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We are seeing an onslaught of right wing pro-fossil lies based politics on our democracies around the world. The tools to manipulate popular opinion have been automated and exposure to fake and personally tailored misrepresentations of reality is still great for a large portion of the world population. Removing the options to target voters with tailored but dishonest messages should be on the top of the agenda to protect our democracies.

Beyond that the socialist ideology has been corrupted in most countries. That is because the economy has been made so important, to the point that a cashless society becomes a real possibility. People will always have to trade in order to exist. True independence is not achievable, safe freedom is only survivable if you take part in the economy. Of course if it is up the the fossil economy you can be poor and die early if you choose to, you are nothing but a natural resource after all.

How can socialist really take a position that is stronger, more future proof, more acceptable and more social? How can they paint a future that people can embrace? The answer lies in aknowledging the current forces at play and how the economy operates. From thinking about these things a new vision follows that is simple, attractive and safe, and which is not offered by right wing conservatives.

Premise nr. 1. : We compete for fossil fuels through income. We compete with companies and machines, and we are obviously losing that competition as citizen.

Because the right wing dominated economy is build on fossil fuels, this is what we divide through our competition for income. If we can reduce cost to our employer we get a cut of access to fossil resources (our salary) but if we can’t because we are old and/or sick, employers lose interest. We become a burden because through social mechanisms we recieve benefits which reduce the resource pool employers can use to produce and make profit. Because we all compete for the same resource (fossil fuels) this dynamic results and individuals that are not ‘economically attractive’ are dumped.

Fossil Fuel Giants Claim To Support Climate Science, Yet Still Fund Denial

What socialists have done up until now is to work for more jobs, more access to a cut of the resources for people, better protection against the inclinations of employers to automate and fire people. This has never really worked because the reward for firing people is high. What socialists have done is to make that reward smaller and increase the value of employing someone. But the true insight is to step out of this entire dynamic, and there is a reason for that :

Premise nr. 2 : Automation will continue and conquer not only mechanical production but also white collar work, to the point that fully automated companies can exists in nearly every field, meaning close to 80% of the able workforce be redundant for the essential manufacturing jobs.

You can try to hang on to jobs, but in doing that you are supporting the right wing pro-fossil conception of our economy. Some say “automation will cost jobs but also allow the creation of new ones” but research shows automation means the replacement of high paying jobs by lower ones, if they are replaced at all. Part of that trend is of course also caused by the high cost of starting any initiative and the requirement of making profit as a new company doing new things. Socialists should hope for new jobs to emerge but it is naieve to trust there will, that is just what economists say to get you to accept the right wing perspective. Assume most important jobs will be automated and only low skilled work will remain.

The right wing attitude to this trend is “Great, we have all the money, all the resources, we’ll be rich, the rest can be servants!”. All those that think to much and can easily be bullied and intimidated or impressed will be either poor or serving us or whatever they can be with their low wage jobs. What should the socialists respons to this be? It is not easy to peal your mind off of injustice, to disengange from right wing anti-social attitudes, because the right is so good at pretending it has something it is not sharing. The right manipulates to get what it wants, every time, all the time. Socialists should look away.

What do they see when they are not caught in the mess created by the right wing distractors? Two things, first : Renewables are cheap and can produce energy in proportion to the needs of the economy. Renewable energy can replace fossil in every application, everywhere, and can be sourced indefinitely such that competition over access to them is NOT necessary.

Sure the right wing economy has brought renewables into its ‘energy markets’ and those markers are now leading us to more wind, more solar, more storage while at the same time companies and home owners are disappearing from the market entirely. Socialists should see that in long term having energy markets makes no sense at all. You produce energy in the quantities you need, yourself, or you rent an installation to do it (which forces you to earn money so less ideal).

So first of all there is no competition for energy, not between people, not between people and machines or people and machines and companies. This makes society more social. The goal of a socialists should therefore be to realise the absolute maximum growth of renewable energy utilization possible.

Second thing is : Automation is your friend, once you have energy covered. Once people no longer compete for income with machines or AI taking their place in companies, there is no harm in that trend to continue. What this implies is that everyone receives income based on the renewable energy utilization in the essential production. So lets say that production chain makes bread and does healthcare etc. Everyone should get credits to spend on bread and healthcare (or health insurance). This credit should be proportional to the renewable energy capacity available. This would amount to a kind of basic income for all.

A basic income has been proposed because fossil economists see as well as anybody that giving more money to people stimulates the economy, this has worked many times in soo many ways. The difference with that kind of basic income (one that does not differentiate between the source of energy) and what we propose here is that it creates resource competition, that it flies in the face of what companies like to see, that it sounds like a nice dream but that it can only be ‘afforded’ for a certain period after which (if there is no renewable energy base) the industrial lobby will reverse it after smearing it for as much time as it needs.

What a socialist can say is thus : “We want 100% or more renewables to support our lives and economies, we will then share access to that energy with anyone (with a basic minimum) while the market based on quality and style of things remains. This way of doing things will not burden anyone because renewables carry the burden. People will not be automated away as fast because the company will know its a trade off between atmosphere and profit, in fact the incentive for cut throat competition is reduced. With more and more renewables and more automation will come price drops, more freedom, more basic income etc.”

We think all socialists should think about this, not dismiss it outright but rather look for the pieces that need to come together. We are not there yet, and we need a lot more renewable energy sources. Some countries may demonstrate the lightness of being if renewables take over from fossil fuels, like for Morocco for instance. The fossil industry is working hard to prevent any positive examples, or ones where the economy is converted to renewables with less pain or at low cost. Socialist should adopt this vision and point to examples and highlight the cost reducing effect of not competing for energy (of course the effect of subsidies and price controls in fossil should be exposed).

We call the economy where renewables and automation make life easy for all the “Roboeconomy”, an economy in which robots can even restore the ecology. Socialists should get us there, but should also start to paint this picture, something that is not happening enough today.

Russia under Putin is a semi-cleptocracy. A lot like in Japan criminal gangs seem to be tolerated to a large extend, for instance usefull cybercriminals become hacking spies. It may also be a basic result of a hierarchy based on information and force, not on cooperation. Like China Russia is a dictatorship of sorts, but more free.

We don’t know enough of Russia to understand its seeming blind spot for climate change. We have never heard of any initiative there to stop it or slow it down, we only read that mammoth tusk are now found in large numbers because the permafrost is thawing, and methane is being released.

At the COP25 Russia doesn’t even pretend to help, it should not bother going if its not going to, instead like other countries with a strong fossil fuel dependend part of their economy it joins in and stifles progress. This is strange in a way because the risk that renewables will replace fossil any time soon is small. Even though the Sun does deliver enough energy in 8 minutes to replace all fossil fuels.

What is even stranger is the pretence there is something to fight for. A world warming 5 degrees (now expected in 2075) is not livable. All the methane stored in the permafrost will be released, the peet will have burned, the clathrate ice on the bottom of the oceans will also have released its methane. It is going to be very hot, and life will become very very hard.

It is impossible to understand why Russia is not taking the route of Morocco, but even better than Morocco, takes matters of production of solar panels and renewable technology in its own hands. It must be the Oligarchs (and Putin) who think they are unmanly when they do something out of fear. But of course its not fear but forsight. Stalin did’t fear the germans, he sacrificed so many because his hart was a machine, he used what he had even if it was people.

Putin must have a fear of seeming weak to not go for renewables as a tool to achieve true autonomy and pave a way to a prosperous future for all of the people of Russia. As things are now russians will have to live under domes with oxygen and greenhouses and what energy is going to be available if all the pipes have cracked because they run over melting tundra? Not so smart.

If Putin saw his true strategic opportunity in renewables instead of gas (selling it to Turkey, such a sunny country!) he would be a true patriot and nobody would need to know. He could export crappy solar panels and keep the good ones for Russia. Of course Russia has massive tree cover and converting these to burried charcoal (sequestring carbon) while planting new trees could be a major way to fight climate change. Of course the energy to run that process could come from either the trees or some combination with renewables.

If you want to catch a fish you need patience, but you have to throw out your line. The river could be teeming with fish and you’d never know!

The title above is slightly misleading. As a long term observer of climate science and investigator of kinds of what industry knows about the trajectory we are on, the rise of atmosepheric methane is no surprise. Its explained by some to originate from decomposing biomass in the permafrost, but it has been locked up in ice in the soil and at the bottom of our oceans for millenia, and is mostly just being released. Its “bacterial farts” and the gas can make a complex with frozen water called clathrate. When the ice melts the methane is released.

Worst case predictions are a rise in temperature of up to 12 degrees, this has happened in the Earths history. That’s simply unsurvivable for humanity, it may even become “Hothouse Earth”, which seems to be a state of our atmosphere that heats up somewhat like Venus. We are lucky with mostly nitrogen, Earth is not Venus, but constant evaporation of water will not cool Earth down, but instead will lock more heat into the atmosphere.

The endgame we would face if we where all cats or dogs would be that the oceans become to hot for fish to survive (too little oxygen), and start to rot and emit H2S, which would then kill most life on land, life that is already parched. So the hot planet with storms and heatwaves and floods and droughts would have a biting atmosphere that would not allow big oxygen breathing animals like humans to survive. If we where cats and dogs.

This is all terribly bad. The discourse is on a completely other level. Oil companies can still simply go about their business. The neat suit never loses ist power to lull people into positive expectations. Neat people can be complete cunts, and oil companies simply don’t care about humanity, they have known for decades of the dangers of what they are doing. Our minds are local, we can easily slip into the illusion everything is ok if we don’t see what goes wrong elsewhere.

Why wouldn’t we lose hope in the face of this new climate threat. Reason nr one is that that would be less fun. Let’s not be pussies, lets live a little.

Reason nr two is that we have technology, we are not sheep led to slaughter, even though industry wants us to behave like that : Drone like consumers without a sense of past or future. But we lack ways to organize, we are now invited to organize as a party, but there’s no time for that. That’s why there are demonstrations, people want to organize in a usefull group now, change laws immediately. Social media can not be used to achieve this, because they suppress such developments and allow individually targeted psychological manipulation.

Its better to start cooperatives and societies to at least find those that want to help you and who you can help to change things. Just withdrawing from fossil fuel dependence is an enormously important step. The biggest obstacle here are banks, who have everyone in this illusory debt. Debt in a fossil credit economy has only one embodyment : CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s where the fossil fuel went as we burned it. We can not replace that fuel, we can not pay our debt. Banks create new debt to pay the old debt, the control they lord over us is a complete fiction, and you find that out when you go bankrupt or have no debt or fossil fuel need.

Create local groups that are outside the fossil economy, what we call Extraeconomic enclaves. They should produce resources but not sell them in the fossil economy, so for instance plant trees but not burn or cut them down. Buy land, grow your own food, aquire renewable energy sources so you can sell the energy in return for whatever you need. The shift to solar/wind/electric is essential to be invulnerable to a fossil industry that suddenly falters.

Reason nr three is that we have mastered the art of mass manufacturing. Only a couple of hundred years ago we could not replicate anything to any degree of precision. Now we curn out millions of exactly identical items. That means that once we develop a lightweight bipedal manually dexterious robot we will be able to mass produce them, and even use them to mass produce themselves. This is not technooptimism because we are not talking Thorium reactors that have never worked. Tesla just revealed a powerfull roadbot the Cybertruck. That thing will be able to drive through firestorms and haul all kinds of usefull machinery to help fight either the cause or the effects of climate change.

We need to create those systems. We need to create systems to plant trees that we can mass produce, we need to deploy wind turbines in the Arctic that spray water into the air so more ice forms. We should look for ways to make more plants grow on the ocean so that the solar heat doesn’t penetrate too deeply. We should be looking for ways to turn sand into a more reflective material (cover with salt) or ways to capture fresh flood water and mass produce fresh water storage devices. Or ways to oxygenate ocean water (we have a great concept) and bring nutrients to the surface.

Reason nr four is that there are better ways to organize our lives. We need to free ourselves from the basic economic process that is soo stuff oriented. We are easy to manipulate if we are tired and trying to distract ourselves consuming TV or other media, but we should not be so weak as to always have to pay for everything. The wet dream of the economy is that we are soo afraid to do anything we behave exactly as shown to us in the media, and consume exactly what we are told to consume, and when we become unattractive or lack the money to consume anymore, fuck off to hand our insurance money to the health care industry. Why? Because we can’t be fighting corruption and commecial influences as we fight climate change. Vote to make all the services everyone needs public.

If the deserts are what we are left with then this still doesn’t mean we can’t survive. The species that did survive the climate extinctions showed in the image above lived underground. Plenty of ways to make that work. As long as we build technology to revert the atmosphere to one that keeps our planet cool (and this will take thousands of years) we have a chance. There are plenty of constructions left over from up to 5000 years ago. We can build structures that convert CO2 into Carbon or even hydrocarbons. What will make the absolute difference is that we don’t waste time organizing to actually do such things. We may also have to move into regions that are cheap and where we can act in freedom.

Automation has been taking jobs since the first mechanical loom was constructed. It replaced many small workshops where women wove fabric with big factories where minors ran under weaving machines to replace spindles. You could say it improved life because it made fabric cheaper while it reduced happyness by stealing the bread from the artisans. Since then our economy has adopted automation wherever it made economic sense and this trend is not stopping, in fact it seems to be accelerating. It does lead to better products at lower prices in large volumes, it allows more people to share in the western lifestyle, more dreams and desires can come true, and this is a good thing.

AI is adding a new aspect to this trend, and this will be a challenge to the economy. The economy needs consumers, people that buy the products and services it produces, and for that to happen people need jobs. Its obvious that if the production machine cuts jobs it reduces the demand for products and services or at least pushes demand down to the level of the “basic income” (also named social security). We have written before that to see the dillema we can ask ourselves the following question:

If we had a machine that made everyting everyone needed, would that mean nobody has a job, so nobody has money to buy anything and everyone would strave, or would that mean everything the machine produces is free? 

We wrote before that in a fossil fuel powered economy humans compete with machines for the -same- fossil fuels.  Because we distribute fossil fuels to anyone with money, money is the distributing medium for fossil fuels, and so machines compete with humans for money. Machines win because they require less money themselves, while generating profit, than humans in most cases. In short, producers will replace humans with machines whenever they can.

“I profit therefore I exist” (the primary economistic directive)

In an economy based on renewables one can facilitate human consumption with renewables, as well as running the machine, so both don’t compete. A factory with solar panels on the roof may be able to run its machines so cheap its products don’t need to be expensive, and as a result the humans have more to spend and can live wealthier lives. This was also the case in parts of the west during the oil glut. Being wealthy was easy, now it is getting harder.

Now we are facing a new variant of machine vs consumer, and this is RPA or Robotic Process Automation. This is about the tedious jobs, but soon it will be about every job. If you sit behind a desk staring at a screen, or you interview people and then process the information, chances are RPA will get your job. This is because RPA uses next generation classification and detection systems of the kind produced from soo called deep learning AI. This kind of AI can do advanced recognition at the level and speed (sometimes higher) humans can, which includes reading texts, classifying items, recognizing items, dealing with variations in form input etc. etc.

RPA is like robotics but more geared to services, not products. So for example a company recieves invoices from different suppliers, these need to be scanned and entered into the accounting books. The lady that did that is replaced by a digital system that takes documents from an inbox, reads them, fills in the necessary fields in the accounting application, sends an email to request additional data etc. etc. Many many jobs are like this, just keeping things working administratively.

So small companies are being competed against by large ones more able to automate (and lose jobs), and both small and big companies will automate administrative tasks and will lose jobs. And these jobs will not be replaced! Today some AI based companies advertise drones that fly autonomously through factories to check machines, reading the gages into the digital system. This would require perhaps serveral workers before. Artificial intelligence is still developing, in terms of language processing and process modelling, so we are just at the beginning of a profound reduction in the need for skilled people.

The way our economy deals with this is the same it as it deals with anything : As long as profits are being made, nobody should worry. So we are told people will do other things and find other jobs, this was always the case. The flaw in this argument is that this expectation is baseless. If you make people that do basic paper shoving redundant you lose a lot of jobs while no new ones are created, except perhaps that of RPA system consultants. So it is possible that the economy will suffer because the new jobless can’t spend anymore. The incentives in the economic system are causing it to eat itself. The machine that makes everything anyone needs is growing, but the number of people that can share in this wealth is dropping.

It is quite clear the economy does not listen to public outcry. Right now politics is so pro economy that you can see it making every effort to keep polluting and destroying nature even though the public wants this to stop. Humans are not setting the limits to what is done in industry, industry still behaves as if it ist working on the moon or some dystopian wasteland. With surveillance anyone with to little credit can even be kept away from places where they can demonstrate, they certainly can be discouraged from it and manipulated based on social media behaviour. This is without the obvious attempt to divide people in harmless camps by the media and politics.

It seems that if you care about all people, you need to start handing out cash to ensure consumption. If you don’t care about all people, you can keep going the way it is, and hope the people that become poor die early. The reason this seems to be the approach is because we use fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are finite. Because the allocation of fossil fuels can only be optimized by competition (including between human and machine) humans are not protected. The way to make this all work is thus to increase renewable energy use in automated production chains, so that the product costs can drop and the machine does not compete for the same energy as the human (of course the energy allocated per human is used to grow food, provide healthcare and education etc. the cost of of which can also be reduced by using renewables). That is the way towards what we call the Roboeconomy, which is the economy in which robots make most of what we need, using renewables and are used to restore the ecology and fight climate change. In this economy the basic income is a renewable energy credit that can be allocated to the products and services of choice.

We wrote this post before, but it somehow disappeared. So this version will be a bit shorter.

Elon Musk is developing a system (Neuralink) to safely and rapidly implant electrodes in the human brain. A small hole is made in the skull and very thin slivers are ‘sowed’ into the brain tissue underneath. This system is a major improvement over the original method, which involved rigit needles that would cut through the neural tissue as the monkey moved around. The brain is not very stiff.

We saw the first example of this in the late 90’s, when a brazilian scientist managed to allow a monkey to control a robot arm using only its brain. It took a while for the monkey to get the hang of it, first also moving its real arm(s) but eventually it could control three arms seperatly.

This milestone taught us a lot, because it turned out that you could read out the arm position using only a few 16-64 electrodes (who would read multiple neurons each). This said a lot a about how the brain encodes stuff, because the regions that are ultimately active when you move an arm contain billions of neurons.

Elon Musk hopes to increase the “bandwith” between humans can computers through the neural implants. He fears that Artificially intelligent systems will overpower humans and the only way to stay on top is to somehow become a symbiot with them. We are already semi-android because we use our mobile devices continuously and depend on digital systems so much.

We have studied neuroscience for a decade and been highly focussed on understanding what the brain actually does. How it works so to say. This gives us a hopefully interesting prespective on the risks and opportunities of the neuralink technology.

Every brain is different. We all develop in our unique way, due to genetic and factors during pregancy (such as air pollution and alcohol) and early development every brain even has different sensitivities to start with. So one can not expect to plug into a brain and read out data as if it was an ethernet connection, for every neuralink connector the subject needs to teach the system the relationship between what the connector reads and what the subject thinks or says.

In fact it is highly unlikely a neuralink system can read from regions that are not sensory or motoric, so what you hear, feel, see or which action you wish to execute now. This is because where the primary senses are mapped quite predictably in specific cortex regions, more abstract concepts can really be anywhere (in the associative areas). They will certainly be in different places for people. It is likely to take a lot of time to train the neuralink to recognize them.

The difficulty to map more abstract concepts also becomes an issue when you try to connect two persons through their neuralinks. It is possible to imagine the Broca area of one person, which drives speech, to be connected to the Wernicke area of another person, at which point they could each know what the other is saying, still this would be very invasive (two neuralinks each). Airpods would be a cheaper solution..

No Homunculus and Brain plasticity

To understand how to think about the possibilities of Neuralink we need to understand a bit more about the brain. An important aspect of how it functions is that it does not know what it does, or what it is, its just a bunch of neurons who actually compete against each other to be usefull. A neuron that gets few inputs will become more sensitive and grow until it finds itself in regular use. This ‘plasticity’ is the reason why our brains survive all the small damage we do to it every day. The brain has stem cells that will repair damage for as long as you have them. A temporary change in environment can trigger significant changes in how colors are encoded. If you start driving an Uber your brain will adapt to facilitate navigation. Every time you learn something your brain basically rewires itself.

If you add neuralink input to your brain the neurons will not know where the signal comes from. If you put them in a color recognition region you will likely see colors, or rather, experience them. There are no senses for pain or touch in the brain so the activity of the neurons to the brain can have only one explanation: There’s a color out there.

If you add neuralink to the Wernicke area (which we use for interpretation of speech), you are likely to have an experience as if someone said something specific. You may also hear someone (you know or yourself) say it.

It may turn out that if you input activity in an associative region, and the subject can control it, you end up with the option of adding senses. So when the subject demands it the system inputs signals in the auditory cortex that signify the state of a server or whether there is someone behind them. This would then have an associated sound (can be anything) which the subject recognizes. For this purpose however one could use backward facing radar and input into the headset as well. The take home message is that any input will simply be integrated into the experience. The neurons in the active region will simply work with what is being put in. This leads to a possible problem.

Ignoring input may be impossible

The way our brain works is that a region that is active silences other regions. This mechanism doesn’t work well with epileptic patients, who have runaway activity in cortical regions when they have an attack. This inhibition is local and also lateral, so between the left and the right brain halves. You can interpret it as kind of a sending state of a brain region, so that it determines the activity elsewhere. The sending region is always the one with the most activity, so any region with high activity (allowed by local inhibition) will dominate al the others. It is easy to see that if you put enough power into a neuralink you will dominat the brain of the subject. There are other more interesting regions to make a neuralink to that can enable even stronger control, but the awareness of a person recieving sufficiently strong Neuralink input will be filled with the modality where the neuralink is planted. So there is a potential for abuse.

Knowing the incredible connectivity of the brain and its plasticity one can also imagine another use of Neuralink, which is simply to use the compute power of a persons brain, like a deep learning neural network of sorts. Plug in two neuralinks in one brain, send with one and read with the other. The person in question may have experiences, and for it to work its awareness will be dominated by the activity. This is not super likely to work and it will at least mean serious discomfort for the subject.

So we think that expecting Neuralink to increase the bandwith between man and machine is optimistic. Its ability to recieve control signals has been proven, and this can lead to human controlled exoskeleton cyborgs, and maybe the sensory input wil become sophistcated enough that the subject can hear and sense (also controlling the sensing devices) a lot like we imagine ourselves, pointing our ears and nose and squinting our eyes, maybe that will become scannning frequencies or peering into the infrared or checking server statusses or other flags.

Beyond our attentional capacity, our ability to comprehend a situation and place the input signals in their appropriate context, its unlikely a direct input into the brain would enhance things, unless it would become abusive, so perhaps a rougue AI using Neuralink to control humans or a lab using captives with Neuralinks to do difficult computations. The development of this technology will be a blessing for paraplegics and can enhance human ability to deal with complex environments, but it also has some potential for being abused.

Geoengineering is any proces by which humans physically intervene in the normal Earth biochemical processes. Its been smeared as dangerous, but if we hear Rex Tillerson of Exxon, some companies have been involved in it knowingly since the 80’s. Still usually it is associated with spraying sulfur particles in the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight to cool the Earth. This idea although it would work, is highly impractical and would mean sulfur rain all over the planet, so it would utlimately be damaging.

There are other options, and we should not reject any option just -because- it could be called geoengineering. Driving a fossil fuel powered car is geoengineering. it should be judged on its effectiveness and sustainability, as if (big shock) we would like the Earth to be habitable for future generations!

Global dimming is a thing

Now that the reuse of rockets has been demonstrated and the cost of launching anything into space has dropped considerably the cost of manned missions to the moon, as well as the establishment of a permanent moon base has become much less. This means that in time there will be a military base there, holding the ultimate high ground over Earth. As we would then have a stabile base observing Earth with massive amounts of dust available, it becomes imaginable that we cause solar dimming by sending moondust to Earth. The energy required for that is modest. If you shoot a rifle bullet up in the sky from the moon it comes down! Basic canons could suffice to shoot material to Earth, or a railgun system driven by solar power.

Sunlight is already being dimmed, even if we don’t notice, by soot from fossil fuels. Strangely if we drop fossil fuel emissons the Earth would warm and the sun would become brighter, causing more warming! Some argue that we should therefore reduce emissions slowly because having a cooler planet is essential for food production, so a sudden drop would spell disaster.

It seems therefore that we would be wise to look for alternatives to soot as a solar dimmer. Many plants can do with 12% of full sunlight and still grow normally, so cooling the Earth by blocking sunlight would mean its plants can suck up a considerable amount of CO2. Sending the moon dust directly to Earth would mean that any effect is realtively short lived. The effect of CO2 emissions takes 20 years to fully express itself. This could be modelled and some experiments could show its effect.

Its not clear how fast the moon will be colonized, but we think it will happen in the next 10 years. It would make sense to not only speak about the military threat of a moon base but also about the opportunity to fight global warming from Earths celestial compagnion.

Around the world countries are drying up, the rising average global temperatures cause water to stick around in the air, instead of raining down. Australia is one of the hardest hit, where the natural graslands used for cattle is simply turning into desert, and farmes are crying because they get no more support.

Water has been touted as a commodity, where the CEO of Nestle said of course everybody has a right to a basic ration of water, but above that, its a free market! We are now seeing all the signs of an attempt to corner humanity as a whole in a scarce water market. If the global economy has any power, it will succeed in forcing us to pay for every drop in the near future. After all being fossil credit slaves, we will become water credit slaves.

How do we know? Because the videos about desalination are misleading. Below video is called “Solving the worlds water crisis” but it is actually a story of two technologies, one really and how there are drawbacks so we should not want either of them. True.

Not all options are mentioned..

The options described are evaporative desalination and reverse osmosis or RO. RO is the most common form and there is a simple reason for it : It is complicated and generates (fossil) cashflow. It requires high pressure pumps and pipes and a lot of energy. This is the dumbest thing to do if you want to be water secure, but if you want to get rich as an industry cooperating with banks and energy companies, its the bomb.

The risk of this ‘economistic’ approach is clearly demonstrated now in Zimbabwe. It has a big desalination plant serving millions, but it can’t afford the fuel anymore, so now millions are suffering, the elderly dying, because they adopted a technology that is economically desirable, but existentially risky. And this is the technology that is put forward to ensure money will always play a role in desalination.

We notice that descriptions of other ways to desalinate are disappearing from Youtube. One very good example we can’t show but it was one of the cheap methods. There are three at lease :

1. Freeze desalination
2. Vacuum evaporation destilation
3. Ionic desalination

Freeze Desalination

Simply put when water freezes it forms a lattice that pushes ions out. Salts fall apart in water, into Natrium Na+ and Cloride Cl- for example. These ions are what makes the water salty. If you freeze water the molecules H2O get closer together, and squeeze the Na+ and Cl- out. So you can simply cool water until you get an ice slush, pick out the ice, thaw it, repeat the cycle until the ice is fresh enough. This is waaay more energy efficient than boiling water, or RO.

Vacuum Evaporative Destillation

Water boils at about 100 degree Celsius at sea level. On top of Mount Everest it boils around 71 degree Celsius. The energy required to make water boil is enormous. So boiling water to desalinate is very energy intensive. The simple solution is to lower the air pressure so water boils at a lower temperature. Create a low enough air pressure and water boils at ambient temperatures or even below freezing! Of course it is easier to create such a vacuum than to push the water through a RO filter at high pressure, it is waay cheaper!

Its know technology

Ionic desalination 

Ionic desalination comes in several forms. The key idea is to pull on the Na+ and Cl- (which we will allow to stand for all salts in this post). They are charged particles. If you create an electric field through water the + particles will move in the opposite direction of the – particles. The water itself will stay where it is. This is one way to separate out the salt from the water.

If you let the water with the salt flow thorugh a magnetic field you will also cause the + particles to move in another direction than the – particles, and the water will again flow as if nothing happend (even though it is a polar molecule, we are no 100% sure). This is also a way to separate out the salt! It is even a way to generate electricity!

Last but not least the – particles will be able to move through a positive charged membrane, while the + paricles will be repulsed. Same with a negative membrane. If you create a setup where the water can flow straight but the particles can move to a positive or negative compartment through a negative or positively charged membrane, you are also desalinating!

temperature swing solvent extraction (TSSE)

Salts bind to amines, which can be separated from the water by increasing the temperature (not boiling it)

The Roboeconomy

The fossil fuel economy wants to sell fossil fuel, and this is done by promoting technology that consumes fossil fuel. Why would it want this? Because the fuel is traded in USD, credit and banks live off supplying and managing it. Renewables will cause a serious drop in work for banks! The products we are supposed to buy today all have this ‘bank tax’ build in, and this is why the stories about water do not include ‘low yielding’ technology, meaning low yielding for banks!!

We are however moving into the Roboeconomy, which is the economy where robots running on renewables make almost everything and are also restoring the ecosystem. Renewables change the equation, and banks are NOT part of that equation.

Right now all technology has to make money for banks, has to be super optimized within that constraint, all because even though banks want to profit, they also want to last long, so the rate of consumption of fossil fuels should be low. In reality the oil and gas companies are flaring (even without burning) 8 million car years worth of methane every year, but that loss doesn’t hit them. The take home message is that with renewable energy you don’t have to be super efficient. The irony is that all of the above desalination technologies ARE more efficient, up to 80%!!

So water is becoming more scarce, and if we all listen to the mass media we feel there is no way out. That is because they help capturing us mentally and physically so we can work in the water economy. This economy is mostly created out of a misplaced extrapolation of current economic thinking. If you want to escape that scenario help promote the above better ways to desalinate, you will certainly save lives and make people happy. And you will help usher in the Roboeconomy!

Science fiction lovers know Stanley Kubrics movie 2001 A Space Odyssey to be one of the defining movies of its genre. Not only for its visual effects, but also for its plot : HAL, the onboard AI of a spacecraft send to investigate a possible sign of alien life, becomes problematic as it makes up its own mind and breaks the first rule of robotics as stated by Isaac Asimove : “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”. This definitely happens because HAL tries to protect itself.

The above report on AI algorithms finding ways outside the expected bounds, so in a way cheating on the challenge given to them shows that a scenario like in Kubrics movie is not far fetched. This can be understood if we consider that in many forms of current AI we do not restrict the use of the tools of the AI. The model of the AI can be simplified to

Input -> Processing  -> Output

In this model the Input are signals from sensors of video feeds or clocks etc. The output can be a datastream (words) but also angular momentum given to actuators, so the movement of a real or simulated robot arm, wheel axle. To the arms and wheels one can attach drills, or paintbrushes etc.  Most interesting AIs can observe itself or at least get feedback on the succes or failure of their actions.

An AI is asked to find the most efficient way to achieve an objective. But is the objective defined in such a way that it is safe to consider every possible avenue?

The implicit risk we take in building an AI and giving it ways to manipulate our world is that we may not have defined the objective in a safe way, and there are ways to manipulate the world to achieve the objective when it is interpreted in another way, more sparsely. A simple example is that you ask an AI to clean the room and you return to find the AI has remove all furniture from the room through the window! The mistake is to think the AI will take into account the constraints you take into account as a human.

A good recent example is that a bug in the Python programming language caused errors in scientific results. In this case even the human programmer who clearly understands the world and the objective did not realize the results where false because the tool used was faulty.

What if we ask an AI to use Python to build a new Hyperloop pod that keeps humans safe over the span of a 1 hour yourney, and the AI decides killing the humans right after the pod leaves is safest because it never learned about harm coming to humans after death?

This echo’s the case in which there could be no (positive) safety rating for Model 3 Teslas because there where too few accidents! Once you start thinking about it, weakly defined objectives and opportunistic intelligence is causing problems everywhere.

We thus need to brace ourselves for AI in the wild. An AI is basically us allowing things to happen we don’t really understand and which might even kill us, a bit like the global economy, which feeds the people who support it but destroys all life because it prefers fossil fuels.

Like laws governing humans a first step is to have laws governing the capabilities of AI, the access, the actuators and magnitude of angular momentum they can give to arms and legs. Also the failsaves. One simple trick would be to build in a breaker that stops a robot in public space if it comes to close to a warm body or smartphone, if the robot has no business.

 

 

Wonen aan een drukke straat in de Randstad is niet gezond. Daar komt nog bij dat er vaak restaurants zijn met lage schoorstenen en dat het stoken door de buren een deken van rook over een wijk kan leggen. Luchtfilters zijn echter vrij duur en meestal niet gefocust op chemische vervuiling maar meer op stof, zn HEPA filters zijn dan de beste. We hebben maar eens een minimaal apparaat in elkaar geknutselt.

Hierboven ziet u een flinke koolstof filter, met flens en een ventilator die in de flens past..

Dit kan op twee manieren, maar de goede is met de blazende kant boven, zodat lucht via de deken in de filter naar de ventilator stroomt. De lucht is dan meestal vrijwel van chemische stoffen gezuiverd, koolstof filters zijn verbazend effectief!

Wat ontbreekt is de HEPA filter. Die zijn erg duur, maar voor 20 Euro moet je er een kunnen  vinden. De onze hadden we al een tijdje. De kunst is nu om alle lucht ook door deze filter te krijgen anders komt er misschien koolstof mee en dat is niet gezond.

Met wat geknutsel hebben we een doos gemaakt, die op de ventilator past en waarvan de bovenkant uit de filter bestaat. Lang leven ducttape!De verpakking van de filter wordt zo herbruikt. Het bodem stuk komt uit een sinasappeldoos.En zo is onze koolstof-HEPA filter klaar voor gebruik (snoer hadden we nog). Deze kan veilig blazen. Het geluid valt zelfs mee. Voor huisgebruik kun je hem natuurlijk in de bijkeuken zetten of in het ventilatie systeem verwerken.

Betere filter optie, iets groter oppervlak

Totale kosten van dit systeem zijn 70,- Euro ongeveer. We denken dat een kit met een paar onderdelen voorbereid 100,- kan kosten. Die kunt u bestellen via info@climatebabes.com of info@greencheck.nl met titel HEPA filter.