# Vinay Gupta talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015 (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [769], 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, 2015-12-08 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): History of infrastructure control.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (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:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Cryptography, encryption & cypherpunks (17%); Nuclear war & defence strategy — nuclear, space, military (13%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: global democracy (13 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); political will (10 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); DNS (9 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); proof of work (3 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); PGP (3 here; 16 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Possible Worlds (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); smart contracts (8 here; 110 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); contracts (10 here; 147 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); Fuller (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); basic needs (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Possible Worlds
- Importance: core-text score 0.44 (1.00 is the top), number 142 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [864] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin with Vinay Gupta Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/864.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
  - [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md): close in content (cosine 0.96)
- On the same works, just before: [755] [Vinay Gupta | Computers that just work | State of the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/755.md); [229] [The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/229.md); [759] [Vinay Gupta, Robin Hood Coop London Open Office, August 2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/759.md)
- On the same works, just after: [242] [Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/242.md); [694] [EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/694.md); [776] [Vinay Gupta presents "Nuclear Poker" to the London... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/776.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 talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015, video, 2015-12-08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [769], https://guptaoption.com/texts/769.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=0s) hi everybody so um I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about the past as a way of understanding the present and the future uh and I'm specifically going to talk about the wrong turns that we made in the 20th century so there are a bunch of decisions that were made in the 20th century that come to completely define what we think of as the present but this is only one of many possible presents if these decisions had been made in a different direction we would have end up with an entirely different current uh situation and many of those decisions were engineering decisions situations where uh we made a decision about how we were going to use a specific technology and after you make that decision the rest of History then begins to flow in a different direction so you can think of these as being places where an idea about a piece of engineering hits history hits reality and there are four or five different ways that it can land and the way that it lands then dictates the future after that point does this sort of make sense as a as an analytical framework so we're going to talk about possible Futures based on possible pasts and I'm going to go through a few of these are you doing this in the relation to better the future well funny you should put it that way cuz you know if I'd thought about that if I didn't realize that Back to the Future day was basically now but if IID called this talk if I had a time machine it would have been a perfect fit up so maybe we should call it that if I had a time machine um so what I'm going to do is basically go back over some decisions that were made and paint you a picture of the world that we could have had if we'd gone in the other direction and I think some of these are worse worlds and some of these are better worlds and towards the end of that I'm going to talk a bit about software and cryptography as an example of you know a situation where we picked basically the worst possible world and now we've got a few years left to fix it um so the first one of these decisions I want to talk about uh is the US uh decision to use the nuclear bomb in 19 uh trying to think when the first one was dropped was it 44 or 45 45 so Hiroshima and Nagasaki were decisions that were made right the US government had come to the conclusion that a bomb program was possible um and

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=150s) uh they had been convinced by the physicists most of whom where do we want is that better they'd been convinced by the physicists most of whom had run from Austria Hungary or Germany like almost the entire bomb team or refugees from Europe um that there was you know the possibility of creating a nuclear bomb that Hitler was working on creating it that if the Allies didn't get to the nuclear bomb first they would lose the war to the nuclear bomb and a very strong argument was made that this technology was not only possible but that it was inevitable right um I think it was Heisenberg stays behind in Germany and there's a very strong historical case to be made that Heisenberg stayed specifically to sabotage the furas nuclear bomb program that he stayed there as the head of physics for the bomb program and took them down a whole bunch of total dead ends in a very subtle way whether or not that's true is an open question but it's certainly one good reading history so the normal narrative people ask about the nuclear bombb is why do they use it in hoshan Nagasaki at all and I think that that is not the most interesting decision right that decision governments or governments they want to test the bomb they paid for potentially it saved a lot of American lives because they had enormous number of prisoners of war in Japan but that's not the question that I want to ask the question I want to ask is why didn't they go all the way to Moscow right you've got the nuclear bomb the Russians have taken half of Europe they're not giving it back up anytime soon and for a good number of years the Americans have the nuclear bomb and the Soviets don't and the Americans don't use the bomb they don't threaten to use the bomb they more or less allow the Russians to build a nuclear program without threatening to level Moscow if you even hear the word uranium and as a result because the Americans don't play their hand heavily when they are the only country in the world with a nuke they allow the Soviets to catch up and the result is mutually sure destruction so there was a brief window in which the Americans had total world domination in the palm of their hand and they refused to take it they allowed the rest of the world to catch up with their nuclear agenda and as a result we now have a world which is completely littered with nuclear weapons rather than a world in which there is a single Global nuclear haimon and they have the nuke and nobody else does do you see what I mean now about this question of a technology hits

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=300s) history there's a branch and the branch that we on is the branch where the Americans refuse to use the nuclear weapon and as a result we end up with nuclear weapons all over the world rather than a single American hgim this is an example of what happens when a technology hits reality and then bureaucracies make decisions relative to that technology and you get a result like the one that we're in now the tough question is what would the world be like if the Americans had decided that they were going to be the only country in the world with nuclear bomb and they'd nuked anybody that tried to develop one and that question there's no way to answer right so we can point to a range of potential Futures in which the Americans might have made that decision in 48 but we can't tell in those potential Futures was the world safer or unsafe in the same way that if we lived in that world we could speculate that if the American said allowed the Russian to to take the bomb then by now we would have had a nuclear Holocaust and everybody would be dead so we can only speculate about the nature of the other Futures that we could have wandered into but what I want to really focus on is this process of technology and choice where the technology is developed by one community and the choice about how the technology will enter reality is largely made by another the technologists develop it or the scientists develop it the bureaucrats and the governments and the uh Power structures decide how it will land in reality does this kind of make sense the stuff is dropped today in Iraq how that look like well it's hard to know that's what the the Americans finally did there well I mean how do you mean well attack it and and try to free and control it theion well indeed indeed um you know I don't think there's been a history I don't think there's been an Empire that has fallen in the global public esteem faster than America in history if you go back 20 years you know there was a time when the Americans were the good guys you know we forget that now but there was a time the Americans were the good guys that uh yeah how quickly people forget right that uh [Music] well yeah you could go backa 60 years but I mean think of um think of what was happening in Russia right the way up through the 1970s right I mean Stalin and his

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=450s) successors killed something like 80 million people is that feedback any less to much yeah it was a bit much so you know Stalin and his successors killed something like 80 million people ma got through about 50 million and while that was going on you know the worst mass murders in history five times the death toll that Hitler had the Americans were the only thing that was containing those regimes and they kept that up with very little support for the rest of the world from the end of world World War II through to 1990 and we extremely efficient in doing it um it's very fast you know how quickly we forget what happened during that period of history but that's still living memory you know the world moves really quickly I didn't actually forget that but to me it feels like we talk about the the lesser of a lot of evils it's not that the the US's hands were were free of any blood at all oh no I didn't ask that just that we keep the standards so low that they seem like they're good guys compared to how bad the others how much worse were I I do I didn't estimate this I actually I actually thought about that argument and worked it out on a bit of paper and as far as I can tell the Americans killed about one tenth as many people as the Russians and the Chinese combined so at the time that made them the lesser of two evils now things have settled down they look like the greater of no evils right you know times change so let's take another example of this which is we all have have a kind of narrative about what computers are that involves transmission of information and knowledge speeding up the society media creation of media some people think of them as tools of empowerment and so on but does everybody know where computers were invented and what they were really invented for right so you could take the first Inception Point as being babage who is an English engineer who made computers for calculating Naval Gunnery tables so you wanted to fire an artill shell and you wanted to know where it with land and babage worked out this stuff on his tabulating Machinery calculating Machinery then you come along to World War II and the computer is invented as basically a you know a kind of doomsday device to crack again German codes so that you can make your way through the German uh you know Machinery of command and win your war and I think that we forget that the computer was born in the secret world and that all the cryptography we use was born in the secret world and all of this

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=600s) stuff has bled out into civilian Society but it was born as weapons and to some degree weapons it Remains the dialogue that we have in our society about cryptography uh is very much like the American uh debate around Firearms the actual kind of Civilian empowerment that comes from a population that has access to strong code is very much like the empowerment of population that comes if you've got access to individual Firearms ownership we're dealing in a world where the dominant technologies that shape our societies are the spin-offs of military engineering nuclear weapons nuclear power cryptography and computers the Internet itself was originally designed as a computer network that would be resilient in the face of a nuclear war it was designed to connect all the nuclear bunkers and command posts together so that in the event that the bomb started falling something would survive and you'd be able to put the pieces of the network back together again reroute the uh Communications and then keep the entire show going and I think that a lot of the problems that we're having in terms of trying to figure out where the internet fits into society comes from an inadequate awareness of the fact that this entire set of structures are essentially Army Surplus Hardware it's a whole bunch of things that have dribbled out of the military and out of the secret world into M use and mass consumption so we're constantly in a process of trying to take these formerly military Technologies and put them to productive civilian use and sometimes that's easy and it works really well well and sometimes that's extremely difficult and we're left with this long lingering aftermath of well you know have we actually gotten them free of the military background or are they still completely embedded in it does this sort of make sense as a line of approach I really want to try and get us back to the points where the critical decisions were made and then we can move forward with the analysis from there so uh another great kind of turning point in this entire set of schemes is the five years around the creation of the web so if you go back uh around 1990 there's a period where we've got very little access to cryptography because the really strong cryptography stuff hasn't come out yet uh it's still classified or hasn't been reinvented in the cilian world or it's been reinvented but it's not widely adopted all all the code that people are using for things like pgp and for Bitcoin and all the rest of those fundamental algorithms what you call public e cryptography all of that stuff has only recently available to people and there

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=750s) was an enormous civil rights struggle to take those tools and make them available that goes on all the way through the 1990s um it used to be illegal to ex export cryptographic code from America on the basis that that code was a weapon and it was covered by a set of regulations called itar so programmers that were interested in working those systems were often giving up their citizen ship As Americans and leaving America so they could work on this stuff abroad uh I can't remember where the you had to give up your citizenship but you certainly had to leave America so you wound up with a whole bunch of people living in tax Havens you know working on cryptography because if they did it from their homes in America they would be arrested and the regulatory framework was eventually beaten because people printed pgp out on paper and then shipped it as a book and then scanned it all back in corrected the pages and recompiled it outside of America can you imagine that and this is how happening in the 1990s this was the struggle that we went through to get people encrypted Communications uh and hands up everybody in the audience who's using pgp on a daily basis to encrypt their email ah you see it was basically all for nothing right now should we do a show of hands for Facebook right we fought right we fought very very very hard to make sure that these Technologies remained available to make sure that the potential of using these Technologies remained present but in actual fact almost no some's using them right I mean you all know the world that we're in why aren't you encrypting your email because of usability ah you know that's the excuse we make the real answer is that people are just politically naive yeah okay it starts with it starts with right I mean we blame usability issues but the bottom line is that people are not encrypting their email because they're not afraid enough and maybe they should be so um let's go back to these decision points so in the early phase nobody realizes that the internet is going to be important in the 1990s so and we're talking about 9291 so right around the time you get S hbd 1.0 something like that the very earliest phase so in those days there's an enormous struggle to try and figure out how to organize the internet we've gotten as far as IP addresses so if you want want to go to a web page you have

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=900s) to type in the ITP address you know 16141 11.41 and you go there and you get you know Alta Vista or whatever the heck it happens to be you get your early phases of Yahoo this is before we had domain names right the only way that you could find things on the Internet is people would send around spreadsheets that had lists of names and lists of IP addresses that were you know the server that somebody sued up on those names and I still remember getting you know like a weekly email that had a list of all of the sites on the internet this is everything there is right and it would be you know first it was 100 then it was 300 then it was 500 then it gets to me a couple of thousand and people think we should stick this in a database so the database that they come up with is called uh domain name servers or DNS and we're still using the great granddaddy of G uh great grandchild of DNS today to organize everything but DNS was hacked together over essentially a summer we went from not having DNS to having DNS in practically no time at all because people just put the pieces together in real time because something was obviously needed and this was something and that's what we got so the entire hierarchical and National spec nationalist nature of the DNS system is a direct outgrowth of a set of decisions that were made really rapidly by a bunch of people that were under pressure so what we did was we encoded the structure of the political system of the world into the DNS system. co.uk org. nl. just means America right all of that stuff was never really properly thought through it was a bunch of decisions or made in a hurry by a bunch of technicians trying to solve a problem and what they wound up doing was embedding the entire current political superstructure inside of a network that had at the time the potential to be genuinely Global from the ground up in its conception right hurriedly made technical decisions partitioned the internet into nationalist boundaried areas without anybody really realizing that this was a bad idea or that there was an alternative so imagine if instead of dividing up the entire domain name system using National boundaries they' used something like the jewy decimal system they could have just picked a different way of structuring the internet and they could have dropped it into the system and we would have used that instead and nobody would ever thought it was weird so your websites would be divided up along the lines of a

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=1050s) 150y old categorization system for books but because that was how the internet worked nobody would think it was weird right and here's another one of these alternate histories what if the early days of the domain name system had been organized by subject boundaries rather than by national boundary right physics maath do history do call you could have had a completely different way of structuring the internet that wouldn't have given national government an immediate appeal to power because after all if you've got a UK domain name everybody knows that that must be a site that's under the UK government's control right right and that framing of the internet as a thing that had in some sense National boundaries runs from basically 90 I guess it's probably 93 or 94 right up until the explosion of top level domains that's happening right now where people have got you know cheese and do shoe and movie you know whatever it happens to be which are finally beginning to break up the idea that a website is predominantly defined not by its content but by its national uh nationality we're finally breaking the idea that the web is divided up into National groups and that the national system has America as the default nation and everything else is some kind of secondary thing that has a longer name associated with it right these tiny tiny tiny little technical decisions wind up having an enormous impact on the way that the world works and nobody's really paying attention to those decisions as they're made because they're typically made in a hurry by a bunch of people that are just trying to solve a problem and as a result the analysis that's done of those decisions is never particularly deep we just kind of hack it together and then we go and if it works it works and if it doesn't it doesn't now obviously what I'm talking about between the lines here right in the margins is Bitcoin and the entire blockchain Revolution so you have a bunch of systems that were hacked together in secret by a person or Persons Unknown who went to extraordinary L to defend their identity and to remain secret and what's come out of that is a huge challenge to the idea that you need to be a nation state to issue a currency what we have is a set of essentially law which instead of being backed by um uh the will of national sovereignty instead of being backed by an army is actually backed by mathematics and the idea that you could back law not with a chunk of

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=1200s) Applied Physics in the form of nuclear bomb but the chunk of Applied Mathematics in the form of encryption is absolutely crazy this is one of the strangest and most exciting things ever to happen in world history you actually have law backed by math rather than backed by guns and I don't think anybody knows where that's going to go it's a historic turning point that could go in one of a whole bunch of different directions depending on what people do right imagine the reality where the Americans had gone all the way to Moscow with their nuclear bomb completely different Universe imagine a world in which the internet had been non- nationalistic right from the beginning and we never had domain names that divided the web up into countries how much stronger would the intellectual defense for the internet as a global force of being if we' never made the mistake of putting National identities into domain names it's a terrible mistake with h and sight nobody really thought about it right so now we're coming into all this this kind of crypto range how many implicit decisions have been made in the crypto ecosystem in the Bitcoin and the ethereum and all the rest of that which are going to turn out to have wildly enormous historical impacts but which nobody's currently aware of as a problem right this is really the Crux of the age that we live in and once you realize that history is being made as a two-part process first by the technologists and then by the politicians kind of like a call and response or stimulus response system it becomes much easier to conceptualize how to steer history the first attempt to steer history is you make a new technology the second attempt to steer history is to try and control how the politicians mangle it as they get their hands around it um so that's the first step I'm now going to go back to another historical Turning Point uh around an American engineer called Buckminster 4 so we're going to leave software leave technology and go back and take a look at different model of how the 20th century could have unfolded um has anybody heard about pster four ah very [Music] good so does everybody know what judic Dome looks like geodesic dome these big hemispheres made of pipes yes something exactly like the thing at the entrance so Buckman Sur is an American engineer who has a very very weird Spiritual Awakening thing happened

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=1350s) to him H where he at least according to the official version of the history H decides that he's a complete failure as a human being and decides to commit suicide and he realizes that he's throwing away a perfectly good human being but he doesn't really want to live anymore so he decides that he's going to throw away his personal identity and then continue to live essentially as a kind of servant of humanity and he calls himself guinea pig be what can a single human being manage if they have no self-interest and what can they do for the world as a result of this and fer certainly makes a certain amount of Mythology about these decisions but certainly went through some very very strong and very uh direct personal transformation um the mythology is that he then deconstructed Language by refusing to speak for two years and then had to relearn English as if he was a baby is that true or not depends on which biography you read but it's certainly the story that were told and his use of English appears to be as if he had learned an alien language as a native and then spoke English by translating from the alien language in his head into English so he continues to use incredibly complex conceptual structures as single words omnidirectional all space filling Universal you know which to him are words that have the same kind of inherent meaning as left right up down root for us so when he says all space filling he specifically means a structure that can be replicated without leaving gaps as it fills the entirety of the universe by you know omnidirectional he means things which expand in a kind of spherical way and some things are omnidirectional with them some things are vectors so he divides the world up into different categories from normal English speakers the other thing that he does is he observes the world as an outsider so he basically says well you know clearly the point of human life is it people are supposed to be happy and most of the unhappiness that we know how to avoid is unhappiness based on material scarcity so why don't we just make enough of all the stuff that everybody needs to be happy and then everybody could be happy and the problem would be solved and he approaches this in a completely naive way he basically looks at the entirety of history as being a failure of humanity to correctly frame the question of its existence if the purpose of life is that people want to be happy and well then we should just make the stuff that makes them happy and well and we should make enough of it that everybody can have

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=1500s) some and then everybody will be happy and well jobs good and you know he's talking about this stuff in sort of 1930s 1940s 1950s America as if it's the most obvious thing in the world right and you know he he doesn't even really bother talking about money or how you divide up thing like that you know it's like if people need denim jackets why don't we just make 150 million denim jackets and then anybody that wants come and have one how much is that going to cost like a dollar a jacket I don't know somebody else can figure out the money but what he focuses on is this idea that what you have to do is you have to point the enormous power at mass of mass production at covering people's actual needs right and this was a completely radical thought because inside of Communism they had this notion that you would do this kind of mass production stuff but you would have to have this enormous bureaucracy that held the entire show together and there was an enormous amount of uh thought around the notion of central planning of everything on the other hand you had the capitalist system where you produce what was profitable and trusted the profitability called good hasn't gone so well so Fuller came up with this thing which was basically a refusal to accept the limitations of thinking in either capitalism or communism he basically said regardless of what your political structures are as long as you're making enough of the right things you're going to be fine the problem is we're not making enough of the right things and in fact we haven't designed the right things to make so for then takes another step back and says well given that we've got an awful lot of people who don't have enough stuff how do we design stuff which will allow everybody to have everything that they need cheaply enough that they can actually afford it so he takes this step of saying we need to figure out what the needs are for everybody and then we need to engineer the things to fill those basic needs so the GDC Dome was an attempt to figure out the most efficient possible house so that you could Mass produce houses in factories and therefore bring the house down to a few hundred do in the same way that we Mass produce cars right one of the great examples is um you know if you designed a car and built a car in the same way that you do a house you'd have an architect for every single car and then you'd have a succession of workmen that came around to your garage and brought the pieces with them clipped them together into the pre-existing bits of the car that had already been assembled the pieces wouldn't fit properly the design would turn out to be wrong weld some additional bits and it would take

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=1650s) about 2 and 1/2 years and $50,000 before you could get even the frame in place and your finished mini would take like 10 years and cost like half a million dollars right there's no way that you can produce an artifact as complicated as a car without doing industrial mass production and precision manufacturing but we continue to make buildings essentially by hand and the result of that is that housing is incredibly expensive to the point where most people take 30 years of their life to pay for their housing and that's entirely an artifact of terrible terrible production technology so for comes all and Advance the Dome and basically says to the world I figured out how everybody can have a house for practically no money let's just solve the housing problem then everyone going to be happy and you know what happens nothing right and it's not like there's any kind of orchestrated systemic sabotage what happens is that the human tendency to want to live in the same kind of houses that they their parents lived in completely swamps people's ability to do what's good for them their adherence to tradition turns out to be far stronger than their ability to adapt to the circumstances that they find themselves in and as a result all of this astonishing creativity from four winds up almost entirely without use so for's work is uh well known in the 1920s 1930s 1940s in America it's regularly discussed in the media he's on television he's kind of a sort of small American national hero maybe a bit like the my MythBusters guys are today uh he does a whole bunch of very successful work for the Department of Defense on housing for troops and things like that and they build odds and ends of it uh the hippies of the 1960s are very into full and gdic does and all the rest of that but the basic Bedrock of society never adapts to the fact that you could do incredibly high quality lowcost housing uh the building codes never adopt the regulations stay Unchained the population doesn't buy them in any great number and to this day they're Curiosities uh on the Florida coast there are a bunch of Domes that were built by Fuller and other people over the years and when you have hurricanes they're often the only building that's left standing for miles around everything else has extensive damage and domes are sitting there completely Rock Solid and even then people just won't build them so somewhere inside of human culture we have an enormous technological conservatism that means that we wind up living with terrible political problems that we could have

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=1800s) engineered our way out of and then we don't make the turn and my contention is that with this you know the breakthroughs that are happening right now in cryptography and Computing in general we've got another one of these historical turning points where if we have the political will we could get to a generally safe post scarcity Society within about two generations and with 80% of the progress in one the question is do you have the political will to change the world to make the things that the engineers are making possible into actual political ground truths or is it going to be another one of these situations where the engineers put a utopian possibility in front of humanity and Humanity goes back to building cubes made out of baked clay that take 30 years to pay for right I mean I mean this very very very seriously because we're in a position where the choice is coming around again you know I worked on you know basically making flors work a little bit easier to understand and a little bit easier to build I call it the hexayurt they're being used really widely at Burning Man there might be a few popping up here and there for refugees we might see a bunch of them in uh possibly in Europe for the European Refugee crisis you know we might see some adoption here but without a broad based political push to make these things legal to live in what you're going to wind up is a situation where we can do incredibly cheap housing like €2,000 a room for a building that will last for 200 years right €200 a room for a building that will last for 200 years uh sorry € 2,000 we could get it down to €200 but we'd have to do really large scale manufacturing to do that so what we could do is we could just say that if you live in an area where we don't need really high density population where you can have a certain amount of space and just kind of dot your building around you could basically pay €10,000 for a house and if you had a couple of kids and wanted some more space you'd buy another couple of PODS clip them onto the side of your complex and if you you know your kids moved out and went to college they could take their pods with them fold them up put them on top of a car drive somewhere else put them back up again right this doesn't get you the kind of buildings that you need for like high density Urban highrise but you've got lots and lots and lots of kind of one or two story buildings all over Europe that could very easily be replaced with hexayurts rather than mortgages right and this is really an

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=1950s) achievable political techn uh technology it's a political reality you put some solar panels on the outside you put some water filters on the inside you do some energy efficient cooking and heating and a few other bits and pieces you can get a building where you just transport the building by taking the bolts out and folding it flat and you've got kind of a car boot worth of solar panels and you know composting toilets and other gadgetry and you put it all back up again and you get basically a first world standard a living pretty much anywhere that you want to go and all of that is completely technically possible today every year that passes it gets even easier and even even cheaper right I've made this stuff possible I'm not in a hurry to get people to adopt it because I think that social change is very slow but we're in a position where it is a process of social change rather than requiring technology to change right the utopian Technologies are constantly around humanity and for whatever reason we fail to politically organize and get these utopian Technologies deployed yes been trying to introduce these Technologies and problems where there's like a problem with housing now thinking of there slums in Mumbai in Rio where there's mhm you know an actual cuz here is like there's already lots of houses so you we might be kind of complacent y y um so one of the reasons that I generally one of the reasons that I generally talk about doing this stuff here is my feeling is that if it's not good enough for Rich Europeans we probably shouldn't be inflicting it on poor Indians or poor South Americans right you know I really want to see Technologies which are good enough for the rich and then if they scale down to the poor that's going to be great like with cell phones I'm very suspicious of technologies that want to start with the poor um because how many homeless people do you have in the Netherlands right in Britain we're knee deep in homeless people and we have no apparent ability to solve solve their problems right so why don't we start with getting rid of homelessness where we are and even if that's only a few hundred, units in the long run if we prove that it works for our populations other people can replicate but I want to see this stuff done here first and if you know South Americans or Indians come across the design they want to build them themselves and they make those decisions that's great but I'm not going to go into the business of exporting my technology to people uh on the basis that if it's not good enough for enough maybe they want it right it has to be that people deploy the technology for themselves otherwise we're falling into

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qIHNKaFdE&t=2100s) the same trap that the ngos fall into and I definitely don't want to do that um you know let's figure out homelessness in the places that we are first and then from there we can kind of go on to have a think about this um so the thing that Buckman fer really focuses attention on is the idea that you can have your post scarcity Society with 1970s technology you go forward to 21st century technology we could do a post scarcity Society without even trying right we have the ability doing Fabrics which last essentially forever we have the ability to make houses out of essentially cardboard and tinf foil we have the ability to make solar panels that are more than good enough to run your entire life on uh increasingly the things that you use consume practically no electricity apart from Heating and the only reason you need heating is because your buildings aren't fully insulated right we've got the ability to Simply to lift the current technological base out and live in a society in which almost all Goods last forever or at least until they tear or break and the energy requirements for daily life are very very very low but to get there you need to stop doing old school terrible engineering and you need to move towards doing kind of new age good engineering and that question of where's the political will to fix the engineering right can anybody think of a political party that is engineered lad and that decides that they're going to change the laws to enable good engineering to happen so the world works better we actually have the pirate party scientist say again for the Socialist nuclear socialists the Dutch the Dutch socialists are led by nuclear the Dutch socialists are readed by nuclear scientists that's amazing rare really rare yeah are are you incling that this is a task that should be left to government um so the technologists the question was is this a task it should be left in government the technologists usually make these Technologies and then regulation stops them being deployed or changes how they're deployed so one approach is that you go to places where there's simply no regulation and you build there which is essentially what happened with Bitcoin right they went to a place with no regulation called the anonymous internet and then they built um but the real kind of Crux of this is that when you come out with technology that will really change the way things work the the first thing that happens is the state says no right so a good example is electric

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/769-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [769] Vinay Gupta talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.