# Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain, Identity, Resilience and Social Order (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [691], 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, 2017-05-16 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals. 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): International-tier governance and finance ideas.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - 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)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (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)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Open government & anti-corruption (12%); culture / history / fiction (12%); housing / house / quality (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Course of Action (2 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 2 undated); clean water (2 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); global democracy (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); platforms (3 here; 76 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); Wired (1 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); political change (1 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); climate refugees (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Frontier (1 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); India (2 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); toilets (1 here; 44 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.23 (1.00 is the top), number 333 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [677] [Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [157] [The Black Elephant Challenge for Governments | IPS Commons (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/157.md); [268] [Thomas Bjelkeman of Akvo.org and Vinay Gupta of... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/268.md); [267] [The future of humanitarian innovation (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/267.md)
- On the same works, just after: [699] [Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt.Capital | Blockchain: Ecology,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/699.md); [690] [FSCONS 2017 - Vinay Gupta - Resilience (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/690.md); [740] [Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/740.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: Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain, Identity, Resilience and Social Order, video, 2017-05-16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [691], https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=0s) maybe you can tell us how accountability can potentially work together with the direct participation of citizens for example there are few examples like crowd funding and violence which opens new opportunities but when we talk about political decision how that would work well right now because of the lag between the situation and the cultural option of the situation the Democratic mandate is operating in the world that hasn't existed for 20 years right yes and we need to make decisions which are grounded in the present so the lag between where culture is and where technology is allowed between where culturalism where policy is lag between her culture is important and the political situation is is enormous and it's only growing wider so for example and when was the last time you heard anybody seriously discussing biological weapons actually just recently I seen an article online and it was as the level of I believe some Minister asking questions about that so I believe that

[1:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=68s) there is something but I'm not sure to what extent goes deeper in terms of understanding what the problem is rather than just talking about the problem so I mean the last time I saw big activity around biological weapons was just after 9/11 when people were emailing anthrax through the email sorry we're mailing anthrax to each other through the u.s. postal system right and then a few years later they found some biological weapons lab in Iraq and it was dressed up as being luke the war was a right thing and then somebody would get it about the decontamination view and that was really the last time that I saw people focusing on it in public but I'm completely convinced from everything they know about the science for everything I know about the history the bun wonderful weapons are a huge part of the forces which shape military strategy and even the old war on terror upon yeah right I think an enormous amount of thoughts about biological weapons risk and I'm guessing that lots of the case right because all that stuff is off its off radar yes so if we were trying to get the general public briefed on biological weapons risk of portable weapons strategy to the point where they were informed enough to make a decision by the time we were done we'd probably have a third of our population so depressed they'd be unable to function in their jobs when you talk

[2:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=143s) about biological weapons it has the very little effects on the society well such we think it has little effect on the society right but on the morning when we do discover we're wrong two million people who die right if the entire hierarchy of the military-industrial complex is actually a machine for handling biological weapons risk which i think is very possible then you can discover the whole society has been shaved by invisible men fighting an invisible war against an invisible program since the end of the Cold War maybe from before the end of the Cold War and I say biological weapons it could be space-based nuclear weapons sure it could be little green men that we found on them it could be just about anything but the point is only that getting an informed consent from the public requires educating them in things which are psychologically damaging from Canoga and in this kind of position that baby is Google warming right yes the public's understanding of global warm and is so far behind the climate scientists understand it's a 20-year gap the climate scientists are beginning to wonder whether they should shoot their children before things get really bad and the general public is only just getting aware that maybe they should change their lightbulbs right and the closer you get to the frontier of climate science the more the unbelievable terror is a daily fact of life for the scientists who look into the data this 20 cent Celsius temperature anomaly in the Arctic never seen ah right 20 Celsius temperature if had happened in New York they would have all frozen to death or they would have had like you know spring rain in the middle of that jaggery you have 20 Celsius is an astonishing normally so I think that what I'm saying is it's impossible to educate public if we talk

[4:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=246s) about first Industrial Revolution or digital revolution would you say that the biggest role and cost industrial revolution would be played by programmers and people for example who are very close to the tech side of the society yes so in a position where the public can't be educated because it simply takes too long and they don't want to know we wind up having to put the representative and representative democracy in a really serious role right so right now in the u.s. in the UK most of the people who are the representatives are lawyers because their job is to make wall the ideas you get people who are really understand what make law the problem is that they're incompetent in science and technology and the main drivers of the story at this point are science and technology right US unemployment turns out supporting recent studies to be largely produced by industrial robots rather than to being produced by outer work the fundamental drivers of unemployment or technological and we're going to see that in all classes we're going to see the self-driving cars and the idea that people that have never written code for a living are going to be making the decisions about how we regulate these technology seems kind of over set like we really want a very different class of solutions and to get that we have to try and get way more Science and Technology people into government and into the institutions to make these decisions because the only people that have any chance of getting these decisions right I don't think it's reasonable to accept lawyers out of the de-facto engines of government in a situation where science in technology inclusive of the driving point ultimate rule I just read that World Economic Forum report on security and they all talk about

[5:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=350s) interest of business and partnership is government multi-stakeholder responsibility accountability how does it fit is what you just said well so whenever I hear multi-stakeholder by here is go Rudy right they will all want different things they will have no ability to coerce each other so it comes from the cartel they can't cooperate they can't compete all they can do is talk a single stakeholder with the country bility I think actually solves problems multi-stakeholder ethically personal problems and how do we build accountability mechanisms where people nail their colors from last on a course of action and then when the course of action succeeds we reward them and when it fails we take them out of the loop to the next decision I don't know how we get not I mean this is almost like a I

[6:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=400s) totally agree with you but I have just one problem with it what about the Valentine China in German so world overview it's very individual and people who program and people who do science or people who do politics they have different world views and if you just take one of those I am NOT saying which one and trying to implement the swanee and programming into the code don't you believe that we can potentially create some problems for other parts of society so we already have that situation the specialist group which runs society are called lawyers almost all MPs are lawmakers in America who legal background almost none come from science and technology so in a situation where the problems are scientific problems were the problems of technological problems having with people that really know how to manage those kinds of situations being charged of them is perfectly logical yes it will produce a change in who dis reportedly represented but we already live with that problem the problem of having one class of people be completely dominant in society it's lawyers and the wretch that make law Lawrence Lessig lots were ruled by Laster but in America because you need to raise big money donations to be able to run a campaign it turns out the big-money donors or the people that decide who is or is not going to be run as a result without campaign finance reform only people are acceptable to the ultra-rich could be American politicians so that's a fact of life America hospital live with the idea that you simply displace of a legal elite with a scientific and technical elite you know this might be a mass it might not be any more democratic with what we have but with it will not be any less democratic and of course we do want the system which is more democratic but to get there we're going to have to overhaul the machinery of democracy because we are as Democratic as we can get within for your electoral democracy and until we do the technological overhaul the way that we figure out what will the people is we're going to be stuck with representative delete so as we can see

[8:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=525s) our current social system is quite constrained many limitations and some of them may be can be overcome by using new technologies new innovations blockchain AI might be some of those technologies so do you believe that those technologies will actually empower or distant power and individual in the future and I think that we will discover that some individuals who are good with these technologies will be enormous ly empowered but the vast majority of individuals in Europe and America are losing power very rapidly because their economies are no longer dominant in 1970 America did something like 50% of world's manufacturing 50% of the world's non factoring inside of America with 5% of the population they were incredibly rich relative to the rest of the world because they were incredibly productive and in the areas where they wanted raw materials and couldn't afford them they'd have an innovation that whole Banana Republic so the Americans have been losing momentum since the 1970s because they came out of World War two as the world's only superpower they had the massive advantage in the nuclear age they had a huge economic productivity and they basically ate the world yes right but that was 50 years ago that and over those 50 years they've lost them that was lamentable mental Europe who gave a shattered after World War two but it was also America's primary trading partner they were enormously protected by the Americans Americans pumped enormous mental resources into standing Europe up as a buffer against the USSR on that golden era was the peak of vampire the global average standard of living is around Mexico and what's happening is that the rich European and American world is gradually sliding towards Mexico at the same time as India and Africa and the poorer parts of South America are all sliding up towards Mexico everybody is converging towards the middle and the ultra elites have basically globalized their effort to middle maintain above that level in a way which is quite also not new so maybe we don't know

[10:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=656s) where we're going but we can see that technology will definitely shape and change the dynamics and relationship between the government and Appalachian the the critical factor in all of this is rate of change right so the ability for an entity to react appropriately to its environment at varies depending on how quickly the environment is changing so an incredibly intelligent technically individual can look at the technology can make informed decisions and can generally get that part of the strategy right but there are more or less the only person to come if you go then to a group of 15 such individuals now you have groupthink you have the ways you wait and see everything slows down and things become much more difficult if you go to an organization the size of say IBM Microsoft the log is not five years might be ten years so if you try and look at any given organization and figure out how large lag is it gives you some idea of how good or bad the decision-making will be relatively rapid rates of change and the one thing that I'm almost certain office of the rate of change accelerates and continues to accelerate certainly for the next 10 to 20 years probably for the rest of my life so do you believe that we should

[12:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=730s) put any constraints on the liberty of individual to make changes to a new system let's say program a programming something or she'll he or she be free to make whatever choices that they want to make well I mean from my perspective and there are two tiers of this question so one of them is about individual freedom the other is about social choice so from my perspective you know programs are speech if you believe in free speech somebody should be able to sit down in front of a computer or instructor to do anything on the other hand a social choice theory level the structure of the technology you build tracing the effects a society that you get so is Facebook a media company or is it a website that some kid knocked up and weakened at Harvard you see ervil's Yale and one of those places like Facebook star Harris was Harvard what I'm cooking so inside of that situation the question then is who watches the Watchmen right if you attempt to have some mechanism by which we regulate the creation of Technology who then doesn't regulate it if the answer is people that are 20 years behind the curve we might select our own throats on the ability to manage climate because certainly the current techno social structure has no possibility of managing the climate process at all nothing no whoo no structure that is currently standing is able code so if we slow technological progress we miss or technological progress to the point where we don't develop the true and necessary to make the term and we wind up with two billion people dying on a farm right or we continue to accelerate as fast as we can we accept that there are going to be a bunch of downsides and we you know hope for you you know will that there is an island of stability that we can reach in time to build the necessary mechanisms so you could do a global representative democracy pretty easily I've done a couple talks about it but the simple approach is that you basically use opinion polling and global randomized calls to be able to build statistical models of for global public opinion s and you can do this a very manageable cost right we call 20,000 people if it is it provably random 20,000 and we appropriately compensate the model for example areas for phones are more scarce yes then you could build a decent statistical tool that would allow you to serve a human the global opinion for a

[14:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=880s) few tens of thousands of dollars per question it could be incredibly cheap on that kind of an approach to building a global democracy might give us a representation of very affordable costs without necessarily building the mechanisms similarly you could build a carbon based global reserve currency pretty easily you take the remaining carbon emission that we can do you divide it up equally among the human race you issue it with train and then you allow people trade right and all the carbon emitters are basically going to have to register these tokens or they're going to be enormous taxes yes those kinds of approaches you could just about make something like that work but to get into a position where you'd actual implement those things requires so much change it requires so much acceptance of the climate reality from the mainstream popular I don't know that we make it in time so as we can see we're heading

[15:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=933s) toward the first Industrial Revolution a digital revolution is exact some of us may be medical revolution but remember three billion of us still work on farms and eighty or ninety percent of our calories of food that we're over their own pounds so is it the gap or our lack of experiencing well if it's a lag it's a log of maybe five centuries right now on the other hand they're also getting mobile phones you know Kenya for example enormous penetration were baffled even into the one acre farmer agriculture class yeah so the thing about all of this stuff is it's very very very unequally distributed and not for reasons that are entirely about money yes bun state of the art technology is expensive but it's a lot less expensive and by the state they are car it's a tenth or a hundredth of the course of by the state of the art house do you believe in they call distribution and don't believe it's a good idea or don't know if it's impossible well first

[16:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=993s) if it's a good idea and secondly do you believe that new technologies can help us to have it implemented well so a global average standard of living is somewhere around Mexico if we take all the world's resources and divide them up equally we wind up with a live individual budget something like five thousand dollars a year yep if everybody in the world is living with exactly five thousand dollars a year I think that what is going to happen is that we're all going to die because you no longer have the ability to do deep scientific research because you can't pull the resources efficiently in the mechanisms allow your punch through what happens is instead of having a blast furnace at the center of the civilization where we just throw money and what comes out of it as miracles if you distribute the heat so evenly the alchemical furnace goes out progress stops and then we wind up back in the Stone Age in about two hundred years right so I think that equality at the point of a sword or reinforcers kind of equality in a top-down fashion is basically suicide on the other hand Kerala in India has a life expectancy within two years European norms they've got a fertility that I think are on the low around replacement they've got a 95% literacy rate and they've got an average income of $1 a day so they have roughly equality on health outcomes and roughly equality on educational outcomes on under 1% of the income of Americans and that models equality for rather than modeling equality in cash we model the quality in lifespan and infant mortality yes these are kind of the quality I think is completely possible because 90% of the gains come from clean water sanitation adequate diet and a few other things like that you know maternal education maternal health monitoring female education all of these things are control all these things are incredibly cheap both environmentally and economically yes so I think that we could bring up standard of living in terms of just the basics of lifespan and infant mortality to a pretty acceptable level everywhere without having to tear our societies apart to get in without killing the alchemical furnace in the process because if we kill the alchemical furnace we are well truly screwed but that doesn't mean that we need to have kids dying of diphtheria in rural Africa it's not an either/or choice but you have to start measuring in terms of money and you have to start measuring in terms of lifespan so when we talk about the digital revolution who is going to be the winner is if

[19:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=1143s) corporation is it people is it just the one winner can we actually all win I'm seriously hoping that the winner in the digital revolution will be me but you know having decided that I'm going to go out there into the marketplace and try make some money so I can privately finance the hectare project and the disaster relief stuff and all the rest but would be this individual benefits kind of scaling up to the level of society well okay so society as a whole is a terrible mass right it's always been a terrible mass it's getting a little less terrible time passes but fixing society is a work for multiple generations each generation chips away at the problem a little more but it's a very very very slow process and in the 20th century we saw a quarter of billion people killed in projects which had unrealistic expectations for rapid social change oh yeah right so I'm very very wary of unrealistic expectations social change I think that we should generally expect society will continue to model in economically bad periods Society will get worse in you can only good good period society will generally speaking get better over time we gradually extend more and more right to more and more and more significance than kilojoules over time but unrealistic expectations social chain to incredibly dangerous so what I want to see is toilets for the entire human race light for the entire human race clean water for the entire human race harmed washing for the entire human race micronutrient supplementation for anybody that isn't getting enough food right there are a bunch of things that we can do five or ten dollars per person per year that will sort out the vast majority if they totally unnecessary suffering in the world this is social change that I absolutely believe in because it's economically possible it doesn't produce massive expectations of unrealistic social change and it alleviates an enormous other suffering all of that stuff is doable and it's largely within reach within my generation of generation after mine on the other hand and we've got no position inside of our philosophies or inside of our culture which allows us to deal with the fact that there are people out there with an IQ of you know 180 who only need three hours a night of sleep could fix five languages by the age of ten right we're also in a position where there are some people that were incredibly charismatic they can stand up in front of a crowd and the crowd will pay $30 a ticket to

[21:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=1293s) see the same boundary right we have people that are completely extraordinary in fundamental ways and in ways which are nothing to do with anything that you would think of as being a meritocracy yes and equality you know really to make everybody the same do these work try or do we try and want the latter societies make the best use possible all the exceptional talents that exist while I'm also accepting that nearly everybody is basically average right yeah I would like to see a what do you give me a utopia magic world I'd like to see a world in which we accepted to the people that should have good quality of life and the people that win should be able to change the future and I think that we can make that work without having to enslave the winners to support the losers right because in any given year maybe one person a thousand wins in a big way it's an unusual thing it's basically a lottery most of the research that I've seen done on what makes big winners is the chances with dominant factor the nonetheless society produces them in the art in the sciences in the economy in politics in all other Canadians sports

[22:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=1361s) yeah well you're absolutely right and as you said while we're discussing volcania and some people just need their water or lights yeah and maybe the wind and the concept of winning is different in different regions of the world and also the goals that we are aiming to are different as well it shouldn't aim at one goal well I mean I think we can achieve global minimum standard of living in which every human being has adequate food water hand washing light telecommunications you know immunisation birth control there's out what's the thing yes it's a few dozen dollars right that is completely achievable for the entire human race within my generation or the one after right thirty years from now I think that will probably be done some of it be done by market some of what we've done by stage some of the wind up by charity some of it done by open sourcing local and cheering but that is completely achievable and there is no reason for not doing it because it doesn't break anything important to try and success is very proper what I'm weary of in the Equality today is the idea that we want to try and equalize income because that killed a quarter of a billion people internally eccentric every place that tried equalizing in command of the genocide program a Swedish model works in Sweden to the probably because the Americans are carrying their national defense budget if you try and make Sweden run with military spending at a realistic level given it in or Russia things change so what basically suggested is this we accept that there is a power-law distribution of winners yeah and we engineer such that the eighty or ninety percent people with very ordinary lives don't suffer unnecessarily and if the ordinary life I mean you know until I was 30 I was a backpacking little man who wrote software in limited money then I spent a long time in academia I could give me an effect on world never really made any money you know did incredibly interesting things but for the vast majority of that period and we plug somebody that was largely speaking Musa because the startup side were involved was involved with never became big winners right I was the co-inventor of the world's fastest all remember an algorithm at about 93 and the company that eventually formed around that was very successful but by the time that company formed when they could organize to do something that was long gone right so you know I can personally amplifies with the idea that you want to ensure quality of life for the people that are losing but that's far more about stability security and access to health care then is about access to absolute

[25:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=1511s) spending power what does it mean for you to win what well I mean in my case there are basically two things the first is that 15 years ago I got quite 15 years fourteen years ago I got very interested in the problem with climate refugees and and I have set plans setting on paper for how you would approach managing the displacement of a quarter billion people's right and I think I might be the only person in the world that has a realistic chance of building the engineering capacity to have those people be displaced to catch them as they are displaced and to resettle them without them without too many of them dying in the process and I've tried to get our work funded by all kinds of entities over the years we hope you will touch it with a barge pole because it's so very radical and because the scenario was so very dark so I want to make enough money doing the VC stuff that I'm doing them the blockchain in the engineer and all the rest these bits and pieces and such that I can privately finance that research that I could prototype that I can desk that I can build demonstrators after that it's up to global civic society to pull it together unless I'm so incredibly wealthy that I can set up my own Gates Foundation and to openly talk about the idea that money is a tool for changing the world and to talk leather stuff I want to change is kind of a new thing for me but basically I decided that I was going to do capitalism because I'm going to privately finance climate micro research first plan second part is it'd be kind of nice if we didn't drive ourselves into extension in my generation and I think that there are a bunch of things that we could be pushing on much harder to get that done but 15 years of solving the way you know in think-tank world defense security zones all the rest of that stuff has burned me out on that effort so I'm taking care for myself I'm taking about the break once everything is kind of running again and you know the wheels are turning and with I want them to turn then I will return to doing a lot more work on the extinction risk stuff again this becomes something where once you're willing to use capitalism as a tool privately financing that something I also make a bunch of sense then but you know those are you know it's a very direct pairing right up so there are financial goals to achieve technical and policy goals but I tried to get done through government I tried to get done through your idea and I just couldn't find the radicalism to get that work done so this puts me in a position I have myself financed that stuff under whether you do that in this culture is you go to market place with a big stick you come up with a sack of gold and then

[27:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=1661s) you go from tip the world what do you think about social identity how it will be shaped by new technologies as well as the individual identity and also talking about the concept of private for versus public not in terms of the blockchain but in terms of the privacy identity to what extent technologies like what chain a I would make a small public or private and so I don't like your category of prime I like the category of secret right so if we divide the world into public and secret I think we got a much better idea of what the real terrain is in public or private because private is kind of like a few people know and maybe a bunch of other people get tall things weak and you know actually in a very real sense there's not much privacy yes right we talk about medical privacy what we really mean in medical secrecy you know your doctor knows nobody else knows end of discussion so private is a very squishy category and we talk about private but we we the privacy becomes a subtle secrecy financial secrecy medical secrecy you know legal secrecy this stuff is super important and I think that we are going to discover this and mass access to real keep secrecy of a country from the state can't read it it's incompatible with human survival because of biotech risk and if people have access to that kind of secrecy particularly at financial transactions you know there's this running joke from the internet that the IQ required to completely destroy the world crop so at one point every year and there's a Christmas nanotech biotech maybe even some kind of software are so incredibly dangerous that small groups of people with relatively long loads of money could potentially change the walking ways that be incredibly damaging for everything so I think it's inevitable that as we go further and further and further into this kind of ultra technology age we wind up with less and less and less secrecy unless access to secrecy for ordinary individuals about personal secrecy well I was going to say with a but and the but is if you don't know anything dangerous you can't do anything dangerous with your secrecy so actually really only the technocratic elite needs to live in a world where their monitor they're carefully monitored right if you have a you know liberal arts degree and run a pottery studio there's basically nothing that you can do with your time which is a substantial threat to anybody

[30:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=1811s) else whereas if you have a PhD in molecular biology and you've got access to a big lab at University maybe we have a right to monitor you round-the-clock from so I think that we need to start dividing the world into areas which are genuinely dangerous and areas which are basically safe and we need to accept that the genuinely dangerous areas are heavily heavily monitored and the basically safe areas I think we should ignore so what about

[30:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=1836s) cultural exposure on social platforms and something that we have on our mobile phones it's something different from the secrecy in the understanding or is it the same concept and I think it I think think of it as secret realm and private helps us draw the lines so for example and what I'm talking about cryptography because if white people need to apocrypha and say you know imagine that you're gay in Iran right if you are going to continue to be gay in your arm you're basically going to have to have secrecy and if you're going to be gained around you're going to use electronic platforms to meet people you're going to require those platforms to reinforce secrecy against the state or you're going to end up dead right and now we can say well there should be political change we should say well maybe people should change their behavior as we should say maybe people should leave you can make all kinds of speculations about how it all can be but the simple truth is that the world is filled with long term stable imperfect situations and being gained Iran is one of them people have to live their lives so you know you can make a clear case for professional secrecy as being incredibly important very very easily and different cultures have different things imagine being a pot smoker because you've got multiple sclerosis in America and the 1980s right it's the height of the war on drugs it relieves your symptoms it may even modify the course of your disease if you get caught at Google for 20 years right this kind of craziness is pervasive in human culture and we have to decide whether we're going to take the risk that personal secrecy in the face of irrational wall is a human right and some people will abuse it or we say a rule was absolute and the world is too dangerous because of nano tech and biotech risks to allow people partial secrecy I don't know which way we go yes but my nightmare scenario is a bunch of crazy people that decide that they're going to do something radical to the human race using a virus you sit at home you build the virus you let open kills all the men the testosterone level over one night or it kills all the really stupidly or it kills all the Chinese right and you know this notion that you could start working on things like genetically specific bioweapons I think that is almost certainly possible in the lab today and if it's not it will be very soon in the black world but I think that molecular biology is getting to the point where you can see that stuff as being a real part of life within 20 years and 20 years it's at the beginning of the internet present 20 years in the future is not that long and I really worry that

[33:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=1986s) we are going to wind up with a segregated society you know large numbers of people with no access to those technologies who live in peace freedom and security small numbers of people can do about this those technologies basically work in a community state so what will happen to

[33:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=2002s) our identity will we have more external points or we will still be liable and responsible for and maintaining and creating our ideas and I think the identity has clearly shattered for the other like people under maybe 25 20 and have grown up in an environment where they were always in a performative ironic fishbowl and what we think of as identity in a non performative way is gone for those people they're always connected to the crowd they're always on stage on this notion that identity is who you are when you're at home alone with book is gone because they're never home alone with a book there are a whole book and also they're wired in the way identity is becoming more social cut surprises engine injury Joe and it might be that the individual concept of identity was an anomaly of Western culture because actually human beings for the last many millions of years origin tribal bands and the tribal bonds you know if you were alone in the wilderness you die pretty quickly so you always stuck around your people if you could seems to be the general way that it works but in some countries like

[34:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05vU1mybals&t=2068s) Japan that's already is the case of collective identity but don't you think that in most of the Western societies individual identity was a driver of economic change and personal benefit the West as far as I can tell was the culture of the special has an individual identity and it's turned out to be enormously powerful and but at the same time the West is very unstable very violent yes so I wonder whether the Western tendency toward murder which is very strong in Western culture in Europe was a battlefield 4000 continuous years you know think of the wars over religion if just unbelievable horror because of the printing press you know so I wonder whether the Western tendency toward individuality is also very very destabilizing and makes people prone to murder and because I mean in a wrong term and you say we're about colonialism so basically you know Europe gets hold or firearms first and then uses them to colonize the entire world America then breaks from Europe and then heads off a little they're actually even more obsessed and oriented run the firearm yes but actually it's not really clear what European culture contributed to the world other than science and firearm and I think that fundamentally if we have to pick which one of these things is more important it ought to be science even though in practice it to the firearm so I think that we really need to double down wrong science but we need to figure out how to default it's on is it we need to figure out how to stop the market from corrupting it and we need to get used to the idea that high quality scientific truth is the best truth for you to access T and I stress the high quality because junk science is the worst possible thing that we could do I mean junk side every time I see people doing you know pushing results as if they were fundamentally true the same with is a I don't know quantum mechanics is true and you know I just cringe because YC is the lifeblood of the future bleeding up so you know this notion that we should be emphasizing the other part of what Europe and America broken world yes right D emphasizing violence double down on the sides keep the sides clean work hard on high-quality scientific truth rather than publication mills that to me is a cultural position that gives us real

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/691-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [691] Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain, Identity, Resilience and Social Order, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.