# Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in the 21st Century (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [800], 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, 2022-07-11 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY. 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): Computational allocation ideas usable for settlement logistics.
- 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)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - 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: Information markets — universal registers and digital twins (24%); blockchain / global / internet (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: scheduling (3 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2012, 1 undated); mechanism design (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2022); Gandhi (4 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); camping gear (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); social stability (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); state power (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); Fab Lab (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); open data (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Occupy (1 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); cypherpunk (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2014)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): mechanism design
- Importance: core-text score 0.34 (1.00 is the top), number 204 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [231] [Chit Chat With the Nightmare Destroyer (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/231.md): close in content (cosine 0.88)
  - [722] ["10 Years of Ethereum... Tokenization is here." ---- RWA... (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/722.md): close in content (cosine 0.88)
- On the same works, just before: [778] [Vinay Gupta on the Future of the Metaverse (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/778.md); [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md); [735] [Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.md)
- On the same works, just after: [594] [Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Online Meet-Up 27 July 2022 (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/594.md); [574] [Wealth Inequality (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/574.md); [576] ['12 Percent US Inflation The Flight in to Hard, Real... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/576.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: Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in the 21st Century, video, 2022-07-11, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [800], https://guptaoption.com/texts/800.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=2400s) don't know 10 kilos or something it was crazy uh but sure enough you could put the helmet on and you could look around and there were weird kind of flapping polygon reptiles that you could shoot with a gun and it barely works but it didn't really need to do much more than barely worked it was stunning i went through the 1990s shaping my career around the idea that vr was right around the corner i went off and learned the right kind of graphics the right kind of databases the right kind of this and the next thing and it didn't come and didn't come and didn't come and didn't come and then i went off into energy policy and disaster relief and worked on you know humanitarian systems design and refugee shelter and all the rest of this stuff infrastructure theory simple critical infrastructure maps and it didn't come and didn't come and didn't come and didn't come and finally quarter one of 2016 there were going to be about five competing vr systems from big companies like facebook and sony i think they were all aiming for christmas and they all missed but whatever it happens to be q1 2016 is going to be consumer vr will finally have landed my guess is that uh christmas 2017 is going to be the christmas of virtual reality right craziness does anybody have any idea how weird it's going to get when you take the current culture that we have and then give it virtual reality right i mean it's like feeding you know a mountain dew or you know triple strength coca-cola to small children right we're just going to caffeinate the entirety of primary school and wait and see what happens um blockchains we've talked a bit about blockchains you've all heard a lot of people talking about blockchains they're fantastic technologies for having large groups of people take collective action the technical details of how they work you could watch any one of my talks i've done in the last three months on youtube i'll explain it i'm not going to go over it again you don't need to know um weak ai right so did anybody see these kind of weird dog lizards things that came out of google a while ago google deep dream right so we now have ai systems which are good enough to take a picture and name just about every object in the picture you know this is a red table that's a glass of water that's a microphone stand that's a weird yellow cube why is it here and these systems work by basically doing very simple simulations of the brain or degrees very simple simulations of a 1970s understanding of the brain with enormous amounts of computer power behind them all the way through my youth i used to say right you know fundamentally we don't have a computer which is artificially intelligent don't even worry about it

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=2550s) they can't tell the difference between a picture of a cat and a picture of a dog well now they can you should start worrying um [Music] it's a simple litmus test can it function in the real world yes and they're only going to get better and they're only going to get faster i don't think we're going to wind up with human-like intelligence i'm not sure that we're going to wind up with you a computer that can hold up a conversation anytime soon but i think we're going to get computers that can solve problems that previously required human intelligence on a mass scale within five or ten years like checking homework for you know students done by machines entirely credible medical diagnosis career advice house shopping all that machines very plausible um robots internet things and drones i kind of bundle those together because they're all basically about taking stuff out of software and sticking it in the real world you know the drone you know apple's drone phone big propellers you kind of throw it in the air it hovers there it takes some selfies it runs out of battery in about 30 seconds um but it will get you a selfie that you've got no other way of getting there's a product for professional sports people the name of which has just slipped out of my mind but it's a drone that you basically throw into the air and it folds you around as you're doing your snowboarding or whatever the heck else is that you're doing and it takes pictures of you as you go and they're good enough that a lot of professionals are using these things absolutely amazing and then you know all these technologies hybridize they interconnect they fuse they cross wire um you know you have a series of drones that are negotiating a landing place they have an auction on a blockchain to figure out what order they're going to land in then they all go and counter sign each other's flight paths then if one of them crashes into other when they land they automatically assign liability and the insurance pays out on a blockchain and if you need to real-time monitor what's actually happening you can plug into any one of the drones through a virtual reality system and you can watch the thing landing and it will show you the flight paths that it's bought and sold with the other drones five years it's probably in the lab today i haven't figured out exactly who's doing it but i bet anybody who looks at this space will see roughly that solution to that problem same thing for self-driving cars when they come to junctions so we're at the beginning of this rolling boiling pervasive shift in the underlying technology that society is running on i think you're going to see an enormous amount of that is mediated through phones particularly when you slap them onto your face and wear them as virtual reality systems which is going to become ubiquitous

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=2700s) because they have cameras mounted on them so you could look through the phone and you could just walk around in virtual reality that's going to become common within five years probably certainly the technical capability to do it will become common whether people adopt it or not will be a matter of fashion right but a world in which some people are walking around in the world with all the garbage edited out is coming very quickly um noise cancelling headphones anybody use them right i'm a big fan of noise consoling headphones there's a brand called digital silence which costs about 20 dollars it's a really cheap way of experimenting with augmented reality because you play music through them when you're on a train and it takes away all the background hiss and rumble it basically makes british engineering sound like swiss engineering right and if you wear them on planes all of the background noise goes away from the plane because the plane's engineering is basically perfect so the noise signature is very reliable and it pulls the noise out quite quickly so heavy duty noise cancelling headphones are quite expensive they're after 200 300 euros you don't know whether you like it until you try it but try the cheap stuff and just get a sense of what it's like to live in an electronically mediated reality i quite often get out of the tube still wearing them and walk through downtown london without realizing that i'm wearing them and the whole thing has this kind of serene dreamlike quality because most of the traffic noise is gone and i don't realize until i've been going for a while that i'm walking through london with no awareness of the traffic right because i can't really hear it so it's just faded out and i'm walking through a kind of uh film vendors well anyway so all of this stuff is coming it's coming really quickly the political structures that we deploy to wrangle these technologies are completely up to us open source software i think i hope is a huge part of this future and um as we move forward into this kind of space uh all i can say is you know just watch out for the young people they're gonna do impossibly weird things and they're gonna scare the crap out of us thank you [Applause] great thank you tonight um there is some type of questions uh but before i open it up to the audience i i have one for you actually because it seems let's go back to the to the case of date um you're sort of advocating these open distributed systems between people

[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=2850s) to arrange all that but as soon as someone will find a technology to make it a little bit more easy for someone to get something else in that system it will be capitalized and it will be sold so how my question basically is how do you keep capitalism out of such a system so um wikipedia managed it with licensing so the wikipedia license says that if you use this technology if you use the data in wikipedia you have to make the data that you're going to put with it free also so if i edit a wikipedia article to clean it up and then i publish it in a written form all the changes that i made have to go back into wikipedia so that's one side of it also wikipedia changes and grows and evolves so rapidly that every time people try and make a copy of wikipedia that works in some different way usually it falls behind the main branch so quickly that it just evaporates um but yeah licensing is absolutely key it's the defensive line because it's basically it takes the defensive structures of capitalism so typically copyright and it inverts them to protect the commons and this was richard stallman's genius when he came up with the copyleft system you know he realized that you could implement a kind of you know communitarian sharing commons on top of capitalist property rights protection and this is i mean this is a legendary piece of genius i think that stallman how many people in the room actually know richard stallman's name oh that's shocking so 500 years from now stallman will be remembered and gandhi will be forgotten he's that important right the only reason that we know anything about the technology that runs our society is because stallman changed the way that we write software so that the source code was open and shared and the stallman architecture for creating software runs 70 percent of the world's mobile phones right it runs linux it runs most of the machines that run the internet stallman is the gandhi that worked i'm being serious right i'm being deadly serious what gandhi left india was a bunch of people with nuclear weapons staring at us over their qurans india's in terrifying danger because we didn't correctly resolve the situation between hindus and muslims there right um i'm not sure if there is a biography of stallman right he's very autistic and he's very difficult but his the the accuracy with which his political theories could be implemented

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=3000s) to produce the change that you want to see in the world is much higher than of any other current existing political thinker it's way better than marx it's way better than gandhi uh you know it really delivers and almost nobody's ever heard of him because he's autistic and difficult people discount the value of his work because socially he's extremely awkward and this really needs to be a lesson that people take in right get stallman really read his stuff understand what he had to say typically there's a lag of 20 years between stallman says it and everybody turns around and says oh god he was right again freedom to read read freedom to read and then look at the kindle okay but why are we asking that question because one of the criticism that blockchain technology is currently receiving is that some of these market platforms are squeezing their way in and charging fees for any transactions um well i mean from my perspective what we're attempting to do is get as many big institutions onto blockchains as possible because blockchains are automatically transparent so at least at the current level of technology development if it happened on a blockchain the entire world couldn't know so if you think that society lacks transparency getting these guys onto blockchains is a good idea and uh having capitalist systems running on top of blockchains at least gives you a transparent capitalism and is that something you want it's certainly progress right i mean i would rather have a transparent capitalism than a non-transparent capitalism um whether you can then reduce the influence of markets in your society i think that's a personal choice thing right part of the reason that we have societies which are dominated by markets is because ikea is fantastic right you know we're in a position where we actually like most of what capitalism does which is why we won't organize mass resistance to it and until we come up with a better system than capitalism we won't be able to displace it so i think we have to kind of admit that we're walked into a relationship with capitalism because we are consumers and if we want to replace it we need to design the upgraded move to the upgrade rather than thinking that we can somehow force capitalism back out because socialism was so fantastic in the soviet era right we need a vision of what the future looks like if we want to get rid of the present we need a new future there's also some voices that claim that transparency is not always good right so i can well maybe i can come up with some cases even in current day capitalism where we actually should cherish some closed awfulness from from our view yes absolutely right so how we protect

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=3150s) privacy in a blockchain world is the next big shift right and right now uh oh god i'm about eight and a half thousand nine thousand words into a very long essay about identity in blockchains which is basically about this question of you know bitcoin protected your identity because you were anonymous you you could tell how much money was in the account but you could never figure out who the account belonged to as soon as you begin to reduce any kind of identity into a blockchain environment then you wind up with this kind of participatory panopticon problem where everybody knows exactly who you are all the time and if we don't want that we're going to have to deploy more cryptography and pretty soon we're beginning to talk about kind of real cypherpunk technology coming to coming to a world near you very soon are there any questions out in the back because we there have an audience mike the question here is uh was dating such a great example because dating sort of uh teases out uh bad data because people obviously cheat on those forms well so yeah this is a great question about incentives um i don't know how much of the data on dating sites is lies i i don't know whether anybody's done the study where they've gone out and actually correlated it with reality if anybody knows i'd be very interested in that um but yeah i mean there's no doubt at all that if you created a system that had accurate incentives there would be less of a tendency to lie to try and trick the algorithms but people might still like to trick other people and i don't think that's different whether you know somebody tells you that they're a brain surgeon in a bar or whether somebody is filling out a form and telling you their brain surgeon you know the the the problem is that human beings will always find ways of gaming systems on the other hand the precise mechanisms by which people choose to game the systems also have signatures so we might discover that you know if if we had a big open data set we might discover that 99.9 of the people that tell you that brain surgeons are lying so you can simply stop telling people that you're a brain surgeon if you are a brain surgeon and if you're not you could just take all the brain surgeons and chuck them right so you know their kind of game and counter game will continue to exist because the nature of evolutionary systems is this very kind of you know close-up struggle and i think that will continue to be the case unfortunately or fortunately

[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=3300s) until we start matching people by their genetics right you take a gene sequence you take another gene sequence you've crunched enough of the data to know that these genes are attracted to those genes and then you match people genetically and it's all perfectly scientific well we're not sure of that actually oh but the smell right there now that we've gotten to that so the smell the smell thing comes from a set of genes called the major histocompatibility complex mhc and it turns out that most of what we're attracted to and other people's smell is the configuration of their immune system and there's a direct correlation between the immune system genes in the way that people smell so it turns out when people are taking the birth control pill it changes the pattern of genes that they find attractive and it changes the smell of people that are attractive to so there's a hypothesis that when american couples or european couples people cultures that are on the pill when they're dating get together they're perfectly comfortable together the woman goes off the pill because she wants to have kids and at that point the partner begins to smell wrong and the relationship breaks down so there's the possibility that in a few years once the genetic stuff has gotten properly resolved like once we've gone from early studies to mature studies you're going to see the biggest class action suit in the world as everybody that got divorced in america in the past 30 years goes after the birth control companies yeah search term is major histocompatibility complex i'm not making this up although i am slightly glossing the technical detail let's make sure that in our dating union that we're going to form psychopaths no psycho path cycle pass wow no i haven't heard of it it sounds really good i mean so the the genetic stuff right the one thing that i didn't talk about this time because i haven't done enough research really talk about it in detail is what happens when you take very large genetic data sets and then start profiling

[57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=3450s) people by their dna i think we've got about 10 years before that becomes a massive urgent screaming pressure social problem but it might be five yeah i mean if if we get really large data sets if you know 30 of people uh get their dna sequence for health reasons and then those data sets get analyzed by enormous corporations looking for patterns in the dna then we're going to wind up in a world that i think is going to basically be really really difficult on the other hand maybe it results in a stream of absolutely perfect people to date because we know that these genes and these genes are attracted right yeah but we're getting the technology where those old ideas might suddenly become new ideas and i can't even begin to imagine that world yes yeah absolutely so part of the reason that i don't talk about labor very much is because labor is over right we're we're in the age of automation uh 20 years from now i think we've seen technological automation wipe out about 50 of jobs we're in the age of permanent unemployment and you either get utopia or dystopia as a result first thing um second thing definitely not demonization of algorithms but if algorithms can only be written at the cost of say 10 million dollars because you need a large team in 10 years uh you're only going to wind up with entities that have structural power creating new algorithms for massive matching the data and extracting meaning from it so the power analysis of who has the technical expertise to create the algorithms becomes extremely important and right now we're failing to fund open source software development to create alternatives to things like amazon or uber my hope is that blockchains will change that but we don't know um and finally the the subtle question about whether decentralization will produce a better world or not i think this is cyclical right decentralization has some problems the society recentralizes centralization

[1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=3600s) has a bunch of problems it becomes insufferable then we decentralize and i think that this is a pendulum swing and where the periodicity changes as technology basically moves society faster um samari mccarthy and herbert snorerson from the icelandic pirate party did a talk organized hack make 2013 here in the netherlands which was a beautiful comparison of the modern open source movement with classical anarchism and they basically came to the conclusion that all of kropotkin's work on how electrical motors would decentralize society is exactly the same as the fab lab argument so the people to really chase that down in fine detail samari mccarthy and herbert norrison look them up online send them a message talk to them you'll really enjoy their thinking thank you everyone [Applause]

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End of [800] Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in the 21st Century, 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, [594](https://guptaoption.com/texts/594.md) Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Online Meet-Up 27 July 2022 (2022); the most closely related, [231](https://guptaoption.com/texts/231.md) Chit Chat With the Nightmare Destroyer (2025); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.