# FSCONS 2017 - Vinay Gupta - Resilience (part 2 of 2) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [690], 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/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2017-11-28 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ. 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): Warns that ID systems for displaced people embed politics. - Career works it belongs to: - Tell Me Who You Are: Identity, institutional memory, and the persistent illusion of the self (2015): ConsenSys essay on what identity is, and how to build identity people can live with: profiles kept apart,... - One Network, One World: Designing for a 7+ Billion Person World (2013): Talk at the OHM2013 hacker camp: housing everyone at one planet's worth of consumption, and why... (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) - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine) - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine) - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (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: Meditation & consciousness (13%); identity / dna / profile (13%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: schemas (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); smart grid (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); rich data (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); global trade (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); science fiction (1 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); human rights (1 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); India (2 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); supply chain (2 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); real estate (1 here; 106 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 2 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.48 (1.00 is the top), number 110 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [706] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md): same career work: Tell Me Who You Are: Identity, institutional memory, and the persistent illusion of the self - [163] [Tell Me Who You Are. Identity, institutional memory, and... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/163.md): same career work: Tell Me Who You Are: Identity, institutional memory, and the persistent illusion of the self - On the same works, just before: [691] [Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md); [917] [Blockchain keynote - Vinay Gupta (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/917.md); [699] [Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt.Capital | Blockchain: Ecology,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/699.md) - On the same works, just after: [740] [Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/740.md); [639] Stephen Diehl - Smart Contracts for New Entrepreneurs (2017); [640] Sally Holdway & Hugo Pickford Wardle - Internet of... (2017) ## 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: FSCONS 2017 - Vinay Gupta - Resilience, video, 2017-11-28, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [690], https://guptaoption.com/texts/690.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages, part 2 of 2 [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=2400s) this particular Rob there is no ID number for me to find another one we've thrown away all of the data right this this incredibly nice little you know timer thing that I use her don't talk too long three and a half minutes left no ID number no model number if I want another one there's no way to identify probably 20% of the utility that Amazon has for me is that I can search for objects that I already own and identify exactly what they are in a way that I can transmit to another person if they want one right today that screwdriver where did you get that it came from Amazon here's a URL just attaching a URL to objects is a huge step forward in my ability to optimize other people's quality of life and for them to optimize mine because getting your objects right is the tooling that used to interface to the world so I think it'd be worth thinking about how we could build really decent models of what human beings are like that could be used to build much more optimal mediums for representing human welfare now what kinds of things am i talking about here a simple example right if I have a dataset that says where everybody lives where everybody works and what real estate is available I have the ability to get you a house which is much closer to where you live and data that I've seen suggests that divorce rates rise very very rapidly for every minute over forty five minutes a day spent commuting I'm so maybe forty five minutes each way right but there is a certain threshold of which the time pressure imposed by commuting is provably bound for human relationships so the idea that you could take people whose marriages are in trouble and you could preferentially relocate them to housing which optimize their commutes and that this might save marriages with corresponding social benefit for all you could really do that cultures of fifty sixty percent divorce rates divorce seems to make people pretty miserable in most cases the idea that it's simply a logistical problem that impacts people's ability to maintain relationships because a time pressure it's an economic problem right but we need a model of a human being that said commute time is bad for emotional relationships commute time is bad for your kids educational attainment right we need a model of a human being which included the full complexity of the actual reality of human experience even worse we need a model which reflected the [42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=2550s) individuality of your human experience because if you're one of the 1% of the population that appears to be asexual then to all intents and purposes the commute time thing probably doesn't matter as much than if you've got four kids and a wobbly marriage right we can only optimize what we can model and if we miss optimize because we misunderstand the individual involved we're going to wind up with systems which have pathologies now I don't think we're going to see systems that have pathologies worse than money in a hurry but we are going to see you systems which are brought in which have pathologies now I am practically at time so I'm going to make two more points and I'm gonna read you something very brief because it's amazing so point number one cognitive ergonomics last for centuries the predominant method that we use for thinking is language or occasionally mathematics and abstractions in language and mathematics have multi century lifespans the notation that we use for calculus came from Leibnitz for remember correctly and we're still using it 700 years after calculus is invented we still call it calculus a language structures like grammar go from language to language to language over uncountable millennia right you know linguists will tell you all about that stuff so when we start talking about cognitive ergonomics we're talking about stuff that has extremely long life spans and right now we're not really thinking as if we're designing abstractions for the future so when we start thinking about the very very very long term future of the human race getting our cognitive ergonomics correct is a huge part of that the other thing very very briefly is I think it's incredibly important that we do this work open source because if we wind up we're the best available models of human beings our proprietary and locked inside of other people's algorithm shops we're going to have very real problems extracting that stuff and making it general later on because it will be tied up in things like copyright in the pattern and if the things which are the ontological foundations of the software which helps optimize the world for us turn out to be wrapped up inside from a priori software whoo we don't want to be part of that future um so on that I'm going to read you one little thing oh I forgot to mention blockchains yeah one more sentence so the blockchain is an opportunity for this virus scale renegotiation because the blockchains as they currently stand have no semantics so the semantics which [45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=2700s) are developed and imposed upon the blockchain will turn out to be the fundamental semantics which are used for interconnected global trade possibly for centuries so we've got an opportunity because we have this new round of interconnectedness on computers to make sure the blockchains of a set of semantics which adequately represent humanity's needs and for that matter the needs of nature and I'm very active in the blockchain space largely to try and get a lot of these values into play in such a way that we get the best out of that technology rather than the worst hence company so a little bit from book this is believe it or not an epic poem which is a very very old literary form arguably the oldest literary form we have and it's an epic science fiction poor one of no Blazers friends you've heard her was an ELISA grotius who framed the eyeball makers bill of rights for by the maze of intellectual property was solved by data mining in the web untangled by a 3d point of view she turned the problem upside down and blockchain from the user to the source made information a utility fair valued by the users use of it paying surprised creators that are war the point of this assuring that she was like many of the Giants will be meeting a polymath his curiosity unlimited by modesty or pride carried ideas over from one field like spores into another somewhere else because you might not know her at rode robe was as a curator of Renaissance art in Amsterdam swans famous Rijksmuseum right I haven't seen anybody bridge the gap between the epic form and science of technology before I've never seen anything like it the book is called apocalypse big I called Frederick and that's the kind of historical scope against which our technological struggles were really being played out right if we get this stuff right we get to be an interstellar species and five million years from now something that we can't even imagine evolving into will wonder what of its ancestors made to jump into space and that's happening right here and right now we are either those ancestors or with the people that drop the ball and wife is stopped so these questions about representation are the questions about the operating systems that we'll use to go into the stars or that will fail us and we will not succeed in making the jump so you know it's all to play for right here right now and we need the epic grasp of history to guide our actions because we [47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=2850s) are in epic times the position that we're in is on the very forefront of the biggest thing that any living species has ever done and we're screwing up because of the operating systems we're using to run our planet are terrible thank you alright done I don't know if there's time for questions I think let's turn on the speaker right along huh okay I didn't realize there was time for questions yes a friend of mine is - a friend of mine is doing is a is a boss of mobile repair and he and he says that from a the green perspective that the state of repair Manship of electronics is not very well optimized do you know any way with which which is win we can enhance that aspect of a consumption whereas yeah yeah I did a bit thinking about this a few years ago and the problem is that we have zero defect manufacturing so because we can make things essentially perfectly we put lots and lots and lots of components into our devices parked incredibly closely together and in the one in a hundred thousand chance of one of those components stops working they're basically impossible to pick off so I think with the current generation of manufacturing technology it's unlikely that things are going to become more repairable and we probably need to focus more on recyclability it's [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=3000s) possible that you could have specific kinds of systems that were designed for repair and I'm thinking of systems of large components like amplifiers you know capacitors this kind of thing but I would say that the systems that have those kind of power handling components I think repair ability is likely to remain very low unfortunately yeah it's a tough one I mean it's kind of I really used to look at the repair thing like this is a serious problem and then I really looked at the manufacturing I just I couldn't see any way back from ultra reliable manufacturing you get to kind of one defect in a hundred thousand and repairability just goes out the window I'm thinking things used to be repairable because of rework if it was screwed up in the factory you would fix it in the factory now if it's screwed up in the factory you just throw it away because it's so much more expensive than just making another one okay I just wanted to make remark that it's quite interesting that mark had decided that virtual reality is hard and is doing this new shortcut we're getting augmented reality which doesn't have to deal with representation of the human yes we just well showing something which already exists and we don't care about what it is yeah this is quite interesting I started my career on virtual reality the first time I've ever paid for was reviewing the virtual reality system for a magazine and I spent the 90s as a graphics engineer so that I could build VR systems when they arrived Wow has it been a long wait and even now you know I mean we we have an HTC vive in the office and people don't use it very much right I mean it's it's clear that there is additional magic to be done before virtual reality is right in a way that encourages us to use these fabulous tools I like got something you know kind of theories about what's wrong with it but you know it it basically boils down to we're not there yet and we're building the bridges we can um I think that when AR begins to be a lot more widely deployed we're going to discover there opens up a bunch of incredible kinds of worms um think of the sheer weirdness of the behavior that we saw around Pokemon go right just the weirdness of it not the rightness or the wrongness just the weirdness of it imagine what happens when somebody wraps an AR layer around something like tinder or Grindr right what is gonna happen I don't know but you're gonna see tons of people behaving in crazy ways because their options are being guided by a bunch of invisible cues that nobody else [52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=3150s) can see I don't know what that produces but that's gonna be bizarre anyway yeah they are the shortcut so we don't really have that much time for every questions but just the small thing most of your talk was around what I would call Western understanding of individuality and its importance in you know in the world and if you imagine a system that is built from say Buddhist perspective then all the individual properties of you are could be considered even to be a flaw that you - do you know and I wonder I just wanted to ask your opinion on the thing you know collective intelligence collective participation in one individual you know is this could be a model for a computer system to aim at and what you think about it in general you know yeah so this is a very very excellent question I wish I had about 20 minutes to answer so let me do the second part first so this is an excellent point right I did talk very much about the individuals the unit of self but if you even look at things like extended family units or the kind of tribal communities that you see around open-source software development it's very clear that a huge part of the utility of computers is connecting people together and if you built the representation of the community or the family first and then attached the individual to it you would have something that looks a little bit like how we handle companies so in the world that we're in in many ways the company is the first class out turn the employee is then attached as a property and you could imagine doing the same thing around family or community or lineage or something like that I don't know whether those systems would be more or less supportive of human individuality and human rights or not um because it's not clear to me that we have any generalized understanding of the value of the human beings placed on each other like in the Nordic world family has become less and less important as welfare state improved in other parts of the world like India the extended family is still fundamental but is it really just an economic arrangement hard to know well on the second thing I am Hindu clergy so I spent years and years and years and years inside of a very serious Hindu religious outfit and I had no think of [55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=3300s) myself as being to some degree post Hindu because when you start asking hard questions are at the intersection between science and religion you usually have to cite the science so um if you take a very sophisticated philosophical view it is much much easier to model what's going on right I mean if you build computer systems from bad assumptions like dual you get software it is incredibly hard to write if you go into a very very serious you know profound philosophical understanding of the nature of the universe and then write that down as code you end up with systems like Lisp or Haskell now these things are not fundamentally philosophical representations but there are systems of structures which are mathematically grounded which is the closest thing we're going to get to a kind of religion you can put inside of a computer right if you want eternal truth mathematics has it for you so I think that it's important to think about this in terms of the difference between the languages which are functional and properly grounded or indeed any properly mathematical we frankly have yeah anyone go to the proper mathematical foundation versus the languages that we just kind of cobbled together out of things like procedural thinking and that difference coolly we will well be applied to database design you could have systems of representation for objects which have real mathematics underlying their semantics and they would be vastly more powerful and have much more utility than things which are basically reification zuv the kind of procedural knowledge that we use from day to day it's a great question we should talk about overwatch Cheers thank you --- End of [690] FSCONS 2017 - Vinay Gupta - Resilience, 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, [740](https://guptaoption.com/texts/740.md) Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at... (2017); the most closely related, [706](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md) Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.