individual human beings as the computing nodes on which these metastable systems impose their preternatural wills on

[p. 46 to 47](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) reality. In short, some people see a corporation as a machine made of people, operating software which is made of corporate law, contracts and abstract principles like ‘shareholder interests’. A government, or a nation state, or a religion, is so far divorced from the lifespan of a single human and that human’s needs that they are basically a force of ‘nature’ if not actually a machine. These cultural heritage patterns have strength and stability so far beyond human will and human purpose that they may as well be rivers, snaking their way through time, carrying us all with them and, occasionally, flooding into wars and destroying everything around them. How, then, are we to take back control of this situation? The answer is simple: we are going to make machines that work for the best in us rather than working on the worst of us. Go back to advertising for just a minute. Beer, like most things being mainly advertised to men, is usually advertised by associating it with conventionally attractive women. And so are cars, and sports gear, and most other things which are being sold to men. It’s either attractive women, high social status among other men, or huge wide-open vistas of unoccupied nature – land. The biological message is clear: you’ll have lots of kids, people will respect you and your many kids will populate the landscape long after you are gone. Life is good, we’ve got all that we need and everybody thinks you are great! I can’t pretend to fully understand how products are sold to women, but it seems to involve a lot of seriously overdressed, really skinny tall girls laughing while they eat salad in expensive-looking venues. Who wouldn’t want such lives? But I don’t think there’s a product I can buy which will deliver them to you or me. The advertisement simply attempts to make a false association between that which is biologically successful and that which is sold. A very simple play is being made to build a false association between some stuff and basic biological drives, and this kind of adversarial programming of humans is increasingly being done with artificial intelligence techniques: Internet advertising is A/B-tested, multiple versions of the advertisements shown to different demographic clusters extracted using pervasive monitoring, processed using fabulous algorithms, until the adverts with the highest financial return become those we see all around us. You buy nappies, you’re going to see kids’ stuff on every web page you visit which has advertising on it for the next six months. But these things also try to crawl inside your soul. These AIs are being trained to do whatever is most profitable: to condition you into buying things you do not really want or need, simply because it happens to be profitable. There is no notion of meaning, of purpose, of semantics in these algorithms: they are the dumbest form of predatory desire, given cunning but no wit. What chance does an ordinary – or even an

[p. 47](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) do whatever is most profitable: to condition you into buying things you do not really want or need, simply because it happens to be profitable. There is no notion of meaning, of purpose, of semantics in these algorithms: they are the dumbest form of predatory desire, given cunning but no wit. What chance does an ordinary – or even an extraordinary – human being have against

[p. 48 to 49](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) pervasive monitoring and vast statistical shaping of their needs, wants, desires and behaviour by an all-pervasive amoral monitoring network? Who can remain free under such pressure? If we did this to animals, we would call it training. We are being trained to jump through arbitrary consumption hoops with the promise of future treats, and those future treats only need to be delivered long enough for the habits to be ingrained. We must send a machine to fight this machine. What Can Defend Us from Imaginary Needs? The most subversive thing we can do is to know what is good for us. This applies to everything: health, mental wellbeing, clothes, work, art, music – to have your own taste and knowledge of your own needs is revolutionary in a society which thrives on mass production coupled to targeted advertising. And, while many individuals may converge on a love of the same thing, Vampire Weekend or Placebo or Bruno Mars or whatever, they all like it for their own reasons, in their own way. Cells love sugar, but infinite diversity in infinite combinations explosively evolves from that basic need, and we should not forget this. So how do we know what is good for us, and, indeed, good for the people around us, our potential or actual descendants, and for the world and life itself? How, in short, do we know what is moral in the most absolute frame of reference we can find? We construct machines to know on our behalf, and they sort this mess out for us. A few years ago, there was a great debate on the use of plastic bags in stores. Plastic bags were evil but, on later analysis, paper bags were evil, too, or so the debate went. The debates were inconclusive, and on weak evidence governments started to slap a tiny minimum price on plastic bags, slashing use. But was it paper or plastic? Or should we have gone delivery, and skipped going to the store at all? What precisely was the lean, green, environmentally efficient choice here? Is a million people each zipping around carrying their own groceries really the smart way of doing this? We had no social machinery to find out. Governments basically made the decision on a whim, and academic study was inconclusive. The effects were not large in any case, and the entire issue kind of slid past us. Something similar happened four decades ago with recycling. Recycling is, generally speaking, roughly environmentally neutral - it doesn’t help the environment very much, if at all. There are some cases where it’s great – steel and aluminium, say – but most of the time pulling apart products which were

[p. 50 to 51](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) never intended to be recycled is basically not worth doing in either environmental or economic terms. It just takes too much time and energy. A lot of it is done by children who work on garbage heaps in horrendously poor places. The pictures are depressing. It’s not good. It’s not even close to okay. However, if we had done an accurate net assessment of environmental strategies in the 1970s everything would have been focused on energy efficiency – immediate financial rewards align with outstanding environmental impact reductions. It’s the clear, clear win of all the things we can do. Energy efficiency is mostly builders doing more skilful jobs, architects thinking about the long-term use of buildings and appliance designers watching what goes into their machines, not just what comes out. It’s clean work, to use less energy. No children living on garbage dumps are required. For the first time in my life I live in a decently insulated house with carbon-neutral heating (via a district heating system that runs on wood chips). Environmental efficiency is great: it’s a warm house with low bills. What’s not to love? Compare this to volunteers at conferences rummaging through garbage bags making sure everything goes into the right one. One of these things is part of the future, the other is simply bad information and misaligned incentives resulting in people being saddled with inconvenient, dirty, meaningless tasks. And pity the kids who live on the garbage dumps. So the decisions we make culturally about what is important stick for decades, even when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. People get stuck on bad ideas about how to help the world. Energy efficiency has been the biggest possible environmental win for decades, and we just could not turn the cultural ship towards this goal. How can we correct that, not just for energy efficiency, but for everything? What I want is a machine to help me make decisions in a moral way. Making morally correct decisions is too hard for individuals when supply chains or science are involved. It is too difficult and time-consuming to correlate all the relevant information and be confident we have come to the right conclusions. There should be a machine that aggregates all the information about the environmental and social impact of our purchases to steer us towards the right choices. Of course, in areas that require complex moral reasoning, this is impossible with today’s technology. But when it comes to buying stuff, figuring out the morally right thing to do comes down to impact analysis. A machine only has to be able to compare the impacts of the things I might buy, and present me with the least damaging option. In this domain, the morally right answer is the one with lowest environmental and social impact – it’s not an unbounded moral problem with ambiguous choices. Under these simplified conditions, a machine can choose what does least harm and most good. Computers do similar kinds of decision

[p. 51](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) the things I might buy, and present me with the least damaging option. In this domain, the morally right answer is the one with lowest environmental and social impact – it’s not an unbounded moral problem with ambiguous choices. Under these simplified conditions, a machine can choose what does least harm and most good. Computers do similar kinds of decision making for us all the time. GPS maps on phones are indispensable because

[p. 52 to 53](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) they identify the shortest route between two points. Flight search engines get you the lowest cost flight, hotel room or rental car. There is no fundamental reason I should not be able to use a machine to find the least socially and environmentally damaging clothes, phone or laptop. At an even simpler level, why can’t shopping sites like Amazon or eBay or Ocado just give me the option to block products made in horrible ways? Never attempt to sell me something that would make me puke if I knew the whole story, okay? Charities, academics, governments, activists, even customers collectively have all parts of the information needed to build these decision-making tools, in much the same way that groups like Ordnance Survey and many different satellite mapping and drone survey companies all had pieces of the data needed to create modern digital maps. Society just had to build the right machines to integrate all these systems together to get the breakthrough in capabilities that we enjoy every day. I use the term machine in the broadest sense. What got us digital maps in the long run involved almost every sector of society: government-funded GPS systems, decades of university research, start-up companies, tech behemoths, hardware manufacturers and many actors had to come together to build these cutting-edge capabilities into our everyday lives. When morality was defined by religion, it was largely based on sexual morality and maybe a bit of instruction about taking care of the very poor. Morality was defined by received wisdom, and all the machinery to implement morality was social. Then over time the role of managing hard limits on morality largely passed to the state, as it took over from religions as the primary maker of law. The state eventually outsourced most of the hard analysis about the consequences of various laws to universities, then stopped funding those universities, so the universities turned to corporations to fund them and the corporations paid for the results that they wanted on a truly epic scale, which then fed directly back into government making new law based on corporatefunded research. We broke the social machines that enabled moral decision-making at scale, and this is far from the only way those machines were compromised. What is the damage done from all this erosion of accurate decision-making capacity? Well, is it carbohydrates, fats or salt that produce heart disease? Or is it job dissatisfaction? The answer depends very much on who you ask, but the fact that you cannot get a clear answer is a clear failure of the social machinery to deliver actionable truth to you, the individual decision-maker. A lot of people die over this question. Even worse, consider tobacco: theoretically smoking is a decision you are free to make, although tobacco consistently tops the charts on addictiveness and objective measures of harm from drugs, and somehow winds up available everywhere, all the time, as if it was as harmless as spring water. Is it really responsible to let people

[p. 53](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) of people die over this question. Even worse, consider tobacco: theoretically smoking is a decision you are free to make, although tobacco consistently tops the charts on addictiveness and objective measures of harm from drugs, and somehow winds up available everywhere, all the time, as if it was as harmless as spring water. Is it really responsible to let people choose this? And, if so, why won’t we let them have

[p. 54 to 55](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) guns, hand grenades and various other things which would objectively kill far fewer people than the humble ciggie? You may say ‘but guns kill other people’ but so does secondary smoking. Government spends a lot of time telling people what to do and not to do. The resulting prohibitions and compulsions are badly irrational: homeless people cannot build homes, and it costs a billion dollars to get a new cancer drug to market. So really we need trustworthy knowledge to make decisions, and especially to make law. We need people who are actually acting on our behalf, not on the behalf of their secret paymasters, to fight the power and tell us the truth that we need to know to make intelligent decisions on our own behalf. It’s simply not fair to have enormous corporate interests corrupting our access to health information with bad science, advertising and illicit involvement with government regulators. Ordinary people cannot stand up to that kind of corrupting pressure, and when something goes wrong like the obesity epidemic we cannot get to the truth because nobody will fund the science, because what if it turns out to be something mundane, banal and wildly profitable, like the corn syrup industry or hormones in dairy products? We are basically left defenceless against enormous machines which lie to us for a living, and we cannot blame people for hugging their crystals and waving spirulina and kale at this problem: after all, when you cannot access the truth through science, what could be more natural than turning to superstition? The scientific method works, but you have to apply it in a non-corrupt way to get trustworthy results. And this is how we wound up in this mess: we can’t get access to facts, and a huge machinery corrupts our sense of what is right for us personally. This is why our relationship with stuff has become so enormously toxic: toxic things made by a toxic machinery, detached from human welfare as an active consideration for the most part. Our stuff is immoral, and preys on our weakness with increasing intelligence. This cannot go on. Automated Morality Is the Answer to Human Weakness When one writes a book about the future, eventually one has to resort to predictions. Here is mine. In the future, we will be able to express our moral sentiments and other personal preferences to machines which will provably act on our behalf and not on the behalf of others, and those machines will intelligently do things such as prevent us being offered goods made by slave labour, or containing minerals from areas with active resource wars. Those goods may still exist in the world, they may be for sale somewhere, but my prediction is that they will be automatically removed from sale, and stigmatised. To sell such goods to

[p. 56 to 57](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) people under false pretences, in a way which disrupts their free choice to live by their own moral law, will be heavily penalised. An Amazon or an eBay could choose to discipline sellers, and provide a checkbox which says ‘only show me things which are verified to be slavery-free’ or ‘only show me things which are vegan’ quite easily at a technical level, but the market itself usually cannot regulate the market. It’s going to take new social structures to control the force of capitalism, because government has tried and largely failed. That does not leave a permanent imbalance in which capital can do what it damn well likes forever: everything eventually finds its counterbalance, and this one is now overdue. Stuff will continue to be made to conform to the profit motive: I am not suggesting a utopian future in which everybody works for free for the common weal, or where nobody works at all. But I am suggesting that, much as people keep kosher or are vegan, or keep Lent, people for the rest of foreseeable history will have personal ethical or moral codes which affect their purchasing patterns. People will rely on machines to make these decisions with them or for them because, in the future, nearly all of our other relationships with markets will be mediated by machines, so why shouldn’t we also have machines to keep these markets moral? In the same way that nearly all airline tickets are booked using algorithms which systematically search through our options, sifting through the dazzling profusion of goods and services offered by capitalism and screening out the toxic dross is a job for algorithms: it is like email spam filtering for the physical world and the world of commerce. This mechanism is the natural counterpart and controller for advertising. The dysfunctional role that stuff plays in our lives is a temporary phase, produced by the enormous imbalance between the powers of mass production combined with the cognitive science of targeted advertising, versus the meagre capabilities of individuals to take back control of their lives from these forces. But these tools are not inherently evil: rather, they can be turned to the good, and my prediction is that increasingly strident consumer objections to being lied to for decades in ways which killed millions of people (I’m looking at you, Big Tobacco) will eventually result in the creation of transparent and near-incorruptible technical and social machinery to answer simple questions we all want the answers to, like ‘Is this poisoning me or anybody else?’ There is some progress towards this quest for objectivity. Services like DPReview and RTINGS do detailed scientific reports on the performance of certain classes of consumer electronics like cameras, monitors and headphones. They measure frequency responses and colour gamuts with laboratory equipment to give an objective basis for consumer decisions. This kind of objective truth cuts through advertising: a manufacturer can show me any shiny little film they like, but if I can get the specifications

[p. 57](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) scientific reports on the performance of certain classes of consumer electronics like cameras, monitors and headphones. They measure frequency responses and colour gamuts with laboratory equipment to give an objective basis for consumer decisions. This kind of objective truth cuts through advertising: a manufacturer can show me any shiny little film they like, but if I can get the specifications from an objective

[p. 58 to 59](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iDuLbVRLxtPz-BNRZKOJCljXbPVt6ohp/view) source, guess what I’m buying? I’m buying the one that works. Correcting the balance of power between manufacturers, workers and buyers will take time. Scientific data about products alone is not enough to know whether a product is worthy of purchase: we must know about the social and environmental impacts of the product too. The imperative towards quality and accountability drives transparency, particularly in food or other products which may directly harm us. People will only allow themselves to be ruthlessly exploited by manufacturers for so long. Just as the creation of the labour union to resist the overarching ambition of industrial-era employers was inevitable, algorithmic exploitation and secrecy about what we are buying must also have limits. We are in the early stages of creating new machinery to impose those limits. Our stuff can and must become kind: if not actively life-giving, at least pleasant, friendly, and not hostile to its buyers or makers. Stuff: Benign and Malevolent Some of the things people try to sell you are going to kill you. Sometimes they know that, and obviously don’t tell you. Sometimes they take active measures, for decades, to stop anybody figuring out how bad for you their products are. A lot of our stuff is mad defective. It is outrageous. Being sold this kind of stuff is as bad as the council planting the park with poison ivy and giant hogweed and then telling people to go out there for a nice picnic, failing to mention the poisonous weeds. Think I’m joking? Read about poisonous flame retardants in furniture. Or my old nemesis, the cigarette, who’s theoretically less-toxic replacement, the e-cig, nearly killed a friend of mine. How do we wind up with cigarettes and toxic sofas and leaded petrol in cars and uninsulated houses poisoning our bodies and our atmosphere, all simultaneously destroying our futures? It is completely absurd – if an invading military force did this to us it would be a series of acts of war. But somehow ‘the market’ can do this to us, and nobody seems to be invested in comprehensively stopping these ongoing atrocities and bringing the perpetrators to justice. It’s like we’re all fighting a war, every day, against other people secretly exploiting and harming us. How come all this bad stuff happens, and mysteriously it’s no one’s fault most of the time? Who’s washing the hands here? This problem is called the agency problem. People sell us things they know are bad for us because they get paid, we get screwed and the people who are paid to ask, ‘Hey, is this stuff poisoning me or made by slave labour?’ are remarkably ineffective. You just can’t get these systems to work properly, because nobody’s incentives in the system actually align with yours.

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/239-3.md (part 3 of 3).
End of [239] The Future of Stuff, part 2 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.