# ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [251], part 2 of 2. 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: video, 2020-01-24 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- 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): Joins the shelter strand and the contracting layer in one climate-migration argument.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Sheet-waste question (1995): The question behind the Hexayurt: how to build a dome from 4x8 sheets without wasting 25 to 40 percent of...
  - Free housing and 21st Century Leadership (2010): Blog essay on the model of personal effectiveness he adopted after inventing the Hexayurt in 2002, with...
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (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)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine)
  - Internet of Agreements (2017): Paper at the World Government Summit in Dubai on producing legal agreements at industrial scale. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Smart contracts, law & arbitration (17%); Burning Man shelter building (14%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: dispute resolution (7 here; 48 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); doubt discount (2 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); expertise (6 here; 65 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); tokenization (4 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); refugee shelter (3 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); supply chain (6 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); refugees (5 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Hope For The World (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); Internet of Agreements (2 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); Department of Defense (2 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.43 (1.00 is the top), number 147 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [321] [Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md): same career work: Sheet-waste question
  - [791] [COP26 Event: Green Blockchain, Green Economy (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/791.md): same career work: Sheet-waste question
- On the same works, just before: [718] Conversations #5 - Vinay Gupta (2019); [191] [My Thoughtmenu on Enlightenment | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/191.md); [239] [The Future of Stuff (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/239.md)
- On the same works, just after: [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); [685] [Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 2 with Vinay Gupta (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/685.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: ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change, video, 2020-01-24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [251], https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[37:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=2266s) bit of a danger that this is sort of a slight over claim in the kind of potential here you know you kind of think you've been talking about things like the Internet of Things all these kind of different developments and that kind of potential escape but I'm kind of also it makes me actually think going back to your point about where we were in 95 and the the things people said about the climate crisis then I loved when I was a kid when I was in 95 and I had a kind of blue peter book which said that you know by the millennium yos and they would be destroyed they've been all this kind of like terrible impacts in terms of global warm Sun all so forth and actually a lot of that hasn't come to pass is that is there a sort of a flip risk that the kind of opportunity that you see through the internet have agreements isn't going to come to pass either so there's a lovely saying from the singer Peter Gabriel and nothing fades like the future nothing sticks like the past you know this old story about you know the Space Shuttle is built the size it's built because of the width of Roman horse axle and so you know the the the Roman roads are so wide because it's got to accommodate two horses that's how wide the axles are the axles then move on to the same axles that are used to make cars because there are on the same roads which then turns into other Sorek trains which then turns into car axles and you know it's a little bit of a shaggy dog story but you know mumble mumble long chain of cause and effect at the end of it that's where the space shuttle rocket booster is four point three meters wide so you know we are we are a couple of sort of historical accidents away from still doing multiplication and Roman numerals you know if you just Zig when you should have zagged your culture can get stuck with terrible ideas for centuries and and there are quite a few of those around like the split between the metric and imperial system for screwdrivers and bolts and wrenches and stuff like that how do you wind up with a single planet with everything coming to be manufactured in two different sizing schemes you know like it's impossible to justify that on any kind of rational basis it's purely historical accident and stubbornness from people that didn't really understand the long-term impact of their actions making decisions that caused the probe to crash on Mars because one team had done their mouth in mirrors and the other team had done their mouth and feet and there was no proper handoff in the system because neither side thought it was conceivable that the other side would be doing something so stupid I'm not gonna tell

[40:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=2416s) you who I think was right in that debate but the you know that sort of problem if we get a problem like that that requires us to stick inside of the existing systems that we use for trade in logistics what we'll get is a world with roughly a 10% GDP drag right container ship and where we put everything into these standardized metal boxes to ship it around the world put something like 7% on global GDP and a point where the world is kind of hot poor and starving I don't think we can afford a 10% gdp drug for paper-pushing but we have to my efficiency at the global system because efficiency is free lunches and we could use free lunches for about 3 million people on current numbers so I don't think we've got a kind of moral right to leave that efficiency and efficiency in place we have to reclaim these inefficiencies because you know if we could pull all that efficiency back from the brokenness of the international logistics systems firstly it's intensely profitable for the companies that succeed and secondly it's food on tables for all the people that can go and do something useful rather than being stuck in that drug you know it's a I don't say this exactly you know all fits inside of the general rubric of trade facilitation with all the logistics on the paper work site and trade facilitation is the thing which of the World Bank is now pushing it's kind of like a number-one priority because it provides stabilisation liquidity to the whole global economy without having to do anything went to your politics or technology you know it's it's I think a lot of people are viewing this as being a free lunch that we kind of have to eat and then how far we get down that path depends on technology politics bureaucracy you know it's kind of 50/50 but there are places where it to be done like the Apple supply chain the Apple supply chain runs very much in the way that I would expect the global supply chain operate its variant degree it's very international they've stripped out practically all the bureaucracy it's extremely transparent and the efficiency is unbelievable and you know everybody's kind of looking at that like okay like the Apple supply chain but for everything and then I would say that there's a kind of sagacious nor doing that yeah okay that's where we're going just don't expect it to be tomorrow I think we could all get on board with the automating the bureaucracy and reducing paperwork perhaps not handing all over to Apple but I would it wanted to bring back to

[42:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=2566s) material conscious of time and olive-green the other people down as

[42:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=2570s) well but you founded material with with quite a strong ethical framework to it I think it's fair to say how do you think some of the technology you're developing there could help reduce those inefficiencies and begin to kind of address a lot of the environmental catastrophes we may see in the future so my feeling is it for the most part if people were given an option between doing the wrong thing and doing the right thing generally speaking they'll do the right thing right I don't think that is you know a completely universal law there are occasions where you're so broke that you're just gonna do the wrong thing and you'll deal with it later but for the most part if you have a choice between buying something which is ethical and unethical go buy the thing which is ethical now right now it's quite hard to figure out what's ethical and what is right you took a long time for the organic and the fair trade and the free-range and all the rest of these certifications to get stood up not just as a certification not just on the certifying body but as something that consumers could relate to and that would affect buying decisions right I mean I would suspect most of us when you see eggs on a shelf what kind of extinct if we reach for the free-range ones rather than them not free-range ones because you have a little voice in your head that is basically like you know chickens in fields chickens in cages chickens in fields better for me better for the chicken you know and that that sort of pressure towards doing the right thing is very driven by habit and it's very driven by data so the field that I'm chasing and I'll talk more about what we're doing in the short term first but in the longer so I told what we're doing the short term second but when the long term first so the field that we're chasing is um inefficiencies caused by poor specification so you buy something on the internet and this hits us individually as consumers a little but for business it's a really big deal so if I buy something over the internet and I need it to work when it arrives and if I have to go and buy another one and it takes three weeks to come on a boat from China hey that could cause me to have a delay on my contract and they'll call me a whole bunch of additional trouble or I have to get the thing air freight and it's gonna cost me seven hundred quid right if I buy my box of 24 steel bolts they have to be exactly the size that I need they have to do the tour that's how I need they need to be in the correct steel all of that stuff has to be

[45:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=2720s) exactly our specified so what material does is basically provides you the framework for putting multi-dimensional product specifications on the blockchain and multi-dimensional is really important so the manufacturer certifies the dimensions and the steel and somebody else certifies that they are legal to import legal to export and you know they're not controlled munition or something somebody else comes along and says that these things have been carbon compensated they've had all the calculations done trees have been planted the offsets have been purchased somebody else comes along and says we're going to dependent testing while we put this bull into a machine it is actually corrosion resistant to a grease this standard here's our data and eyes a buyer if I have a choice between you know some random bolts our on Alibaba that tells me they're bolts are great versus another seller that has exactly the same boat but with all this documentation on the blockchain and strong legal recoverability of assets if they're lying I'm in most cases going to pay a premium to get the thing that is genuinely reliably what I'm paying for so the we thought we call this a doubt discount normally when we buy something online you always have a doubt about the fitness for purpose of the goods or the quality of the goods or delivery schedules or these kinds of things and that means that we're constantly applying contingency in case the stuff isn't what we thought it would be right you know you're gonna need three and you buy four because one of them won't turn up this kind of thinking or you know it says it's 25 bucks and you're kind of like yeah but what if it doesn't fit and then you just don't buy it right so getting rid of the dev discount it saves waste and it makes money good enough to get started with and when we start talking about the global international sort of implications of this if most of our manufactured goods have extremely detailed extremely reliable multi-dimensional specifications available we can now begin to use software to drive provisioning so I come along and say right here are 36 things that I need I've typed them up in a spreadsheet I hand the spreadsheet over to a website that has automated provisioning it goes out and finds me people to will sell me all of these things and because the specifications are extremely precise that website has the ability to go out and do kind of bargain hunting for me so think of things that look kind of like flight

[47:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=2870s) looking websites but for the material world right I want a white dress shirt that is my size and I want it on Thursday before I fly go how'd you like this fabric 1899 sold - reliably get what you paid for in a way that gets rid of the doubt discount you know that's kind of doing from the material world well internet search engines did for information and who guarantees that reliability I was it different from say having a hundred great reviews on TripAdvisor all on Amazon or whatever yes so now I'll come to the kind of near-term stuff so what are doing in the near term is working with things like Stradivarius violins we're also working for William Shatner so we're doing a bunch of Star Trek memorabilia but it's Star Trek memorabilia and a range of other things up to including strap Barra sure if that's alright pool for Stradivarius Stradivarius I mean if it was an octopus you'd say Oh put it there's a Greek anyway therefore probably unlikely to ever be able to afford one that'll a many but they're cheap to listen to so the so the if you're doing with the Strads um what you have is a set of experts that will offer you an opinion that the thing is accurate but an opinion is opinion and the opinions are usually bad for reputational loss if the expert comes along the looks at this segment and later on it's discovered to be fake the expert over hard time writing an opinion for another violin in the same class right but that doesn't make you any because you bought it and the thing turns out to actually be an MRT so there's a risk here right you know one expert identification at 25 turns out to be an accurate for example varies from field to field and and where there's risk there's insurance so our approach is that the experts basically give you an opinion and the experts work with insurers or work with us or work with Mutual's that are bunch of different legal structures and to come along and give you a policy where you give the expert five thousand dollars and the expert gets you half a million

[50:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=3020s) to cover against the violin not being real or not being as described and what that means is that you as a consumer can buy a set of these policies to ensure that the object is genuine and this has two features and the first is if there's a problem you get money and you don't have to go to court because it's a dispute resolution with an insurer rather than having to try and Sue somebody so it's a much it's a bunch of ghent or kind of dispute resolution thing 1 and thing 2 is you know that they're serious about the accuracy of their opinions because if they're wrong they're gonna have to pay out their own pockets and so that gives you a sense that people are serious about the integrity of the claims that they're making and you have to tie this to good dispute resolution machinery or the disputes when they arise will be so expensive then we'll overcome the value of the insurance and we've got a ton of work on that and but it all comes down to money as a universal language right if I say this is real and there's two and a half million dollars of insurance available on it and the object only costs three million dollars that's the kind of universal language of truth so I buy the insurance and then I'm going to take this thing and we knew that it's real and if it's not you're gonna pay me back and we've got half a dozen different people writing policies they're all wired up to this summer two and a half million in that situation if multiple experts are willing to poop real money on the line in substantial quantities I have the strongest possible assurance that the thing is genuine and I think that what that creates because money is a universal language what it creates is the ability to internationally trade in assets which are very hard to move across cultures so what's what's simple generally the strods because the strods are a very specific case they have a lot of very very complicated politics at history and tradecraft they're they're strict strict attack yeah yeah they're they're they're they're fiddly right the fiddle and think a little more generally right and

[52:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=3170s) the museum world went through a huge eruption when radiocarbon dating was invented right so there were all kinds of objects which had been assigned to date then radiocarbon dating is invented then you reexamine the objects using the new technique and quite a few things turn out to be fake and of quite a few things also turn out to be way older than they've been thought to be so not instance you can have the best experts in the world who all have the same opinion every single expert in the world can say okay this stuff is genuine then we come up with new science and it turns out that some of them are wrong now you have an easy claim and it's easy to settle in that instance you know a change in circumstances gives you a black and white answer somebody raids a forgers nest and discovers a whole bunch of copies of paint in what you just bought oops so those are the kind of black and white instances the harder instances are sort of he-said she-said professional opinion six experts say it's real one expert comes along and says how you missed something it's not real your original experts look at it and like this guy's a clown he has no idea what he's talking about somebody has to make a decision right so in all of these instances the insurers are a frontline dispute resolution machine you know a provider through their customer service right and if it's something like radiocarbon dating or forgers or call red-handed the insurers will pay because they kind of have to because the facts are clear and they know that if there's a formal dispute they will inevitably be forced to pay they might as well just take their medicine that's the business in the instances where it's he said she said we know go to arbitration right and the critical thing about these these machines is that arbitration is a is an under engineered field right and the 19 is it 58 New York Convention on foreign arbitration awards is signed up to by about 150 countries and the ability to constitute a private court which will have the same legal enforcement power in every one of those 150 countries regardless where the court is located and those systems clear transactions of hundreds of billions of dollars years it currently stands there's an enormous volume of dispute through those machines so the insurance policies and all this blockchain stuff that goes around them binds to specific arbitration courts which have technical expertise in the asset class that you're working with and those arbitration courts also have expedited dispute

[55:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=3320s) resolution machines so you can do things like hourly neutral evaluations to give you a good sense of which way it will go a very constrained cost so you're always attempting to avoid full-scale arbitration you're attempting to avoid expert witnesses you're giving people every opportunity to re-examine the facts from the perspective of their opponents and because from the perspective of the insurers you know how much would the insurance industry like a slice of every transaction in the world right visa operates for example an informal insurance and dispute resolution system which is every time you make a charge back the guy who decides whether he's going to give you money or not and if he does the money shows up back in your account what's essentially insurance but it's all operated by Visa and paid for by merchants and as a result it doesn't do large value transactions so imagine visa style models where you've got insurance or district resolution baked into the payment rail but it's a payment rail that allow you buy houses Stradivarius violins cars right you know the really heavy purchases of life all inside of these same frameworks and what that allows for because it's using arbitration courts you know the blockchain technology is inherently global arbitration is inherently global so it gives you reliable jurisprudence from Garda software in the world you're undertaking our transactions and that will take a long time for all the little nooks and crannies and you know eyes to get dotted and T's to get crossed but the broad outlines of that are immediately workable in most transit for most of the world right now today because arbitration is extremely standard internationally I want to try

[57:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=3425s) and bring in some of the questions here at this point there are other people who got okay so hold it sorry gentleman in the back here before did you for oh hi oh hi I'm hey gum with Heng Barrett that we're magical consultancy yeah we're just interested to know with the description you made of the violins I can't pronounce it either or some of those other things is there an opportunity to tokenize those types of things or cars where the history kind of follows with it or is it always gonna be a unique kind of time stamp on it to get all those experts or things in so yeah they don't you tokenize long term lifetime if you like cars or things so we are very much in favor of to organization we think it's a really good idea we do not want to compete with our customers right so we would quite like there to be a nice position where we do the object authentication we verify the things real and then that becomes kind of a standard for all the different companies who are doing tokenization to verify that the physical asset so there tokenizing really exist and they they have the attributes there are legally required to have you know it's a it's it's kind of a different level of the stock so we think of the tokenization companies as potential in the long term some of our best customers and but we ourselves don't want to compete with them so we're staying out organization because if we did a bit of tokenization stuff ourselves on one hand it would prove that it works and we could show people how we think it ought to be approached but on the other hand who wants to buy services from a company that could compete with them so we're much more comfortable staying out of tokenization thank you I'm sorry sorry's good so you do behind you lady behind you yeah well we'll come to you next I am I think I just did this this morning yeah it's all done on a phone

[59:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=3575s) application thing like people used to sign the back of passport photos yeah sorry I I'm not sure is it a token or is it three factor authentication of the tort that you're talking about and it sounds like both I mean the use of people yeah I mean the so very early on in the discussions around material there was some thinking about whether you could do this for things like medical registration yes you know if somebody comes and says okay you know here's my certificate I am you know I've got 14 years surgery in Japan and you then attempt to re-implement that in New Jersey just managing the paperwork burden of recertifying is so enormous you know could you streamline that using the same kind of mechanisms that we're using for objects and and are taken that is technically there's no problem and in terms of commercial risk for things like malpractice insurance there's no problem the certification boards are gonna kill cause you enormous problems so it's not that you can't do this in a way which is legally responsible and would ensure patient safety but it just turns out there's a bunch of legal machinery and which you would have to negotiate with to get results and you know like by the time that process was done my beard would come down to my navel I got a feeling that the British government have just kind of worm their way right around it very quickly or power to them the idea that the situation is so desperate that the British government actually becomes nimble and responsive for a change you know the British government the British cultural rule like only when the situation is truly desperate we'll be risk putting the smart people in charge it's how we survived World War two the situation become became extremely desperate they finally decided that the boffins were going to run the war and the result was Alan Turing and the adventure of radar and it's not

[1:02:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=3725s) until your true desperation descends on the British people that they finally accept that smart people better be put in charge of the situation because if you smart people in charge of things in time of peace you get chaos but if you've already got chaos that you get order and that's my theory the long-term impacts of breck say is going to be that the experts are going to be in charge well we'll have to listen to them in the event the the national crisis becomes severe enough that we boot smart people in charge then you know I think you could expect some national Renaissance if it turns out that the idiots continue to run the asylum in the way that we've seen pretty consistently for rather a long time in this country from both sides of the house and then we are well and truly doomed we'll see which way it goes you don't you another question I was going to say that you've been talking about trade and economics mostly about ideas about social consensus in that we're living through a screaming example of how in addition the electoral system is presumably live social consensus could either side stat or maybe supplement politics now this

[1:03:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=3807s) opens an enormous can of worms how are we doing for time all right so that in that case I'll take the the the motorway rather than the scenic route on this so there's what thinking in the blockchain space about social stuff distributed autonomous organizations and there's no cold Dow Dow stock they're doing about to work on this um and there's a very strong sense of optimism that you can build sort of like a new generation of extremely lightweight organizations that can use kind of advanced mechanisms to find social consensus and so on I have profound skepticism about this and my skepticism is rooted in weirdly enough success rather than failure so we have seen enormous ly effective large-scale cooperation to solve global problems in the past twenty or thirty years repeatedly and that is the free software movement its Linux its Wikipedia its Android it's your Python it's see all of these large you know pieces of software but for the infrastructure of society the global platforms are all free software created by mass collaboration and the creation of Commons using shared licensure and this is where we have a split between the sociological desire for what they want to be true and how these things actually work so the sociological desire is that these things should be run by caring sharing people the fine group consensus work the ball and that everybody on the same team and the whole thing is kind of warm and fuzzy right and actually almost none of these projects work this way most of them are run by a single autistic sociopath that governs the project by screaming at people when they screw up and rule about 50% of the code themselves and that model of a single super productive individual with enormous inherent authority from a strictly meritocratic base right if I grew 50% of this system myself you rob a lot to be able to write the other 50% now do it my way because you came here because I did the first half myself that turns out how to be the assist how these systems actually run Wikipedia is a little

[1:05:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=3957s) different but one man wrote about 1/3 of Wikipedia right he should be as famous as you know Norwood bull Wong the guy that did the Green Revolution one guy wrote by 1/3 of Wikipedia so those kind of you know meritocratic dictators turn out to be kind of like feudal mobility right one guy over the sword says I'm gonna do it this way and if you're on my side we will succeed and if you're not on my side we will still succeed that model much as it is out of step with our current social norms turns out to work right and I think that there is an opportunity to take that model make funding much more accessible to those networks to make small transactions for payments much more accessible to do automated payments for problem-solve aunty's there's lots of room for streamlining that pipe but to be honest for all the time and energy I've seen people sink into finding large-scale social consensus I don't think anything's come out I mean I'm surrounded by people that are jibber jabbering on about you know one kind of social progressive value or another about how we're gonna find communities or the answer or you know we need you know complexity aware of organizations or you know whatever it happens to be there's an endless churn of these kind of ideas of like well somehow we're gonna work together we're gonna sort this out but the idea of simply putting really really competent people that nobody likes very much in charge and then doing what they tell you seems through the last thing on anybody's mind right because the more the more kind of friendly and sociable the thing is the more we will tend to promote people with excellent social skills right and the intersection between excellent social skills and absolutely profound domain expertise is very infrequent right this is this is the kind of Steve Jobs thing right so I kind of feel that what we need is a sort of working-class technocratic response to a lot of problems right and the amplification of genuine expertise to the point where people will follow the expertise rather than following social hierarchy or popularity I think that has a lot to recommend it and Singapore has a model where you know they have okay an authoritarian government for sure right but they also have an astonishingly powerful civil service where the the head bureaucrats are paid on the order

[1:08:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=4107s) of half a million dollars a year and if they're found to be corrupt they're extraordinarily seriously prosecuted and that model has established a kind of technocratic governance of Singapore where if the problem could be solved with a little bit of money and a correct opinion it gets solved and so the society runs pretty smoothly and that's not a product of authoritarianism it's a product of massively over investing in the civil service and then letting the civil service solve problems right you could import that model of the civil service here inside of a democracy and nothing would glitch so yeah I think that my my take on this is that in terms of problem-solving grunt we don't need systems which further super empower socially competent popular people right democracy is the apex of empowering socially competent popular people we're super empowering those people to the point where they make nearly all of our big decisions I don't think it's working very well what I'd like to see is an approach which is about super empower and quiet competence and I think that the civil services of the world are where a lot of that confidence resides and it could be backed very strongly and I think that the open source world is a really good and it's real good evidence for the idea that large-scale organization of quiet competence is a path for the future so yeah I think that we are pretty much maxed out on proving shiny people in charge of things and what we need is competent hands and minds that are you know disciplined and capable taking responsibility to be empowered by the systems to solve the are within their domains of expertise that's it I think an interesting point to end perhaps you're one of the people that could answer Dominick coming this is called expertise into the civil service and Templi reform a intoxicant of all afraid of what we hope that they will invite him to the next event

[1:10:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=4224s) do we just sight I'm going to cycle back quickly sure their climate questions we started there I mean comes at a great journey I can't thank you both enough for doing that just as a sort of take away the climate issue we see it in Australia we see the numbers yeah that's all a level here whether we own competence or shiny I don't know what's one thing we could be thinking about looking at your material thing about you know things we acquire what's the one thing that we could do as a group to take away as a take away thought about practical steps that we could think about in the climate sphere so there's a there's a policy step and there's a kind of practical step so the practical step is meat consumption is really inefficient right it's just really inefficient some forms of meat like beef are much more efficient than others like chicken but right across the board meat is a really inefficient way of doing food I think that's also true to dairy to a lesser degree so reducing me in diet has a really large effect on carbon and food is about I want to say 30 percent global carbon production and for most people their diet is about a third of their carbon footprint and if you go off me it will slosh that third very substantially I can't remember the exact figures it might be that if you give up me oddly reduces your food per by a third might be 20% count remember so reduced meat diets are certainly an enormous step great ok it's something we can all do for comparison flying is four percent of global warming total so meat is like five times the size of the problem flying and giving up me is way less damaging to your quality of life than giving up flying right I mean really you're not gonna miss me all that much if you have a stake once in a while it's not a big deal where is giving up flying really disconnects you from the world and more than anything we need the world to be connected right now we need to be working together we don't want parochialism to break out exactly the real problems so I am very Pro flying I'm reasonably aunty me that said ie me just not as much as it used to the second thing is that meat is under serious pressure from technology to produce high quality protein without having to go through the whole process of growing cows right and this is the

[1:12:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=4374s) whole the Americans call it clean meat Jorge Mario calls it farm free food he just wrote a big article about for the Guardian and I think that we need really really strong cultural support for that as an agenda right okay so you know use biotechnology to make good food without having to go through the whole farm our farm yard thing right and you know there are long and complicated arguments about well in some parts of the country the cheaper part in the ecosystem and you know it's more efficient to grow upon the salon than potatoes and then you know there are all kinds of detailed complicated ramifications but the end of the day we've got 9 billion people to feed biotechnology has gotten really good recently it cannot be beyond the mind of man to make something that works like yogurt produces beef steak and you know people are chipping away at so I think we all need to be aware that that is coming and don't allow paranoia about our technology to take hold right because there will be an inevitable backlash from people whose idea of environmentalism is pastoralism where we go back to the wand and everybody has a pet chicken in their backyard and this is the solution to the environmental problem and unfortunately if you sit down with a spreadsheet and run the numbers on that it doesn't really come anywhere close to feeding us you know if we're going to sustain a fairly substantial high-tech society that increases quality of life for everybody for the foreseeable future if we're going to continue the trend of civilization being civilized rather than coming off some kind of cliff we need to continue to develop new ways of feeding people that are more efficient than the old ways and the next step on that path is the replacement of the factory farm with this kind of new approach to food so don't let paranoia seek in right we need to watch that stuff very closely modern beers article is excellent I once bet against George mom being and George was right and I was wrong he's one of the few people when he says something that I immediately think that can't be right he's one of the few people where I assume that he's right rather than thinking that I'm right and he's wrong and then I check and usually his opinions are pretty well-founded he is not God but he's close so I think that there is a there's a real need to embrace those technologies as they come because they'll come to develop rural countries first one of the things that will come out of brexit is the UK will get its own ability to make quick decisions on these kind of technologies you could see that that's us being used as guinea pigs

[1:15:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K0Z-APh2M&t=4524s) you could also say that's us taking a world-leading position so yeah you know fight pastoralism pastoralism is the enemy on green issues what you're looking for is ultra green high-tech industrial solutions because that's the only stuff that scales to 9 billion people and you know we've done it for everything else right we did it for books we did it for white we did it for entertainment we did it for shoes and you know trousers and whatever it happens to be you know we go into this position where we've got nine billion people to support because we were so good at solving resource scarcity problems using these kind of industrial approaches and there is nothing behind us that will support nine billion people right there's stuff behind us that will support 1 billion people but nobody wants to see that right happen right so if we want to move forward rather than back unfortunately it's more industrialization and it's more use of science to solve our problems because there's just no way to support our population in a bucket with a new direction for it it's the only way thank you so much that's a great answer fantastic session thank you very much that was really inside Lancelot now I have you stay behind and have a glass wine some canapés upstairs with us before you go and the second of marks on next events in the network and finally I'd like to thank you know again grant want a new sponsor these for supporting us a long time and also free to our others of opportunities thank you very much D both of you for making this happen and thank you both we know that's coming out for London for such insightful evening thank you very great to be here thank you

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End of [251] ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [760](https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md) Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @... (2020); the most closely related, [321](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md) Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.