# FSCONS 2017 - Vinay Gupta - Resilience (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [690], part 1 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, 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 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=0s) the the intention though hon today was to talk about how the digital representations that we build of humans in computers affect how human beings then proceed to treat each other so there are a couple of different ways that I can give that talk one of them is kind of abstract theoretical and political and one of them is very practical and very businessí and very blockchain flavored does anybody particularly care about blockchains is that topic a strong interest couple hands right so you're gonna get the abstract and political version of this doesn't matter I've spent basically three years inside a market capitalism plugging away attempting it sound like a reasonable human being to business people after I abandon ship on the political projects I'd been part of and it does impose a certain cognitive burden going back into the world of theory so if this is a little creaky in places and sounds a little flim-flam II you know the next two talks I'm doing in the next two countries are very gray suit events so if we go back to the beginning of computers representing human beings human being started as integers right the IBM Hollerith punched card systems you go back to basically had a unique ID number for every human being and it was simply an index number and the sum totality of whom humanity as it was represented to the computer was just a number you were virtually a number you weren't a name if you were a name you were a name really for tax purposes and not really much else and that sort of an approach is very typical right if you think about your relationship with dysfunctional organizations to dis offer dysfunctional organizations you always feel like you are simply a number in a machine right there's no sense that you're being treated as an individual you're very little humanity you're just a number now that is at one end of a spectrum of dialog right at one end you are completely dehumanized into a number at the other end you have pervasive wraparound surveillance capitalism that knows everything you ever did and is capable of doing things like predicting that before pregnant before their parents know so the rich representation of a human being is not necessarily for the human beings benefit

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=150s) rich representations of human beings can be against our interests or for our interests so your friends have a rich representation of who you are and that rich representation represents a balancing of their interests in your interests in an ongoing sustainable dynamic relationship but the rich representation that's held about you inside of say Amazon or Facebook is largely for the benefit of serving you advertising and here we get to an interesting juncture which is we sort of assume that advertising is instinctively a bad thing the in theory the perfect loud fair is as valuable to you as direct human communication from somebody that knows you intimately right we all have a set of unfilled needs which are theoretically fixable with the product right I persistently need different kinds of weird bits of Av and equipment I want a cable that does this and if somebody advertised to me Haven a that cable that you wanted we have one for you now this would be extremely useful communication there'd be no loss of quality of life in my experience for being shown something that I actually wanted and needed and could afford the problem that we have here is twofold firstly most of the advertising is for terrible things that we don't want because the model is not rich enough to get rid of all the advertising which is not relevant our interests right every time I log on to any kind of social media platform right now all I see is adverts for blockchain startups trying to sell me their bloody tokens right and all I'm seeing is the entire world is just a wraparound of token advertising oh my god these idiots write at the same time there is also the secondary agenda which is the company that's serving me the ads is not particularly interested in my welfare so it's not going to serve me ads for things which are preferentially good for me it doesn't care whether the advertiser is advertising things which are bad for me or good for me would you like to buy this product which does not really exist and will steal your they don't care so it is not the wrap-around nature of the advertising experience it causes us the problem what causes is the problem is that the ads are irrelevant and predatory and the stuff which is irrelevant is simply predatory on attention right it's that problem of insufficient representation turning into a cognitive predator ecosystem that takes us into an environment where advertising is essentially parasitic rather than symbiotic and we can all kind of notion

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=300s) that the perfect model of yourself that has the ability to accurately for example find the things you're interested in in the media or report you open a piece of software that you care about is updated could theoretically also bring you intelligence about products which had been created or offers of things you might want to do like vacations with your friends so I want to stress very clearly that the problem here is not having rich representations of human beings and machines filtering information for their benefit the problem is the agency of the rich model if the rich model is owned by advertisers and the advertisers make more money by being parasitic and idiotic rather than being sophisticated and helpful you're going to end up in a position where you wind up just nailed to the mast by the big databases because the business model in which your personal data is embedded is inherently bad for you but it's not hard to imagine similarly rich representations that existed in your service rather than as predation upon you so it is not the richness of the model that represents the inherent problem it's the agency of the model and this gets directly into a set of questions about the long-term future of AI where we start questioning whether or not an AI is working on your behalf or on behalf of its owners and operators and the questions of how we even find correct language to discuss agency in artificial intelligence is the topic of another talk which I'm still in the process of figuring out the underlying structures for am but that question about agency of other people's software I think is an extremely deep philosophical question and it also connects very nicely to computer security in the form of thing called the ability based operating system so capability based operating systems provided an extremely high level of computer security because they assumed the old code had the agency of its creator unlike the UNIX model or the Windows model or the Mac model where all code has the agency of the person running the program so when we assume that the code has the agency of the creator plus the agency of entropy because all code contains bugs and bugs are essentially entropic then you wind up building a computer system which doesn't trust the users decision to run the code as overwrite in the interest to the author of the code it preserves the model of agency right the way through the computer security system that we built and these systems are theoretically at least extremely secure they've never been fully effectively commercialized

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=450s) largely because there is a general sense that it's a little bit too complicated but I think in the long run it's the only way were likely find secure computers you half the model the agency of the artifacts correctly to be able to produce genuine security so I'm gonna go back through this question of rich representation so probably at this point the richest behavioral representation that we have lives inside of the advertising world and the advertising world back doors directly into the national security apparatus to all intents and purposes the NSA is Google is Facebook is Twitter is your internet service provider all of that information is being scraped and pooled and the internet is essentially a single giant eye from the perspective of the NSA I would be entirely unsurprised if they weren't using the entire internet training data for an artificial general intelligence because as we've seen the person with the most data generally does the best job inside of AI when you multiply the amount of data by a factor of a couple hundred thousand times the efficiency of almost any AR algorithm goes straight up and the possibility here is that the reason that there's no data Hungary is it's a training set for an intelligent machine and you can see the train of logic which would lead there the intelligent machine is required to parse the data the machine gets more intelligent the more data you give it to parse there's a positive feedback loop there that could very well be the thing that first bootstraps artificial general intelligence that's not a reassuring thought right if you think you're worried about google's AI how much more worried should we be about the NSA's AI because for one thing if they crack that problem we're not going to hear about it for decades right the Enigma machines that were used to in world war ii were not revealed as having been broken until what year late 50s early 60s carefully kept secrets so representation one the behavioral database maintained by the state and its proxies in the form of large corporations the unification of state and corporate power and rich data set to all of these attempts which were made to take the body in to the virtual so you start with virtual reality and initially you are simply a disembodied point if you put on a headset like you would get around a phone whatever they call it Google's it's calmer and whatever is the simple goggles into it your SWAT phone um you look around that world as a

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=600s) disembodied point whose location is entirely virtual so you're in the system if you move your head up and down the system doesn't know you've moved your head up and down it does know if you rotate so it's got no absolute positioning if you step forward or you step back nothing changes so your absolute positioning is invisible to the system it doesn't exist your rotational positioning as you turn your head the system could pick up because it has JIRA scopes right accelerometers so you're a point with pitch yaw and roll XYZ that's all you are you're represented by a quaternion so there's nothing of you in the system because all the system has is an abstract godlike point and that's all the in from all the information that the VR system has of you there's nothing else there we go up one more step in technology into something like the vive the Vipers a couple of external positioning points it has masts on which that our IR beacons which basically scan a laser across the scene to identify where things are so at that point we know half the spatial positioning right the acts and the way the zero represented not just the pitch in the on the roll and once you have that spatial positioning we begin to see more of you the system knows how tall you are because you can see your head right that's not a bad piece of progress okay now if I move up and down the system knows I move up and down we can do kind of look around like this and that ability to know just those three additional pieces of information immediately builds a different kind of a bridge because now you're no longer just the abstract point of perception you're the abstract point of perception with that is directly moved by the body in a completely different way to just the rotation of the head and why it seems so different it's quite tricky because in Western cultures were taught to very much identify with the brain as the seat of self we generally feel like if we're moving our head around we're moving our mind around the pitch in the on the roll in some sense is a mental construct once you start to be able to move the body around we begin to think of the body as being this robot which we're attached and now the VR system is beginning to build an interface with the robot now all these things are cultural constructs you've gone to the Middle Ages they would have told you the seat of the self as your liver or your heart or some

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=750s) other thing right but the fact that we're beginning to bring the body into the system inside of the constructs that we're in changes our perception of what the machine is doing now there is a little piece of the body in the system and we can do things with our nominated body that go beyond our head and that's the beginnings of bringing some of the self into the system the weird thing is when you then look for the body there's no standard representation of the body so sometimes you look down and there's nobody there there's just a floating point and you can't see yourself at all sometimes there's an abstract body so there are games where there's simply a torso which looks like a medieval suit of armor no arms no legs there's just a torsional and helmet you look like a ghost oh I guess I'm ghost what scolding this armor right but it's a little bit of a representation of the body in other games there is our body but the body isn't your body so you look down and you're aware that your fruit is forward and the system just has a leg that goes straight to the ground and this is very disturbing that's all what's that doing there so that initial attempt to represent the body goes into space where it's semantically incoherent we have no semantics of the body inside virtual space using the existing technologies you can do it you can walk around and you can look at things and all the rest that stuff as long as you don't ask who or what you are it's relatively compelling as soon as you ask that question false the pieces right so this is a second model of the body right first model of the South you've got the big dataset second model of the self you just have the disembodied point third model you begin to the disembodied point plus some relationship with the actual machinery you can go further you could put hands into the system's you told to controllers the controller's show you Hans the Hans have even worse problems with representation you look at the hand and the hand is not in the position of the hand that is holding the controller you push a button to make the hand open and close to pick object app but you physically know that your hand is holding the controller and if you make the mistake of opening your hand because you want to open your hand at the game the controller falls out of your hand now okay it's on a belt strap but that constant mismatch between the actual mechanics of the body and the

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=900s) positioning of the instruments with the representation of the self inside of the forms causes a kind of dissonance around the body and that dissonance around the body hasn't shown up in a big way as a problem in VR because most of the people that are using VR systems are nerds and find dissonance around the body perfectly normative oh look there is dissidents around the body just like always ah right um you know that thing where you could just tell for around by pushing the button and you can kind of go Bing Bing Bing Bing Bing around the scene you know that feels much more natural to me sometimes than trying to get in things like it's almost a different shape where the seats never in the same place what are these doors right so that kind of approach where the world is not right already and it continues to be not right in VR will work fine for nerds right the problem will be when you get to the general public who are generally speaking much more embedded in their physicality that they will come into these things and they will feel terrible because if you're somebody that spends half an hour a day looking in a mirror it becomes really really really difficult if you're in an environment where you see yourself and you're not you right you see how direct this is and you know half an hour a day looking at yourself in a mirror it's pretty normal for people that are not nerds maybe more women than man but you know people spend a lot of time on this stuff right it seems for them it appears to be very important they put a lot of effort into it I mean if you heard of this thing they have called fashion right I didn't really understand it at all but when I started having to interact with people in a business context you have to like dress in particular ways to get access to particular kinds of micro societies it's absolutely bonkers can you not just set the bit with cheer if you know chmod no no it turns out in the real world that there are sets of protocols that involve the use of physical tokens for access to social spaces absolutely bizarre so you know this is what happens you leave academia you have to learn this stuff from scratch there are to be a guidebook um so the representation of the body as an issue that divides the Nerds from the non nerds I think is going to be acutely felt inside virtual reality right until we solve the body representation problem it's going to be an absolute dog now then we get to the question for what happens when we solve the body representation problem so how do we do it we put a bunch off what's a lidar machinery into the room so we can

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=1050s) tell exactly how far away all of our pixels are we scan the physical bodies using more lidar we do all kinds of clever things involving bringing in a pre-existing digital model of your physical body and putting inside of the virtual world and at this point things begin to get weird I did a kind of accidental experiment of this in second life must have been more than ten years ago second life you know simple alternate reality system big virtual space you had a kind of Avatar constructor where you could build what model of yourself and take it in the standard human representation that most people picked was a kind of seven through high Alf or a dragon or a demon or you know some kind of substantially altered human form and I'd being kind of naive about this just made a virtual person the Mook those much like me in the real world as possible so is this kind of you know bald guy babe yellow shirt green striped pants and I was just kind of wandering around in this thing looking like myself in that environment this turned out to be obscene right people would be a wide as your avatar would click that look this is what it looked like in the real world there because for them this was breaking the sense that they had that they had detached their consciousness and put it somewhere else into a body that was better than the body they were already in right and that dynamic where for some percentage of the population virtual spaces will appeal to them because they can conceive of peeling their mind out of their current physical body and putting it into a different thing versus for people who identify with the body as self and the idea that you can peel off the software and abstract it onto some other platform seems horrific completely disorienting these differences in how we model and represent the body in the mind turn out of direct consequences on a doctrine of technology and I think that right now if you look at the dialogue inside transhumanism about skimming the algorithms off people and then re-implement in them in silico for most people they don't believe their algorithms they they have no notion that they could be represented in some sense as a bunch of weights on size of a very very very large graph right and whether you believe that or not changes how you relate to the kind of you know we're going to upload our personalities kind of dreams for some people that stuff seems reasonable and intuitive you could just skim off the algorithms put the software or much better hardware for other people it seems kind of horrific

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=1200s) like I'm not an algorithm I'm a person well what defines you well is it this you know 70 kilograms of meat or you you see and we don't have objective scientific answers to most of these questions until somebody actually succeeds in uploading a consciousness we're not really going to know whether consciousness is our algorithms or whether they are some kind of weird kind of phenomena that we haven't gotten a handle on you know maybe it's the Penrose model when it's all quantum mechanical maybe it's something which is buried at a much lower level of understanding we don't know where there are algorithms mapped to consciousness anymore than hydraulics mapped to consciousness because they used to think it was all hydraulic is the algorithm an actual fit for the nature of mind or is it an enormous ly crude approximation that covers almost none of the actual functions in mind and the short answer is we don't know every civilization goes through a period of assuming that the highest scientific thing they have access to accurate reflects the nature of consciousness it's a very repetitive cycle now um with all that framed let me try and make a bit of a scramble through the high ground so what I'm gonna suggest is that every computer system has inside of it an abstract representation of what a human being is the surveillance marketing system thinks that you're a set of preferences and it uses your observed behaviors in what you click to model your preferences and these preferences have predictive value that can be exploited the virtual reality system that we discussed in theory which scans in the entire body so you can take your body with you into VR that system is designed to produce fun right you take your body with you into a place which you couldn't ever exist in like you're wandering around inside of a lava dome and you're having fun the product is fun right the model of the self is literally the surface of the skin is the you that you're taking it and we go to systems like computer security systems when you log into a system you're a username you're a password you're a set of permission and you're some files and that's the UNIX model of a user that's what a user is right it's a model of a human for our purposes the relevant model of the human is this the IBM Hollerith machines which

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=1350s) were so popular in Germany before World War two the user was a number right it was a number it was a name it was a genealogy so inside of all these schemas inside of these data structures is embedded a philosophical position on human and it's never made explicit how does this system perceive the human being that is using it is not a question that we ask in software and this is not by the way from a kind of critical theory perspective although this is sort of a critical theory question I'm actually looking at this for a very pragmatic engineering perspective because the user can't get anything out with the system that the system doesn't represent if there's no model of the thing inside of the system I as a user don't exist in that dimension of my being so a good example of this is search history right systems download search history right they they keep it they sync it through all this kind of stuff but the system's don't generally speaking store the full text of everything I've seen so I remember seeing something but unless I happen to remember the title which will be recorded in the search history I can't retrieve the text so my memory of the situation is larger than my computer's memory of the situation and this is absurd right it constantly feels wrong that I can't do a full-text search for everything that I've seen on the internet on any of my computers but for whatever reason they don't by default store that even though there are up you know half a terabyte a free harddrive on the desktop um we just it's just not tracking what I did so my recollection the situation exceeds that of my machine because the machine is only storing the history in terms of a headline and a URL and I'm storing the history in terms of this complex neural mass of interconnected bits so the fact that history is thrown away is a decision that somebody made because they weren't trying to model my memory and enhance my memory the wrong model my behavior and in this respect the browser manufacturers had gotten a little bit contaminated with the advertising model the fact that it doesn't have the full tax history is because they didn't think about me as a user looking at information or recording bits of it they only thought about a quick history and I don't want a quick history I want a memory model and that sort of disjoint function is everywhere inside of software right because we don't explicitly state what is the user to us and how does user interact with our technology we're not really starting

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=1500s) in a way for just genuinely user centric now why do we want to be user centric because we want good tools right cognitive ergonomics will define the future of the human race there is no doubt in my mind at all that if we do not successfully figure out how to build tools that fit our intelligence is as smoothly as the tools that we made for say woodworking fit in our hands we're going to end up with suboptimal human performance from now until the horizon at an example of this which has been frankly disastrous for Humanity on a pretty large scale is perfect the QWERTY keyboard writte designed as much as possible so that when you typed letters each letter would be typed with the other hand one two one two one two one two left right left right left right left right and designed to slow you down enough that the keys wouldn't Jam so it put a lot of frequently used letters on inconvenient and weak fingers for example the letter A is on your pinky which is not a very strong finger and the way our G which is far less used is on the strong index finger so that sort of decision-making was designed to make mechanical typewriters that wouldn't jam and we've lived with a 30% less speed in inputting text into computers for what is a hundred years 150 years when does QWERTY invented its ancient we locked on to a standard that turns out to be terrible for human beings and it produces a whole bunch of crippling injuries from things like RSI because the little fingers are just not made for the kind of load that you put on them if you take a great deal and we probably all know people that have had career at risking in from repetitive strain and a lot of those injuries a result for people when they move on to a keyboard design that's designed for human heart right so we've got untold people hundreds thousands of people who had career-ending injuries because we designed a keyboard around the needs of a machine rather than the needs of a person and then we standardize on it this is incredible right now imagine what that looks like if we take into the domain of a software design what does it do to your mind to have a situation where your computer stores less of what you've read than you do right now I have to try and think what I have to search for oh I have to go back to Google and I have to try and remember enough of my red to type it

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=1650s) into Google and oh that's interesting I have to keep going back to the centralized search engine every time I want to try and remember something because my local machine won't remember it for me do you hear what I'm saying right the natural cognitive model is that my computer should store why Fred and I should be able to see it instead we have a position where every time we want to recall something that we saw and we can't remember exactly where it is we have to go back to a single global server to go and retrieve that information the model of the software in front of me has been deformed by the imperative that I should continue returning to a search engine perhaps maybe that's how this works I'm not sure but the cognitive ergonomics of the situation are suboptimal because rather than being able to look for only what I have seen which means if it's in my memory I know it's in my machine I'm now going back to the general pool where I'm subjected to all the other things which sort a kind of sound like that out of the entire global pool of all possible objects and that modeling right of the relationship between me and my computer as an extension of my humanity is not done because the computer is not understood as an extension of my humanity it's understood as a product right now does this whole sort make sense so far I'll take one or two questions here just to make sure we're all on track because the next bit is where it begins to get strange any any immediate points of clarification real good for the next here right let us go into the Great Sea now as we move forward we're in a position where all of our natural resources are extremely constrained and we have seven and a half billion people heading for nine billion so in this kind of a future there is a need for accurately model in what is happening because we no longer have enough natural resources that we can kind of wing it right when you've got a couple of hundred thousand human beings as the total global population it really doesn't matter what they do because they're not affecting very much when you've got seven and a half billion human beings who with the human beings plus their animals like dogs and particularly cows and sheep and things like that represent something like 90 or 95 percent of all vertebrate biomass

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=1800s) literally if you weigh everything which has a spine by the kilo something like 90% of it is us on our paths right in that kind of environment how we behave suddenly has dramatic consequences because there are so many of us that the amplification of those behaviors sloshes around the entire global ecosystem as if there's no tomorrow which frankly given our current ways of behaving there may not be so when we get into this question of modeling a human being inside of a computer in all probability the way that we are going to manage natural resources in future to ensure that we don't drive ourselves into extinction or accidentally I don't know eat the remaining elephant will be driven by a computer model of a human being right there will be a piece of software in the future which figures out you and what you are consuming and what you are F throwing away right what are the inputs what are the outputs what is the processing how much meat are you in how much carbon dioxide are you emitting from your energy streams what percentage of the world global supply of brass are you currently holding on to right how much is the stainless steel in your possession currently worth and is anybody will buy the stainless steel that you currently own off you because it's more valuable inside of a jet engine than it is inside whose a cutlery drawer where you haven't used it in 20 years right and that need to build an adequate representation of the assets of the human race so that we can efficiently allocate them applies whether we are talking about the stuff inside of a market structure whether we're talking about it inside of some kind of a managed economy or planned economy or whether we're talking about some kind of you know posthuman machine economy where we basically right on the back of artificially intelligent intelligent infrastructure like patents right it doesn't really matter there are too many of us for us to just sloshed around without having any kind of optimizable data layer but will allow us to manage environmental impact and this is the agenda behind smart city smart cities entirely about figuring out what people are using so that you can change how much of it they're using out the points where it's expensive to provide for their needs and there's a simple economic argument for this if you're peak consumption requires 100 power

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=1950s) stations to meet but you're only at peak consumption two days a year right the rest of the year power station number 100 is asleep you only use it two days a year and the rest of the time it's just sitting there not doing anything so you're paying for a power station for 365 days but you're only using it for two and therefore the energy from that power station is very expensive and if you could just reduce the peak a little you can rake at work with 99 power stations rather than 100 so you can ask people hey the power grid is really really busy right now could you please not run the washing machine you could ask before whether they would mind not running their dishwasher for two hours and that kind of stuff can save your society billions billions of billions of dollars this is why the pushing for Smart Grid but if that stuff is going to be genuinely efficient it's going to need a model of the human being and the human beings activities so that it could figure out where it can shave grid load without directly impacting your quality of life and if it's good enough for doing that it can invisibly optimize the power utilization that we have as a society in a way that leaves you with a more effective more efficient society and no reduction in quality of life now for us in ridiculously affluent societies and in ridiculously often corners of ridiculously affluent societies the need for that kind of extreme brute-force optimization is not particularly clear but if you have this discussion inside of a country like India or Mexico where brownouts because the electrical grid doesn't have capacity or regular fact of life the idea that you could add a data layer to the electrical consumption and stop the brownouts is a real thing because in a lot of societies we have direct choices to make between different courses of action which all affect people's quality of life the old saying about this was guns or butter I can't remember which President was think it was Roosevelt possibly Eisenhower they used to say that you know every bullet fired is you know a direct reduction in the shelter and housing and clothing available to help people who were poor inside of America that there was a direct choice for every economic action was it producing welfare or warfare and that sort of modeling if you think of us as a single polity as a single planets worth of humans that's incredibly important right because we don't have the data

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=2100s) layers we're throwing away huge amounts of room for optimization and if we get that optimization right people will live when otherwise they would starve right think of the food supply chain how much of the stuff which is in the food supply chain is winding up as junk rather than feeding somebody that would gladly eat it hmm right not comfortable lot of problems so given that unless we find some kind of enormously abundant global economy and I mean so much stuff that we don't even count it proffer get wasted in the same way that we don't really care about storing a gigabyte file anymore I don't know just throw it somewhere right unless we see that kind of exponential acceleration and resource availability for all physical things to the point where everything is as cheap and as abundant as bits are unless that happens we're going to wind up using computers to moderate our resource use and if we go down that track the model of a human being which is embedded inside of those computers is going to dramatically shape the entire future of the human race right how much natural resource is it appropriate for a human being to spend on armed a poll point is your art habit overconsumption of a kind that lures a call if life is somebody else if some Tantra sets the value of art to 0.1% the value of sport because sport is keeping people out of hospital and art is only making them more confusing then you might be in a position where you just wind up optimizing the are out of your society's right now I don't know there's a lot about our out there maybe we should just off tries all of that but that question of what do we optimize becomes a critical question when we're starting trying to figure out how are we going to run the world and what are we going to optimize and how are we going to optimize it is going to be based on models of a human being because we're constantly attempting to reduce the impact on the actual human beings from the optimization that we're conducting the optimization function is limited by the amount of optimization the human beings take before they will break the optimizer now can anybody tell me what is the optimizer that we're currently running on the global economy and what is its model of a human being it's a simple one-word answer what is the optimizer that we're using on the entire human race right now market

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uumkVobbfYQ&t=2250s) correct right and to the market a human being is money a human being is an integer it's a number of pants that you control right it may be associate with a slightly richer model in terms of list of the property you own if you own things like houses but to all intents and purposes inside of the market economy human beings are optimized by a single number money alongside of this that then goes a richer representation which your government stores which may include things like health records tax records educational attainment but very few of those things are visible inside of the market economy except at points like wage negotiation where you take your educational certification and you convert it into more money so this is the optimization function that we are currently using to run the universal now could we design a richer representation of a human being which would allow us to perform more effective optimization of the global economy than money mmm that sounds like a pretty interesting research project could we design a better representation of a person than money and use that representation to optimize more efficiently than the current global economy optimizes now I think the answer to that question is probably yes right in that it would be pretty hard to design a worse optimization than a many thousand year old system that hasn't undergone substantial updates in centuries right I mean this this money thing is incredibly out of date our informational bandwidth has increased probably a trillion times literally a trillion times since it was invented so why are we still using money as a way of making decisions in the situation where we've got damn near infinite data processing power it just doesn't make any sense if we optimize things down to a price we've thrown away well everything but one ten thousandth of the information embodied in the object and then we slide it across and then the other person has to reconstruct it on the other end you know if you look at objects like I mean you know take this cap right there isn't even an ID number on this thing so if I want another one of these how do I find another one of these right okay there's a pile of them up there but if I was attached to this particular model of

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/690-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [690] FSCONS 2017 - Vinay Gupta - Resilience, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.