# Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in the 21st Century (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [800], 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, 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 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=0s) um what i want to basically try and lay out is a framework for considering a really simple kind of work example of where we are with all this data stuff and then from that word example i want us to have a little bit of a collective panic and once we've had that panic maybe we can start thinking about this stuff in a more kind of rationalist reasonable way um one of the things that's going to be kind of present all the way through this talk is a discussion of algorithms and mechanisms of choice so i just want to phrase frame this first and then as we go through it will make a little more sense so the way that we decide something individually or as a society you could think of as a mechanism for choosing things and mechanisms in economics are quite well understood the most recent nobel prize for economics was specifically maybe this one before that was specifically on mechanism design so an auction is a mechanism if a government has a utility a shared asset like the spectrum that our phones use for 4g communication and they want to get a fair price for that thing and they design an auction with some rules they put the thing up for auction somebody buys it and we have a kind of general social consensus that this represents a fair value for the thing that was sold because anybody that wanted it could bid for it now we all know that these mechanisms are extremely imperfect they're prone to corruption there's all kinds of trouble in mayhem that surrounds these things but nonetheless that is a clear simple example of a mechanism another mechanism of this kind is democracy we choose right we have our our social choice where we decide that we're going to pick our leadership one person one vote organized into political parties represented usually by geographically bounded areas and then those people count off against a register and once that register passes 51 you actually put something in charge of the bureaucracy with a prime minister in a cabinet and all the rest of this and this is a mechanism once these mechanisms are established in society we have a very strong tendency to then reify them so we forget that democracy is one of a wide variety of systems of choice and we automatically assume that democracy means fourier electoral cycles five-year

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=150s) electoral cycles so we begin to take a complex scope of possibilities and we wire it down to a single chosen mechanism that we then use interchangeably so we forget that we made a decision to get here and then afterwards we just naturally assume that democracy equals this that is the mechanism an auction is the only way of knowing what something is worth a democracy is the only way of choosing a government um does this generally make sense as a way of looking at the world mechanisms that we forget were mechanisms okay then let us proceed so over the last some number of years we've gone through revolution after revolution after revolution in data um i think that the first real revolution in data was this notion of simply having data so there was a very early era in the 60s and 70s magnetic tape databases all this kind of stuff and that kind of bumbled along in the background i think the next really big sudden shift was hft high frequency trading when all of a sudden we began to hear about milliseconds and microseconds and extraordinarily rapid transformations of um value in the financial system based on people trying to shave a few microseconds off the time that it took to get a signal from new gork to chicago and back and there's an entire branch of the economy that extracts value from light speed delays so you know server racks close to the new york stock exchange in america are literally sold for you know millions of dollars per cubic meter because you pack these things with machines and they can always get a trade in faster than a machine which is 200 meters down the road proximity equals speed because we're right up against the hard physical limit and a lot of people who argue that all of the value which is extracted by these systems is essentially stolen because all they're doing is imposing friction on legitimate trade so you want to buy some aluminium you go to the market to buy some aluminium seven people buy or sell the aluminium before it reaches you and none of them have ever seen an ounce of the stuff so you know there are proposals like having a 10 minute delay on trading so that it would wipe out all this hft stuff but until those kind of measures are taken you simply have a friction in the system which is a whole bunch of people using incredibly fast data to produce what i would regard probably as a distortion in the fundamental mechanisms that run the world and we can argue about you know free trade and whether or not people should be allowed to do things like that but

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=300s) nonetheless this is what's happening um the thing that we're doing next is of course big data does anybody have definition of big data saying we have an immediate like i know exactly what big day is that's actually a really good definition the definition was uh deriving your models uh not from kind of thinking about things beforehand but from observing patterns in the data so if you go down that path big data is kind of like statistical learning and in some ways it's almost like a branch of ai like google's translation surface is almost entirely driven by vast quantities of translated text being statistically correlated so it doesn't have a theory of language which is what you always assumed machine translation would have that machine translation and understanding of language would be closely correlated instead it's what um searles would have called a chinese room it's a big machine that has absolutely no understanding what it's doing and it just mashes symbols according to rules but nonetheless it translates very well um i often think of big data in terms of how much data does it have to be before it's big is it gigabytes is it petabytes is it so much data that only a dozen organizations in the world can afford to store it and i think that if you kind of think of it as being big data is data which is so big that only a few organizations have the muscle to actually work with the stuff that produces quite an interesting way of viewing big data if you think of it as being the data which requires super computers to manage and tens of billions of dollars a year of data management budget i think that's quite an interesting way of thinking about it um out of big data comes a whole different approach this kind of evidence-based modeling and lots and lots and lots of people are very enthusiastic that this big data thing is going to result in something worthwhile at the end of the day i think we could point to lots and lots and lots of incremental gains that have come from it but it's still kind of sitting out there as something that other people do largely because of the sheer cost and expense of working with the staff right it's still fundamentally an elite thing in the same way the hft was an elite thing because to play that game you needed to be slapped directly on top of a supercomputer sorry directly on top of a fiber optic pipe preferably with a supercomputer so now we get down to this immutable data

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=450s) thing another fashion in data this time for data i thought that was my phone for a minute so this immutable data thing uh is is extremely problematic because anybody can play the game but nobody really understands what they're doing because it's actually super super super complicated but all the complexity is hidden so the simplest way for an ordinary person to go out there and scorch their fingers a little bit with immutable data is you go to the internet you find a bitcoin wallet site you get yourself a bitcoin wallet you find somebody that has some bitcoin you hand them 20 euros in cash and they send you some bitcoin and you've now done a transaction which will be stored on some invisible magic book for in theory the next x centuries it'll be stored there until people no longer regard bitcoin as being of even historical interest and given the current rate of transformation that bitcoin is pushing on the world i think that could be quite a while so what i want people to kind of think about is how simple that access to immutable data is relative to the access to fast data or big data right you could say that google search or google translate are examples of routine casual access to big data but these are things where you can use the systems but very little what you do is recorded stored bound part of the process you become a consumer of those services but you're in no way shape or form an actor whereas if you start using something like bitcoin you're an actor in these processes you're actually doing the thing that produces the change in the system you're interacting with a machine which is going to store the data essentially forever where forever means probably four years but so the accessibility of these technologies is really new and they're going to continue to get easier and easier and easier to use and more and more and more accessible i would guess back of the envelope that it'll be somewhere between three and five years before every shiny new apple computer has some kind of blockchain based something on it it might be for data storage it might be for password management uh it might be for backing up your files but the notion that you'll just have you know casual access to blockchain technology and consumer products i think that's going to come very quickly and blockchains are just ways of making relatively small data sets today but much bigger data sets later completely permanent because there

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=600s) are tens of thousands of copies all over the world it's not really rocket science and i'll talk a little bit more about how they work later but this notion that it's just a massively replicated thing with some very very sophisticated tamper resistance so you can't just edit it in one place and have the false change propagate over the network it's a simple simple way of thinking about these things um now that notion that you have a generation shift in data that process is not going to stop with immutable data in the same way that fast and big kind of solve different problems you know fast and big and immutable solve different problems there's always going to be a certain amount of bleed through where these things kind of hybridize and combine but i guarantee that tomorrow there'll be another kind of new data that suddenly is out all over the place and is extremely fashionable um internet of things i think is a pretty good candidate for this kind of pervasive computing everything you go you know the doors open and register when they're open and closed you know the the um the core systems of the society begin to be part of this woven responsive web and so don't think of this stuff as being in any way a terminal point it's simply a rolling forward of fashion and technology in the same way that you see a rolling forward of safe fashion in camping gear or in bicycle design these things are all driven by kind of core social processes to just roll onward over time um okay next slide please wrecked so i want to take this as an example of a part of life which has been heavily transformed by data and the access to data in ways that really nobody is entirely comfortable thinking about right and you know i've roughed this number in at ten percent i've read various numbers from seven up to about fifteen um you know you pick your source and you take your choice but nobody can deny that internet dating has become a huge part of how people meet each other and meeting each other still turns out to be a critical part of people having babies so we're in this kind of crossing point where you know the data thing is beginning to really substantially impact people's personal lives in ways that everybody is a little shy to discuss but actually it's become quite pervasive and i want you to think about if we were having this talk

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=750s) uh you know around the time that um you know our good friend norbert was uh gave his talk imagine what he would have said if he'd known in the future 10 of human beings would be created by matches that were made by a computer right can you imagine the anxiety that that would have provoked our forebears right our forebears would have been astonishingly nervous oh my god how will the machines choose who should be with who over a few generations won't that steer the entire human race in completely anything unthinkable directions right but you know how will you make the machines decide how to match people now remember i was talking before about mechanism design right so an internet dating service is a mechanism which has many effects but one of them is making new human beings according to a set of matching criteria that are embodied inside of what amounts to an economic engine an economic game so the humans that are matched by an internet dating site are the humans that it is most profitable for the internet dating site to match does that seem like a reasonable set of criteria for making 10 of humans what do you think yeah it makes me a little nervous too so i want to i want to break that down a little further i have a theory here which i have no data to back up this is pure hypothesis but i just have this theory that maybe internet dating sites deliberately match people in relationships that won't last because then they'll come back to the internet dating side right because if you've got access to all of the statistical information about user behavior right these two people hooked up went on two dates and dropped off the site entirely is probably a decent indicator that they are now you know in a relationship and are no longer you know crawling across the web looking for replacements at which point they've ceased to put any value back into the system right in the same way that we've got the line designed obsolescence in washing machines or cars where the mechanisms are made to break down in a few years because it's more profitable to replace them than to keep fixing them indefinitely right you have to spend a lot of money to get a washing machine which is not designed to break down so it seems entirely reasonable to me that internet dating systems may well be

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=900s) deliberately setting up unstable relationships on the basis that these are simply more profitable in the long run and i think it's pretty easy to imagine that if you were in charge of an internet dating site the fact that you're losing customers to successful relationships would be an obvious drain on your bottom line now i can't imagine that anybody's going to get caught doing this anytime soon but if somebody was to hack one of these services and discover that this is how it worked internally would any of us really be surprised right i mean this is the logic of capitalism applied at a biopolitical level if you're going to be making your matches uh through the internet by companies that have a business model driven by targeted advertising and subscription fees you can't really be all that surprised when they choose to set up matches which might not be for your interest but are fundamentally for their interest and if that this is a mechanism that's leading to 10 of the human race being born in the countries that are heavily using internet dating we shouldn't be surprised if things get a little weird after a couple generations right i just want to give us a moment to sort of pause and breathe and have a think about that i mean am i describing the world that we currently live in is there any doubt that this is plausible right so at that point i think we have to then kind of pause for breath and just look at that for a moment the people are being selected by agencies which have no particular interest in fermenting stable relationships they may or may not do it by accident but it's certainly against their business interest if they're too good at it and that set of business mechanisms is directly affecting the genetic makeup of the human race in quite a substantial way given the number of people that are meeting through these systems so you can imagine and i'm going to push this a little further the the kind of era of say okay cupid which was the dominant life form in that ecology for a while right at least for people that designed websites for a living and were like thick glasses um the generation of you know kind of okay cupid matches there was a lot of emphasis on writing your profile and this particular kind of ability to occupy a fashion niche and all the rest of this stuff right then along comes tinder which is a system which doesn't show any text when it makes the initial match

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=1050s) and people will just sit there based on geography and location sorry geography and timing it will show essentially a real-time feed of people in the area that might be interested in connecting so people go to places where they think there'll be a lot of interesting people sit around in corners of bars and sit there compulsively swiping right or left instead basically scanning the area for people that they might match with right this will definitely produce a different set of matches than people sitting at home on their desktop pcs reading the text that was written by people on a website there's no doubt at all that a different mechanism for making introductions will result in different matches and if some percentage of tinder dates turn into relationships which turn into kids then you'll have different human beings coming into existence because of a different algorithm on a different website a different app that had a different model for matching people a different mechanism results in different human beings and it seems very likely indeed that this kind of process is going to continue further in time as these systems get better and better and better at giving people what they want not necessarily what they need you're going to see an increasing transformation in dating culture with more and more and more human beings that come out of algorithms how uncomfortable is this right it's positively skin crawling for me right now actually laying the argument down in public you know you get this kind of like that can't possibly be right it feels almost superstitious but there's definitely a sense of like should we really be delegating that to machines then you've got to say well if we go back to the pre-machine age what did we delegate it to geographical proximity and the available quantity of alcohol right more or less right i mean for example how much do you think the birth rate in scandinavia would drop in the event that they had a complete alcohol moratorium that was actually effective right you know if there was some you know genetically engineered flu and after you caught the flu you could no longer metabolize alcohol properly how long would it take scandinavian culture to adapt again to the point where people could form new relationships rather than sitting there frosty we staring each other right i've lived in iceland there hasn't been an icelander conceived sober in about 700 years no offense to my icelandic friends it was them that told me this so

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=1200s) it's not as if we didn't have mechanisms for doing this stuff before which are just as crazy and unnatural as the idea of putting a computer into the mix right the evolution of alcohol you know we didn't evolve with alcohol we probably invented brewing on some kind of industrial scale 10 000 years ago there's a pretty pretty decent argument that it's one of the things that forced us to settle down and farm agricultural surplus plus pottery equaled beer no really like archaeological perspective right people really think about this so you know we already made one radical shift in the way that the human race hooks up which is we introduced alcohol right and the cultures that were heavily dependent on alcohol's way of doing business were very different from the cultures that were very much about things like arranged marriage right on the one side of my family are european the other branch are indian and back through their genetic history they had completely different mechanisms for selecting in each generation who would wind up with who right even the cousins in my generation had arranged marriages and were about as happy as anybody was with their marriage it wasn't you know even now it's not clear that unstatistical data range marriages are on average less successful less happy than the so-called love match right so there are clearly lots of options in the mechanisms that we use to make these kinds of things happen in our societies whether one mechanism works less well than another one that can be argued but the idea that there is a natural system and an unnatural system i think to find out anything resembling a natural system you'd have to go back pre-agriculture and at that point you know we're basically speculating we've no real idea about what human beings we're up to in those days we have some guesses uh we know that there's about a 200 000 to maybe 400 000 year gap between the invention of fire and the inventor of agriculture so we've got an awful lot of time sitting around campfires telling stories or whatever it was we did to pass the time before we get to the farming part so one gaps um well that's a really interesting question i'm going to get to those kind of questions in a moment because i'm going to ask what happens when the state gets involved so the fact that we've got you know generation after generation of these mechanisms which are all artificial until we get to a state in nature where all we know is that we had fire but no agriculture and we spent a lot of time around campfires by the way

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=1350s) just while we're chasing that particular thread down does it not seem like what most people consider to be the peak experiences of their wives are small groups of young people around campfires in natural conditions like if you let teenagers off the loose you know off the uh you know kind of out on the loose typically what they will do is grab a car head for nature put up some tents and make a big fire so i think this notion is that we might be recreating the circumstances of an earlier revolution over and over and over again as close as we can get to them in the same way that dogs like to hunt even if they happen to live in you know perfectly nice suburban areas they still chase rabbits human beings like fire and they like the outdoors and this is particularly visible in america where they've got large rugged wilderness areas which really were quite paleolithic in their way you know they're not that different from what you'd have seen state in nature the the drag that people feel to go out into these places and have experiences which are something like what their ancestors would have had is palpable it's a really strong effect just checking what we're doing for time right so uh could i have the next slide please so um the scenario that i've been discussing is what happens when companies use data to match human beings and you know we've talked about the incentives which are a bit strange for a company the the possible risk that they might be deliberately setting up temporary matches all these kind of things um let's now re-narrate this in a situation where for example the state got right on top of this has anybody heard of a book called red plenty so red plenty is a book that basically examines from a kind of science fiction but also from an economics perspective what would have happened if the soviet union had gotten attacked together to actually deliver the promise of industrial socialism if they just sorted their stuff out a little better in the 1950s it's possible that they could have produced an extremely high standard of living on a substantially different set of drivers than the ones that were being deployed in america but with a similar quality of life output and it goes through a kind of history of where the mistakes were made and how it could have been done in other ways expect in about 20 years another round of kind of socialist thinking to emerge as it becomes possible to use quantum computers to solve the scheduling problem in a way which is demonstrably more efficient than what you can

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=1500s) generate with a free market um the reason and this is kind of for technical people in the audience the reason that that matters is that you can't solve the scheduling problem because the scheduling problem is np complete or np hard but if you have a computer you can solve the mp hard problem in a polynomial time or something like that which makes it possible to run a planned economy efficiently so once you can solve the traveling salesman problem you can solve everything and the prospect is you could basically outperform capitalism take the same data set crunch the result show you would have gotten 20 more industrial throughput if you've done it properly um so the notion that socialism is gone forever i think it's simply a pendulum swing from local to global optimization as a way of climbing the hills right technical section ends so just have to get this stuff in there you know somebody will want to know so what if we imagine a situation in which the russians got through the industrial crisis automated put in cybernetic systems and wound up with gigantic quantities of personal data on all of their citizens as a result in a similar manner to the u.s national security agency all of the communications are tapped all the purchasing decisions are on a credit card the credit card goes directly to the kremlin and they bash all the data with an enormous hammer right now it's clear that an enormous cause of misery and unhappiness in your societies people with unsuccessful relationships you know from the data that when people break up the alcoholism rate doubles or whatever it would have been for the soviets triples and as a result it's really good if you can avoid these messy breakups because they're bad for your industrial production they're demonstrating bad for the economy you go through and you you know calculate an economic cost to each broken marriage and then you factor this into the industrial planning and eventually somebody says well you know why don't we just make marriages that don't break and you send out some scientists and they do some research and they look at the data and you come up with a state marriage bureau right and you don't laugh it's no more ridiculous in weaving this up to a company is it you leave it to industrial capitalism without even blinking an eyeball but the idea of the state would do it seems ridiculous remember what i said about reifying a model you take the model that you currently work with as a mechanism and then you assume that that's just how reality is and that's the natural the natural state of human beings that is exactly what it is like so you go to the state marriage bureau and they take all of the information they have in your profile and everything

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=1650s) that they know and they crunch it through a set of mysterious algorithms and they introduce you to a series of potential partners under a set of circumstances which are optimally designed to produce the best likelihood of a good match what if it worked right what if it was actually a really good way for people to find partners you could take your chances with some you know meeting some random stranger but if it didn't happen in a few years you get to your late 20s early 30s you think you know maybe i'm going to try the state marriage bureau and they hook you up with somebody and it works and what if this was common enough as a good way of doing things and it was successful enough and the averages were good enough that people did it preferentially over wandering around bars drunk in the same way in this culture they preferentially go to internet dating rather than watering around a barge trunk now what are the incentives for a state if it's going to be arranging marriages right if the incentive for an internet dating service is temporary matches so you continue to use the service the incentive for the state is probably permanent durable relationships which reduce social costs which one would we prefer if we were going to be choosing what we get out of a service that was going to find us partners maybe when we're young we want the system which produces relatively random things which don't last all that long but really interesting and exciting maybe when we're older we want something that produces permanent matches but capitalism cannot likely generate a system that gives us permanent matches because we don't incentivize the systems in the correct way and so the capitalist use of data will tend to produce junk food and this kind of fantasy socialist use of data will tend to produce marriages which are good for the interests of the state we fantasize that this might be marriages which are permanent it might be marriages where people are un miserable at home and are really productive at work right as long as it doesn't drive them to drinks you need an optimal level of unhappiness at home to make sure that people are productive but not drunken you know you can never tell what the big data will show turns out to be the optimum incentive structure for the person who's doing the job yeah it's not a very comfortable way of looking at the world it took me a long time to work up to this so other situations that you can imagine pertaining suppose we had an enormous set of data on relationship success right so people would basically publish tons and tons and tons of anonymized

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=1800s) data about their relationship histories and all of this stuff would slosh around in a bucket and you could then take your prospective partner whack them through the big data analysis thing that you yourself were performing maybe with some open source tools and it would be incentivized to find exactly the people that you wanted for exactly the kind of relationships that you felt like you can imagine a kind of fantasy wikipedia which just has you know 250 000 well-documented relationships in it matching criteria personality profiles whatever data people felt like publishing and this is not so crazy there's quite a lot of discussion about mass publication of human genomes from people that are willing to sacrifice their privacy for progress and there could be really interesting results if we had an enormous number of people publishing their genome data publicly they take the hit on privacy but we suddenly get much better chance of analyzing certain classes of diseases and goodness knows what else we might learn about human biology and psychology so it's not crazy to think that people might do this it might look crazy for this generation but does anybody remember what culture was like before twilight and 50 shades of grey right i mean these things would have been considered enormously disgusting her heresies in the 1980s or 1990s and you finally get to a point where every generation has to find something to appall prior generations and that was basically all that was left god only knows where they're going next you know what do you feed to your parents to drive your parents nuts if 50 shades of grey was what your parents were into right this constant drive of the young to appall the old is one of the few things that you can really count on in culture and particularly as somebody in their mid-40s you know i really get a look at culture like my god these kids are crazy and that tells you that you're aging so what if right we had this large-scale publication of relationship histories that people could then use to optimize their relationships this would be a data commons so while an individual might be doing the analysis they'd be pulling from a commons or a cooperative that would actually manage all this is stored data and that's quite interesting because you could almost certainly get the system of incentives right at the analysis level because you could commission people to build tools like open source software that would be used to perform the analysis on the public data set and in all probability people wouldn't be incentivized to lie when they published into the public data set

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=1950s) because it would be anonymous so it's entirely possible that you could construct a system which was incentivized to do what was good for you rather than what was good for the state or what was good for capitalism right industrial production motive profit motive however you want to think about these motives they're definitely situations in which the data is being used in ways which only partially serve your interests unless you're the person in control of the data set but the tension that we're always going to find is if the only data set that i have access to is my own experience i don't have any benefit from a kind of wider cultural learning and there are basically two approaches to that the first is mass assembly of common data so wikipedia is a good example of this everybody pulls their data into a commons and the output of that commons is vastly more better organized human knowledge than you were going to have access to otherwise and this is a really good really successful attempt and that might be quite an interesting experiment where you could basically have something which is kind of like what they call vrm vendor relationship management where people could publish their profiles and their psychometrics anonymously and then use cryptography to allow people to contact them but without reviewing their identities and you can imagine all kinds of interesting things would happen in that scenario it's the kind of thing that you could in theory build on the ethereum blockchain relatively easily and you could get the agency lined up between the people with the data and the people who wanted the services but to do it you need individuals to be acting in their own best interest together without having a middleman or a state which is basically distorting the situation for their own benefit and i think as an experiment this is quite interesting because it really shows how deeply the data thing touches our lives you know we're all in a culture where the people around us are using computers to find not just shoes but men and women the most intimate areas of our lives we voluntarily turn over to the machines because we think they can do a better job than we can do on our own in the same way that we've turned over the quest for a perfect hamburger from our kitchen to our restaurants right and we just do these things because the culture around us encourages them and naturalizes them and normalizes them we bring an encounter factual from an imaginary culture and it seems shocking

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=2100s) and horrifying my god the state marriage bureau that's insane right but when you put it beside okay cupid or tinder why is one matter than the other and then finally we look at how much work it would be to have self-determination in these areas the labor that we would have to put in to build the software and potentially the hardware to operate a kind of human matching service that wasn't driven by either capitalism or state interest seems like an enormous amount of work but if it produced the result that was as good as wikipedia it might be far better than the deal that we could get from either the previous artificial system which was alcohol and bars let us know also capitalist interest in provision of both of these services right or the matching systems which served social stability at a tribal level you know the indian arranged marriage system yeah it was about making sure that your kids were happy but it was also about making sure that you could stand your kid's future wife or husband right the parents were not selecting these kids solely because it was going to make their kid happy they were also picking people that they could live with because you know that was going to be the mother of your grandchildren you were going to make damn sure that you picked somebody you that you liked and got along with so the ability for human beings to express their interests cleanly and clearly without being pooled by their service providers or their culture is something i think is a relatively new invention the market does a poor job of that but it does a better job than most of the previous systems have done the commons approach that you see with things like wikipedia i think is another step forward probably in 10 years or 15 years or 20 years it will be visible as imperfect in different ways particularly i'd point to the bureaucratization of wikipedia but if we think that it might be possible to have large-scale cooperative behavior where individuals seek their self-interest together without market mechanisms through cooperative sharing of data i think something extremely interesting might come out of that um i picked the example of dating because it's something that really hits people hard and it really brings up huge questions about the legitimacy of things like market mechanisms but for buying and selling houses for renting houses for car rides for all these kinds of things if you have a capitalist agency in the middle or state agency in the middle they will operate these systems in ways which will benefit them and it benefit you perhaps incidentally right if we move into a position where

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5fbLQJu-XY&t=2250s) we've got a much more fundamental grip on reality and we are working with these systems in ways that are directly about our own needs but we do it together we could produce much much cleaner running systems um there's a thing running in london called open rent which is a website which basically has a fixed fee structure for finding your house and it's very very transparent it's very fair it's not as huge as it might be but it's an example of people trying to build systems that are as close to an open system as possible so i think what we might see in the future is systems which have all the strength of big data systems they've got the real kind of industrial grunt power of big data um but they're made from lots and lots and lots of small data published under open licenses and then synthesized together using the kind of algorithms that we currently use in big data and those kind of systems if they're correctly licensed could provide a very effective hedge against the growth of corporate and state power um because you might simply ban for-profit use of that data or you might require that any institution that uses that data in a for-profit way also publishes every single byte that it owns that isn't somebody else's personal data as public data there might be all kinds of interesting ways of policing managing regulating these data commons in such a way that you get high quality services of the kind that you're used to getting from capitalism but without the seven percent hit uh shaving that's haplotozen will typically give you for making a match and without the weird incentives like dating sites that want you to break up with somebody um i think that's the last slide isn't it was there one more oh right sorry there was one more so the other thing i want to talk about is technology horizons and basically right now all of these four technologies are currently going completely bananas um my first paying gig the first thing i ever made money doing when i was a kid was i did a review of a virtual reality system from magazine called computer shopper in 1991 when i was 19. and it was amazing it was this thing it was a big kind of plastic arcade machine about the size of this table that you sat in and you put on a helmet that was on an arm and the helmet weighed like i

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/800-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [800] Lecture by Vinay Gupta at the opening event of Data in the 21st Century, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.