# Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [752], part 2 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2019-09-23 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected
- 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): Clearest recording of the camp-at-scale design problem behind Harappa.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Sheet-waste question (1995): The question behind the Hexayurt: how to build a dome from 4x8 sheets without wasting 25 to 40 percent of...
  - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut.
  - Saving the World on the Cheap (2007): Essay on a new way for charities and governments to fund lifesaving engineering.
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into...
  - Ethereum launch (2015): Release coordinator for the July 2015 launch of Ethereum, the programmable blockchain.
  - The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019): Talk on rehousing 300 million climate migrants in new cities, and the thirty-year Hexayurt plan, halfway...
- 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.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
- Ideas developed here: 30-year plan (Hexayurt; target revised upward, now 300 million)
- Topics: Rural poverty & development infrastructure (18%); disaster / refugee / food (15%); Burning Man shelter building (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: refugees (22 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); speed of light (7 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); refugee camp (10 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); global trade (7 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); refugee camps (6 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); Sphere standards (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); commodities (5 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Burning Man (10 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); basic income (3 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); ShiftPod (2 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): ShiftPod; Sovrin
- Importance: core-text score 0.62 (1.00 is the top), number 40 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md): same career work: Hexayurt
  - [172] [vinay gupta | be you. (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/172.md): same career work: Hexayurt
- On the same works, just before: [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md); [748] [CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit Malta... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/748.md); [255] [Global Fintech and Blockchain - Imperial College - Vinay... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/255.md)
- On the same works, just after: [165] [The Mattereum Manifesto: green capitalism, product... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/165.md); [254] [Vinay Talk Amsterdam October 2019 (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/254.md); [758] [#3 Vinay Gupta, Indexing the physical world (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/758.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: The Cities That Will Walk Away, video, 2019-09-23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [752], https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[38:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=2337s) So, let's go back to the big level again. What the hexayurt gets us is a somewhat inelegant way of building modular relocatable cities. Now, we've discussed why you want cities rather than refugee camps. There are a whole bunch of political questions which we'll come back to about why a city is a city. But the simple hardware question is, "Can you build something much more city like out of stuff that you can sling around the world relatively easily?" And if you need to move the refugee camp, or you move the city or you need to add to it or you want to turn a suburb into a new city center, if you want to do these things, you don't want to lose all the capital that you've spent to build the systems. A building like this, you can't take this building to pieces and move it somewhere. It's gonna cost more than building another one. But modern building techniques where you do things like bolt together steel girders rather than welding them, those you can disassemble, move and then reassemble. And those kind of approaches, the modularity and the reusability and the standardization, those approaches haven't yet come to the building industry in a big way, frankly, because the building industry is kind of a gigantic ripoff. But there's no reason that we couldn't apply these kind of principles to a new kind of emergency urbanism and then back propagate that into the real world as a way of enormously reducing the price of housing globally. And the overpricing of housing comes from market manipulation and terrible engineering practice. Housing doesn't have to be this expensive. We could fix it if you would let engineers build houses rather than architects. So, this is a factory which makes hexayurts. It's an outfit called Reno Hexayurt. They have an Instagram and they post lots of pictures on Instagram of their factory where they're making hexayurts, and they're just producing these things for Burning Man, a few hundred units a year, I guess. Not sure how... Exactly how many they're producing, but they're moving truckloads of housing around. And that stuff could easily be packed into sea containers and moved around. These hexayurts, by the way, are not their hexayurts, their hexayurts are a lot neater. These are somebody else's hexayurts. But I couldn't find a picture of a mass of the reno hexayurts. It's a small shop. It's got no industrial tooling to speak of. It's a bunch of people assembling these things with hand tools and a few power tools. You could build a factory like this anywhere in the

[41:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=2487s) world, and just ship the material there and turn it into housing, but it's not the only thing that you can do this for. That's a cooking stove, a water filter, a cargo bicycle, toilets. These are solar lights. All of this stuff flat packs into sea containers. Ship out the components, assemble them on site or ship out the entire things, and it takes up a little bit more space. We can containerize more or less all the machinery that is required to keep people alive and to gradually build a higher and higher and higher standard of living. And you know that for a fact because practically everything you own went through a sea container at some point, right? We go through this vast kind of performance art of trying to make you think that everything was handmade and boutique and was delivered by Wombles or something. But you walk around even the funky little boutiques downtown here and all that stuff came in a sea container from China. And you know that, and I know that, but they won't show you the sea container because they can charge you 10 times more for your stuff. But you can imagine gigantic warehouses where you just line up the sea containers filled with whatever it was that happened to be in them when they were delivered, and you index it all on the computer and people just walk around with wheelbarrows and pick out the stuff that they need, and that's more or less what Costco does. The amount of wrapping that you put around the thing hugely changes the value, but the basic proposition is you make it and you ship it in a box and then you take it out and you use it. And you can do that for everything. What makes a city a city is a service architecture. A refugee camp provides you basically with food, sanitation or water, maybe some medical care. A city provides you with a vastly wider and broader service architecture but a lot of that service architecture is the same basic components remixed and remixed and remixed and remixed. The difference between an office and a movie theater is basically the kind of deployment of the seating and how big your video projector is. And if you were going to compromise a little bit on some of the nuances, you could probably use the same seats and the same video projectors in either an office configuration or in a cinema configuration. And certainly, if you're dealing with people that are internally displaced or have become permanently displaced in refugee camp type settings, the idea that you might have a little bit of compromise on some of the detail, but you've got a reconfigurable array of things that produce services, that sounds like a pretty good approach to me.

[43:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=2637s) So when I started trying to design refugee camps at scale, I realized that I didn't have a way of designing them. I could sort of sit down and imagine how things would be and write down what I thought ought to happen, but there was no methodology that I could find that would allow me to identify and build a comprehensive model of what was happening. There are things like the sphere standards, but the sphere standards were kind of like a laundry list. I should've put this on a slide actually. Does anybody know The Celestial Emperor's Benevolent Emporium of Knowledge, something like that? It's a thing from Borges, and basically, it's a list of animals divided up into 14 completely nonsensical categories, and that's what most of the design tools are like when you start trying to do things at this scale. They're not really orthogonal; they're not neat and tidy. So I built one that was very objective.

[44:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=2686s) Engineers. Too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, illness and injury. These are the six things that can kill you. And then we build around us this kind of cocoon of services that protect us from the things that will kill us. And this is called civilization. It's basically just the machine that keeps you alive from all of these different things that can happen to you. And then we've got a bunch of activities we do to keep ourselves occupied between birth and death, like watching television or knitting, right? But the core of civilization is that it covers these basic needs. The municipal level is the level that we're really talking about here. So we're talking about the services that are delivered at the level of a town. But if you want to understand civilization, it's actually a stack that goes from individual all the way up to global. So if we go back here one, if you look at this too cold segment here, dying of the cold is something that you can all relate to because you live here. So we just have to think about it, right? What protects you from the cold as a tiered service architecture. So layer one is your clothes, and layer two is the building that you're in, layer three is the energy that heats the building that you're in, and layer four is the global markets that capitalize the infrastructure that extracts the energy from the ground and then pumps it to your building. And there you have it, energy markets, power station, heating system, clothing isn't on that one. Alright? But if you think about it, every time you don't die of cold in the winter here, you're dependent on global financial markets to keep the oil moving, which runs the rest of your civilization. Maybe it's fracking the natural gas or maybe it's nuclear, you can actually map out these systems in a fair bit of detail. So, multiple classes of services that operate at different levels, nation state cascades down to organization, cascades down to the individual, right? So we would form a group, simple, simple, simple ways of modeling, right? And workspace is where we are, right? Communications is how you knew that this was the place to be on this particular day, and transport is how you got here, and that's the things you need for group. Resource control is why we're using this theater for this purpose, rather than having a showing of Gone With The Wind or something. And that's basically it, that's all you need to form groups,

[47:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=2836s) is communications, transport, workspace and some ability to set a boundary, it's very, very simple. Groups turn into organizations. They get a shared plan, they get a map of action... Or sorry, rather, they get a map, they get a plan relative to the map and they get some way of selecting new leadership if something goes wrong. Now, you've got a fire service or a hospital. And we go up to the nation state level. A nation state is a set of effective organizations, a list of territory... Sorry, a map of territory, a list of citizens and then there's some hocus pocus around things like international recognition, but if you have these systems in place, they're basically a state. Jurisdiction is very, very important. My definition of the nation state is not that it's a thing that has a monopoly of violence, which is the Weberian model, but it's the thing which has the ability to retroactively or proactively pardon crime. So, if you pardon murder, you get an army, if you pardon assault, you get police, if you pardon theft, you get tax collectors. And this, I think, is key to the understanding of what the state is, and how this interlinks with theories of justice. It's a state of exception, to be a nation state. And this is the big map, right? So this is a simple ish way of understanding the entire function of a civilization, and when you start talking about building cities from an endless series of sea containers that get dropped off at a dock and unpacked by the refugees, and each box you unpack allows you another 10 refuges because you've gotten a bunch more life supporters bill. It's quite important to have some model of how it's all meant to work, even if it's very abstract, because if we can't do this kind of systemic and meta systemic thinking, you wind up in a position where all the components work, but they don't add up to a nation state or they don't add up to a city at the end of it. And we've all seen this kind of complex systems architecture, like when corporations try and deploy new software, the failure rate is something like 70%, 90% because all the individual components work but the thing overall doesn't do what it's meant to, and that kind of systemic problem, anytime somebody tries to do something like install mass transit in a city, you see all of these kinds of problems. And I should point to this. So this mystery of sovereignty down here, this is the thing that goes wrong when something turns into a failed state, is something becomes unhooked down in that corner, and you go from

[49:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=2986s) having a country to not having a country. And to be honest, nobody really understands what that is. So I call it the mystery of sovereignty, but it's somewhere down in that corner of interrelationships. It's about like an arch, that are a whole bunch of things leaning on each other, and if any one of them drops out, the whole thing falls to pieces, but if you don't have a model of what it's meant to look like when it's stood up again, it's very hard to stand it up again, as has been seen in places like Afghanistan. Right. So this is really the assertion, right? We can't build cities from scratch, a sea container at a time. You figure out what's going in the box, depending on what climate people are in and what their cultural norms are. You maybe do some testing at the village scale, you make sure it all kind of works and then you just start pumping the industrial platforms to produce enormous amounts of material, and you ship it around the world and the people that are going to be living in these towns take the stuff out of the boxes and clip it together using nice videos that you've probably put on YouTube and that they watch on their phones. It doesn't sound that bad. If you've gone to Burning Man a bunch of times... Raise your hands if you've gone to Burning Man a bunch of times, right? You've participated in this process, right? It's not that different from Burning Man. The Burners would be exactly the people that you'd get to project managing. It's a very plausible thing, but you have to do this in a model where what you expect to get out of it is a city and not just a cozier refugee camp. And for it to be a city, the people need economic rights, they need passports even if they're restricted, they need some concept of citizenship, some concept of sovereignty. Because if you're in a position where the entire ecology is simply controlled by a single bureaucracy with absolute power, which is the typical fate of the refugees, it's incredibly difficult to do any kind of innovation, because innovation is inherently messy, and it's inherently anti bureaucratic. So we have to think very carefully about what it means to give cities as the way forward for the people that become permanently displaced persons rather than for it to be camps or resettlement. It's a very different mindset, because cities are extremely ancient. Humans have been doing this city thing for really a long time. We've got a lot of experience doing it, but not all of that experience is written down and the cities themselves have complex emergent properties, which is why Paris feels like a completely

[52:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=3136s) different place from, say, Brussels. Now, there is more. So to get this to work, we have to get an enormous number of moving parts to fit together neatly and smoothly, otherwise, we're going to wind up with systems that just don't behave. And this is very easy to see, anytime you do something like try and spend a billion dollars on writing a piece of software, most of the time it fails because of the coordination problem. The pieces work but the whole fails.

[52:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=3170s) So I wanna start looking at the coordination problem from the perspective of global coordination, because if we're talking about shipping things around the world and assembling them into functioning cities, really, that's a global coordination problem. But I'm gonna start at the most abstract possible level and work down. This is one of those level shifts I warned you about at the beginning. So the speed of light means that it takes about a third of a second for a signal to get all the way around the world and back. It's usually a bit longer than that on the internet because the switches take time and the cables aren't perfectly straight, but it's about this amount of time. And that is a hard physical limit which can never be reduced, as far as we know, right? So you're never going to get less than about a third of a seconds delay if you want to do communication around the world. Now, a third of a second doesn't seem like very long. You can write fancy software that allow human beings to talk to each other and it will stretch out your speech a little bit as you talk, and then cover the third of a second delay so that you never actually talk over the other person. Almost all of your video conferencing software does this. So you can manage it for people, but you can't manage it for machines. About 50% of the world's commodities are traded using a thing called high frequency trading. And high frequency trading, a typical system would process on the order of 10 million transactions a second. So a third of a second delay in a system like that is a 3 million transaction de synchronization. So if I'm trying to make sure that I wind up with 50,000 chairs, 500 video projectors and 50 big geodesic domes or something, if I need to lock in purchasing for each one of those things, there has to be some way of handling this delay or I might wind up with two of the three and I've already locked in purchases. If I want to be able to coordinate all of these different moving pieces, I need to be able to simultaneously execute trades because I'm completely wrecked if I've got everything that I need except the toilets. Right? So if we want to build really efficient systems, we have to be able to synchronize the machinery of trade really effectively. Now, for something like refugee camps, this is only a theoretical problem, right? We're never going to see a speed of light delay affect the ability to build a refugee camp and make it work. But that speed of light delay problem is cracking open the global trading system right now because nearly all the machines that do high frequency trading of commodities

[55:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=3320s) are in America and this is beginning to make the rest of the world rather upset, because it means that all the money which is trading those commodities is being governed by American law and we may see a point in the future where the Chinese and the Europeans set up independent high frequency trading facilities, and then we have to coordinate these things internationally or we wind up with three much smaller, much less liquid markets, rather than a single global market. And we can't afford the world to break up into a whole bunch of less liquid markets that were all balkanized because we weren't able to figure out the software and the politics of ensuring that global trade stays global. This problem really matters. And I'll come back to that in a second. So another example of this kind of global system, GPS, right? GPS uses the time lag between your phone and the satellite to figure out where your phone is relative to the satellite, and when you do that for a number of satellites, it can calculate your position to within a couple of meters. Every time you use Google Maps or some other mapping service, you're using the speed of light delay to locate yourself on Earth. Isn't that cool? Right? Turns out that general relativity is good for something. Google Spanner, right? Collaborative document, editing on the web, all of that stuff, powered by a database called Spanner, which is a completely global network, and the data centers all have atomic clocks and very careful synchronization protocols to make sure all the pieces stay lined up. And that structure is why it's possible to have half a dozen people editing documents from all different corners of the world and they're not continually editing over each other or lagging while the documents catch up. Google Spanner plus a whole bunch of advanced mathematics involving operator theory. And again, it's just managing the speed of light problem. Right? Blockchain. So this is my kind of home industry. 2014, I kinda washed out of the back end of academia and decided I had to go and make like something resembling a living, so I went off and joined the Ethereum team as a project manager and I ran the launch processes for the Ethereum blockchain, which was kind of a big deal. I had no idea it would work this well. But the blockchain solves that speed of light problem by imposing a mandatory delay, right? Speed of light is a third of a second, the block length is 15 seconds, so we just assemble all of the trades in a 15 second block and then sequence them in an arbitrary way.

[57:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=3470s) And that's how the Ethereum system works. That's how all the blockchains work, bitcoin and all the rest of it. It's an approach to solving the synchronization problem globally in a way that facilitates trade. That's why you can spend a bitcoin from America to China and you don't have to go through a whole bunch of complicated banking stuff to do the synchronization to make sure the coin isn't spent twice or there's a fraud because it's all being handled on the internet using this approach of having a nice, long delay between when you say something has happened and when everybody else has had a chance to check that it's not a fraud. It's a very simple approach but it solves the global trade problem that HFT doesn't solve. So if we slowed global trade down to a 10 second block and we cleared it using an algorithm and everybody was using the same algorithm so everybody agreed on what had happened, we could build a decentralized architecture for global commodity trading which would also get rid of high frequency trading, which most economists agree is a source of pure friction in the economy. All the money made in high frequency trading is actually a tax on the people that are doing things like building houses and cars because it makes their commodities more expensive for no good reason. So you could kill two birds with one stone if you could put an enormous break on the amount of money being taken out of the economy by HFT and you could prevent the balkanization of the global economy into a set of competing HFT regions. That, I think, is the most important argument for blockchain. So these things are all aspects of a single underlying truth,

[59:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=3563s) which is global civilization, right, is now well established. The Internet is its predominant manifestation, but that's actually the third or fourth round of global interconnectedness that's happened in the last century. The first big one was probably the sea container system which was set up and now carries the vast majority of goods in the world, and the entire world operates on a single standard. Something similar happened in financialization in the 1980s and 1990s, where we basically interconnected all the banks, and that turned into a single global architecture for moving money around. Then we did the Internet. We did the same thing for information. And arguably, with the blockchain, we're doing the same thing for trade. Inevitably, right, we're moving into a world where the pieces are permanently interconnected because everything affects everything else. And we need to be able to measure and account for those interactions and interdependencies, or we're gonna get into real trouble. The predominant problem that we have managing the environment is we can't tell whose fault it is that things are screwed up, and so we can't send them a bill, right? If we had total transparency and we understood everything that was happening in the carbon economy, we could figure out exactly where the problem was, and we could just send people bills, and it would stop. And this is what's happening, right? One way or another, we are building this architectural global knowing. It's being built in many different pieces, it's being built in many different forms, different people are working on different parts of it, but that system is for real. Whether it's a national security apparatus in student global monitoring or whether it's a global credit reporting system like Visa operates, we're building systems that understand the world in a holistic way because all the causes and effects are playing out on a global stage. Okay. Last couple of slides, and then we will be done. Sorry, it's been kind of long and complicated. So this global knowing system, the global knowing about people which is most fundamental is passports. But the passport system doesn't actually serve our needs very well because you're constantly losing the damn thing, and it doesn't give you any ability to interact with electronic services in a coherent way. So you can imagine new global identity systems that would work better than Facebook, or credit cards, or passports. A lot of these systems are called Self Sovereign ID, uPort is one system, Sovrin is another. Lots of people working on this, and this is potentially also incredibly important in terms of understanding global citizenship. Another part of

[1:01:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=3713s) this is the engineering of borders, right? So a border for goods and a border for people are essentially just software artifacts. So if I take a sea container and it has a JSON file which describes every single thing in that container to an arbitrary level of detail, I ought to be able to run a piece of software over that file that will tell me whether or not the box can pass customs and come into my country. And if I can do that, we could automate huge amounts of the friction that we get at borders, which would, again, facilitate global trade. And we need global trade to stay global because if we don't have global trade to stay global, the global economy will break into a bunch of competing units. And those competing units will be less efficient, and we will all be much poorer. Global trade is super important. My company is a blockchain company called Mattereum that actually works on this problem of how we define what physical objects are well enough that we can make decisions about those objects using software. Of all people, we're working for William Shatner right now, doing Star Trek memorabilia, which is a fascinating place to start. So all of this, we finally put it together, is... Fits into a framework that we think of as economies of omniscience, if we know what's happening with everything, we can make optimal decisions about how to allocate resources. It's like a super information rich, super information dense form of capitalism, and it has the side effect that it allows us to manage the environment at the same time. So as you're building the deep understanding of physical objects that allows you to do things like establish prices for them accurately, you also get into a domain where you could track the environmental footprint or you can track contamination. If you want to know whether or not your lettuce was grown in an area that was affected by the outbreak of, say, E. Coli, that also gives you the information that you need to figure out whether it was imported illegally and ducked tariffs, or whether it comes from a nation that is, for example, currently blocked on trade because of human rights practices, right? The knowledge systems that you need to handle the capital are the same knowledge systems you market, are the same knowledge systems you need to handle the environment. And as we build the Internet out so it interconnects all the remaining systems, the production systems, the consumption systems, the payment systems, as we interconnect all of those things, we wind up with the necessary knowledge that we can then use algorithms to begin to solve

[1:04:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=3863s) the coordination problems which result in the economy being enormously destructive at the extraction end and enormously wasteful at the consumption end. And it's all part of this long term trajectory of digitization. And this is the kind of mega trend, right? When we get right down to it, we're gradually de digitizing reality, we're building the sensor networks, we're building the algorithms, we're modeling how all the pieces fit together. And I don't see another way for us to practically manage the problem. Keeping 2 billion people in luxury is consuming basically the resources of the entire planet. We have to find some way of becoming radically more effective in our ability to turn the things that we take out of the earth into extremely efficient human welfare. And the only way that I know of getting those kind of breakthroughs is basically to use computers to monitor processes, and make them more efficient, and detect waste, and eradicate it. We did it for manufacturing over the past 200 years, and it's why you can buy a phone for $50. We did it for investment. That's where high frequency trading, and algo trading, and quantitative finance came from. Now, we do it for the rest of the systems, ecology, economy, consumption, waste disposal. So the last thing I wanna talk a little bit about is volatility. So I guess we should do this in a personal way. Has anybody in this room been really poor for a decent chunk of time? I'd have thought, right? A few hands, yeah, less than you get in Europe? So when you're poor, generally speaking, the worst thing that happens is volatility. You have money one day and you don't have money the next day, because your cart breaks its leg, and those spikes are enormously stressful and distressing and they make you miserable, right? If we had use of things like insurance for all those tiny little risks, we could smooth out the income fluctuations for people that are very poor without it actually costing any more money, maybe 1 or 2% of income. Micro insurance is exactly the kind of service you can deliver if you've got computers and smart contracts and blockchains and all the rest of that. If you pair that with something like basic income, then you can get into a position where if you become poor,

[1:06:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=4013s) you become very stable. Because the thing that makes being poor horrifically stressful is the precarity. Things are bad, then they're a little better, then they're way worse, then they're a little better, then they're a little better, then they're little better, then if something... And that is constant stress, and massively, massively difficult to live with. Basic income... Universal basic income alone doesn't solve precarity because your expenses can self fluctuate, but a lot of expenses could be turned into insurable risk. So I can visualize a system where we begin to solve an enormous number of the problems that we have, dealing with the fact that a lot of us are poor, by simply accepting that one of the predominant goals is to take the precarity out of poverty. And we've done this in finance for decades, right? We found all kinds of elaborate ways of risk compensating deals so that if it's really important that a billion dollars stays a billion dollars, it's insured and it's managed and it's regulated and you can take care of it. We may not have enough money to run a much more elaborate welfare state, but we could run a welfare state that got rid of precarity on more or less the existing budgets. And these are the kinds of approaches that I think we need to think about as we look forward into the future, because if we don't figure out how to provide reasonably, equitably for 9 billion people, we're going to have a century of increasingly destructive war with really high tech weapons. And it's gonna really suck. We're at sort of the last stage where we can pretend that what's happening in other countries, if it profits us, isn't actually in some way our fault, right? We're in the position where we are so deeply connected and there's so much information available because of the Internet. And as we go through these processes of digitization it will become even more integrated and even more interwoven. Eventually, you realize that political accountability has to come along as part of the package. I used to say it when I was teaching people about economic collapse, and economic collapse means living in the same conditions as the people that grow your coffee. And you can't have ultra efficient, ultra transparent global supply chains without having to contend with the welfare of the people that are on the other end of those supply chains. You can't build an efficient system if you continue to put up veils between the producers and the consumers so that the consumers see this kind of fantasy world, but they pay 10 times more for the resources to maintain that fantasy world. The economic pressure forces us into reality,

[1:09:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJWPv3Cl5Go&t=4163s) and as we're forced into reality, we can get to grips with problems like climate but it also comes at the cost of having to clean up our act in terms of where the manufactured goods are manufactured and what the consequences are there. So the future that I see is that we build a world which is fundamentally more economically efficient, but also a world which is fundamentally more just, because the tools that we need for economic efficiency are identical to the tools that we need for justice. The actual software that you need to run an efficient world is also the software that you need to run a just world. Efficiency and justice, when you fundamentally get down to it, rely on exactly the same data sets. And that's all I had to say. Thank you.

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End of [752] Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away, 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, [165](https://guptaoption.com/texts/165.md) The Mattereum Manifesto: green capitalism, product... (2019); the most closely related, [711](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md) Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.