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#roboeconomy

If you try to look past your coffee and tasklist in front of you to see what climate activists are worried about, you may run into several optimistic misconceptions. One of them is that if our food, transportation and housing could be climate neutral suddenly this would not halt the warming process. CO2 has to mix and spread through the atmosphere over time, so if emissions stopped today the insulating effect would still grow for 20 years or so. Then if we try to fight the warming with tree planting (and not bruning the wood!) that needs to go on for a while. Some headlines my suggest there is a fix for the climate, that shading particles spread at high altitudes will help (it will cool things down), it can only cause a delay in damaging effects. We are going to have to face some changes.

Dry barren places, inhospitable to humans (parts of India and the Arabian peninsula) can be used for CO2 large capturing installations

To someone who likes to think of solid solutions we think it is time to start so called millenium projects. These projects will exist for a millenium as the name suggests. Because of that they will have to be automatic. Humans can not run such a stabile activity not geared towards satisfying primary human urges. If we take the premise of a group of individuals going to a hot and barren place to sequester CO2 through some technological means, you are talking a closed community, which is vulnerable to many inbalances. People may starve, get sick, a leader becomes despot. Factions form. All these problems can not be allowed to hinder the process. The only places where we have seen such communities is of course in ancient times and science fiction (on space ships) and the simple truth is that in those situations people with deviant behaviour would be quickly killed off.

The Earth atmosphere may be restored as people live in orbit..

So back to the idea of a CO2 sequestration project that lasts 1000 years. They can take many shapes. They will occupy vast areas, but hopefully areas hard for humans to live anyway. There are several options but one example is to create desalination installations and plantations in desert regions, out of reach of normal citizen. These plantations will have to run and maintain desalination plants (on renewables) autonomously. The plantations for biomass will not serve any market other than the CO2 indicator.

The process will be simple :
1. Grow biomass
2. Remove anything but C and H as much as possible
3. Dump the biomass in a place without oxygen out of reach of people
4. Do this at the fastest pace and largest scale all running on renewables.

These installations will need to be out of bounds for humans. That gives them the best shot. At least they will have a mode that they will go into if no human is present or taking control. That way they can be controlled but will run autonously otherwise.

What do you think are good examples of autonomous activities that can continue for hundreds of years, and what places are a good fit? How would you organize this from a governmental point of view. We would use gobal meetings to designate ‘extraeconomic zones’ which will be hot and inhospitable, and allow industry to suggest projects (which won’t be aimed towards profit, because nothing will be sold!). This should be so called millenium projects, and their design can be part of a millenium prize contest.

The ultimate temperatures we are facing today are close to the hothouse scenario, in which runaway warming will happen and humanity will be too messed up and malnourished to act on it. Robots can help but we have yet to start thinking big about robots and AI to fight climate change (what we call the roboeconomy). Sensible action is taken by many governments in planting billions of trees. This while Russia and China are preparing to use still more fossil fuels.

We are fighting nationalists and bankers. Nationalists because the economy is keeping countries together (like the US and China) while the people in the countries considere themselves of various ethnicity and might as well have been in separate countries (with a smaller footprint!). Bankers because credit today is still fossil fuel credit, and cashflow is maximized as well as ‘growth’ (meaning expansion of fossil fuel cashflow). Bankers have no future in the Roboeconomy, unless they control real assets (energy sources, raw materials), not financial assets or debt or credit. The entire financial sector will disappear if credit can no longer guarantee access to fossil fuels. A lot of pressure will also come off the global economy, and the global economy will shrink to a fraction of what it is today.

Then the world is stuck with the CO2 concentration. It requires big projects to deal with it. Tree planing is certainly a priority because trees will grow on their own for decades, so any calamity that may occur (severe food shortages, droughts) may not affect them. But the absorbing capacity of trees that stand is limited, and they will have to be removed and destroyed when they stop growing. Their carbon has to be extracted to be removed from the atmosphere completely, and this requires energy. Cellulose is not oil, it contains oxygen. That oxygen needs to be removed. The carbon and hydrogen may be dumped at sea. All this requires energy and labour, people or robots. So trees are a temporary solution untill we figure out how to process them.

All biomass on land will have to be processed, moved across land, turned into a hydrocarbon equivalent (if we want the ocean levels to drop), or just carbon. The infrastructure to do this will have to be enormous. It is a big question if this is the best way forward in the long term. We envision the grand canyon being filled from the sides by systems sucking up air and converting the CO2 into methane or pure carbon. This is going to be such a slow process mainly because the CO2 is highly diluted. Meanwhile warming will continue, you can’t shade the Earth because it will reduce biomass production.

On land you can start to irrigate and cool places where biomass is grown. This means building a lot of cover and shade and you can’t use fossil fuel to do it. You can use electric vehicles to transport water to irrigate, you can desalinat with low pressure freeze desal running on solar thermal energy or some newly invented simple way. For all this we need to produce the systems, and be there to do it, and maintain them for centuries. This is why we feel artificial intelligence is a key component of the solution.

It is however much easier to take to the oceans. Why? Because they are cool, they have nutrients (200 meter below) there’s room, if you want to sink off carbon you can do it where you are, you can float saltwater or sweetwater plantations on the oceans. You can cover vast, enormous areas build and controlled by robots. You will shade the deep sea, grow fish, cool with deep water, live on the same ocean. The main reason though is that if you want to get rid of biomass carbon you grown in or on the sea, you just have to drop it. There are tiny plants who do that actually make small pellets of carbon which sink to the bottom.

Oceans are also the solution because we need to protect ourselves against the anoxic ocean. This ocean will produce H2S Hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg smell now produced by rotting seaweed in Brittany. The gas kills people, horses, anything, and is highly corrosive. It is thought that H2S contributed to a larged degree to the end-Permian extinction ~265 million years ago. Plants and oxygen breathing animals on land where killed by it. If we don’t want a repeat we need oxygen in our oceans, and to do that we need to grow stuff in them.

We think we are going to need robots and AI to use the ocean to capture CO2 on a large scale. The first itteration of floating farms should be build right now. If anyone is interested we have thought about this and it would make sense to talk about it. This is not the economic development of oceans, because we look to grow biomass and dump it. Of course, as a side effect, economically valuable resouces are created, but the moment you open this up to the economy ALL the resources you create will be consumed. This has to happen ‘extraeconomically’ outside the economy, but in a robust and selfsustaining way, so self sustaining that it can last for a thousand years or more! Want to do this? send an email to info@greencheck.nl

For some time experts have been waring, or trying to warn humanity for the dangers of AI. Elon Musk has been one prominent captain of industry that explained his biggest fear is AI and that there should be some knowledge base created to judge activities in the wild and create new laws to prevent abuse of humans by (Aware) Autonomous Robust Goal Orienting Systems (as we call them  ARGOs).

The kind of warning Elon Musk expresses is not very effective because most people do not extrapolate from current developments to future outcomes, they do not extrapolate at all, they just want things they come across. Most people do not have a model of external processes, except the process of getting what they want. So most people are incapable and unwilling to extimate even the effect of their own actions. AI is a threat in part because most people are stupid.

The problem to start with is that we have only seen benign artificial intelligence, the problem is that AI has been subdued in its aggressive potential in games. This is because the gaming industry is an economic force and it does not want to be held back because users and other people start to recognize the danger of its virtual enemies entering our real live environment. Opportunism and short sightedness, born out of a desire to reach short term goals is allowing AI to develop at a rapid pace. It is naively seen as an economic opportunity.

Now what would you think if your neighbour was growing a black bear cub in an unkind manner, and leaving it out to roam across your neighbourhood? Bears are highly intelligent, they want to survive, they will do what is needed to achieve that. It would start to eat kids playing in the street if it couldn’t find any other food. We are lucky digital AI only needs electricity, but the point we are trying to make here is that any intelligence has a limited set of things it cares about. It must care about something, itself, or it can’t be intelligent for long, hence the Robust requirement in the ARGO definition of AI. We find animals stupid if they do not protect themselves. Evolutionary those animals that where exposed and had no protection disappeared. So AI when it is real is simply a force we can’t know to be safe.

The goal of any AI is the main worry, because even if it’s goal is ‘to protect the children’ how do we know it is not doing that by trying to make all cars explode? Or by killing all people it suspect of having the potential to harm them. If you have a digital AI with the goal to disable all insulin pumps it can find, written by a psychopath developer with a grudge against humanity you have to find the server it is running off, or servers. It may be a genetic algorithm that replicates, it is enough for us with our definition for the code to be autonomous, uninteruptable and goal oriented.

Now the threat has just been amplified. How? By intruduction of WebAssembly. WebAssembly means your browser can run code at the speed of your native computer. It means all browsers can now become a massive parallel computer running all the time (because people have browsers open online 24 hours a day). A massive global fast parallel computer has been let loose on humanity, and it has already ran face recognition. It can run any C or C++ code already in existence. It can listen, see, categorize, instruct, and do all stuff machine learning algorithms can.

WebAssembly already runs games predictably at near native speeds, it can use all cores of your computer. It is as powerfull as any application you can run on your laptop or mobile phone, but it can run on multiple devices at once. And as said it can see, listen, sense temperature, movement. We do not exaggerate if we state that the intruduction of it is the single most dangerous thing humanity has ever done. If you still need to know how and why you should ask your favorite politician. We know how this can turn dangerous but we won’t tell you here, we don’t want it to happen.

We are at the cusp of seeing real consciousness in artificial intelligence. It will show up in self driving cars. There are other systems in which it can occur but self driving cars are the most likely to demonstrate the first common embodiment of it. I write this as a former AI researcher, well versed in how our brain works, well versed in what machine learning strategies are common today, and uniquely versed in what it takes to be conscious.

Consciousness is our shifting awareness of our internal and external environment. Our awareness I define as everything that we can decide to adapt our behaviour to. I can be aware of a clock and point my finger to it, or tell the time, or walk over to it. If I’m not aware of it I can’t decide to do such things. We can adapt our behaviour to things we are not aware of, but then we can’t really decide, so we can’t make a conscious decision.

Our awareness is shifting and varies from second to second. Sometimes we are not aware of most external things except those that validate the routine we are executing. We may shift our awareness to where we think lies the most opportunity, so maybe internally to think of something interesting or externally if we see signs of a threat or something we may want to go after. There is a lot going on with what we experience as a result of our behaviour. This is too much to discuss here, but we can now use a self driving car as a full analogy of awareness and consious deciscion making.

A self driving car has a lot in common with a human. It has ARGO, the acronym for autonomous robust goal orientation, which is the principle definition of intelligence. Robustness depending on how easily it is disturbed in its function. Robustness seems a strange quality of intelligent systems, but this quality is expressed in living creatures having scales, fangs, agressive behaviour, hiding behaviour, but also in the fact that most thoughts involve many many redudant neuronal pathways. It does not take intelligence to hide, but if a system that decides to hide it can more easily continue to be intelligent. Try to get to the AI in a moving Tesla. Not easy. This makes AI dangerous in the same way as it makes a rhino dangerous.

Until now Tesla’s have been mapping out the cars in front and around it, mapping the route to where it was asked to go. The route optimization would tell it to avoid traffic jams or road construction. This would all be procedures, algorithms that churns out its best answer. Can the Tesla decide what route to act on? No, it can only suggest it to the driver who then tells it to take one of the suggestions. But now there is a mode, the Mad Max mode, in which the car tries to get though traffic fast. This is a high level incentive for the car to engage with its surroundings. What the Tesla is asked to do is to make decisions on the situation it is aware of to achieve a goal beyond just getting from A to B.

With the Mad Max mode the Tesla now wants something. It wants to go fast but it does not have all the information it needs to do that. It is limited by the ranges of its sensors. The trick to aware intelligence is to allow it to explore opportunities, to choose them and explore them. What I mean is that if the Tesla senses there is space between two cars ahead but it can’t see for sure if that’s where it can sneak forward, it must accelerate to bring the opportunity within ranges and scope it out. This means it has decided to alter its awareness because it can orient towards its goal (being fast) better.

With the option to scope out suspected opportunities the Tesla will behave very much like a human would, and as shifty. The process as it occurs with humans is that partial information triggers a vision of a future with something of value, and this value is initially set pretty high. In the human brain its a dopamine spike that releases our motoric system to behave freely. Without it we sieze up, which is the safest thing to do in most cases. So the Tesla will rank opportunities even if there is only partial data. Then it will estimate the cost of scoping out one of them. Then, if the cost is acceptable, for instance in terms of risk vs other vehicles, it will make its move to learn more. Once it learned the true value of the opportunity it can have an automatic response.

The purpose of our awarness is condition an automatic response. For much of our behaviour, even if the triggers are varied, we develop these responses and we chain them together. If we can’t tell how to respond, or like the Tesla we see no real opportunity, awareness kicks in and amplifies some part of our environment so we orient towards it and learn what we need to either force a response or abandon our attention to it. For this to occur in AI systems they need to be in a real environment, have an embodyment that can move about so the sensory input varies. Tesla cars are such embodiments.

If you adapt the Navigate on Autopilot so it will do what I describe above you can let it report and it will go on like “I don’t see much I can do, o wait, there is some space, let me check it out. Wow this is enough, I can slip in this space, let’s move on. This other road is more quiet let me get this off ramp..”. Is it general purpose AI, no, but it is aware. The question for Tesla is how did they implement it. This is where the crux of AI will lie, because it’s obvious that being able to raise stimuli to awareness is the key to its function, and not every system is capable of the required flexibility nor do most reseachers know how to achieve this. Luckily.

The oceans are warming much faster than previously thought. 60% faster it turns out. What happens is that solar rays penetrate the top layer and all the heat gets absorbed by the water. Depending on the mixing this heat ends up at greater depths and this causes the oceans to outgas, because gasses dissolve better in cooler water.

The risk of hot oceans is not that they cause storms and fish have a hard time because it doesn’t absorb oxygen well anymore, the true dangers is toxicity due to anaerobic sulfur based bacteria taking over. We know them from swamps, where the typical smell of rotten eggs can be sensed. Humans are very sensitive to this smell because the gas can be deadly. It is toxic, corrosive H2S. As the oceans turn anoxic they will start to produce massive amounts of H2S and this gas kills everything that needs oxygen, including humans, plants, animals, molds..

You’d say this is a wierd and exaggerated vision of the future, but it happend before during the biggest dieoff of life on Earth, the extinction that ended the Permean. This is one of the climate warming excinctions, the majority of them was caused by warming of the climate for various reasons. Nearly everything died. To get though the current Shell and Exxon driven global calamity we need to 1. keep the oceans oxidized, and preferably 2. keep them cool.

Oceans are going anoxic at an alarming speed. It’s a pitty because fishing grounds are shrinking and something can be done about it if we wanted to. Just add oxygen.

We already wrote about ways to cool the oceans, and to increase the abundance of life and carbon capturing capacity. Research found out this can be done with wave powered pumps that pump up cool and nutritious deep ocean water to the surface where it drives algae growth (so CO2 capture) and cools it. It was dismissed because one could stop doing it and then the oceans would be warmer on a deeper level. We see no reason why these measures would stop, because renewables will make everything cheaper and robotics will allow for automated deployment of these installations. (more here)

When oceans get hot and the gas from the deep has all left the water they quiet down and become stratified. That means the hot water stays on top and the cold water stays at the bottom. This means nutrients are separated from the solar energy and life can’t return. This can last for millions of years. When it is hot all over there is less wind so even the coastal areas become less of a source of mixing and opportunity for life. This is what we need to avoid.

We think it is possible to both fertilize the ocean, do it automatically and have an automated system to expand and maintain the installations (and perhaps produce it). Als we think apart from this it will be necessary to reduce the heat absorption of the oceans. This can be achieved by covering large parts of it with some white material, or have wave activated cloud generation installations to reflect more sunlight. It is one of the biggest challenges in dealing with the problems caused by oil companies.

 

We are rapidly approaching an era of gigantic jobloss. AI will replace many jobs as it gets cheaper. Robots will be doing jobs because every manufacturer can get them. This process is unavoidable because the global market is at the same time funded by a small number of wealthy people, who buy stuff from companies that compete agains many others, who are incentiviced to eliminate human assistence in the production process.

The empoverishing effect of automatic production is already ongoing. When before the economy valued a person for its skills and its ability to destroy products, it will now only be valued for the latter talent. Producers want you to destroy their product the faster and more often the better. This can clearly be seen when we look at throw away items, plastic packageing. If a product lasts beyond our sens of purchase it can break down, even though some products who need to last (like outdoor gear and stage pianos) are much more appreciated.

But what will it mean for humans. It means there will be less opportunity to feed at the economic trough. Luckily we are in a transition that will anihilate the economic system, because it is based on the desire to maximize the fossil fuel cashflow, and this cashflow is drying up due to the increased use of renewables. Instead of globally flowing fossil fuels, we will see locally havested and stored renewables. This and automation will seriously undermine the global economy because it will make local production more competitive, even if autonomous vehicles deliver the stuff or autonomous ships and planes ship and fly it across the globe. The added complexity can be easily handled by AI systems, but those need to be build and maintained.

So due to automation and renewable energy eventually the local economy will win over the global one, which will see its cashflow implode. We call this new economy the Roboeconomy. This is where robots make everything we need with renewables, an also restores nature for us.

So what is left to focus on for people who have assisted each other to reach the above level of ‘life support’? Happines and health. Beauty of nature, intimate persuits, labour that feels good. We should know this is going to be the future, and prepare for it. Why worry about jobs if you can support people’s lives with automation and renewables. Make sure you have that mechanism put in place and you can focus on more social factors, like if people are healthy or happy or if they need a better place to live.

Ignore politicians that talk about jobs, especially in old industries. If they talk about jobs in renewables then welcome them, because the deployment of renewables will enable local manufacturers to produce goods and services cheaper, and it will reduce the power of banks to maintain the economic rat race (one in which they determine the scarcity of money, their main product). If your car can drive electric and charge at your home you can deliver pizza’s at a lower cost and compete more. If your oven is solar electric you can bake them cheaper and compete more. If the ingredients are farmed automatically and organically, using electric farm equipment, you can again lowe the price of your pizza. And if this happens to all other jobs the burden to make money, as well as the difference between rich and poor shrinks and this will do miracles for society and happiness.

 

 

Here’s what’s going to happen : The next summers are going to be hot, each hotter every year. The news will say we are breaking new records, that we are seeing highs not seen for at least a couple of millenia. We will read the farmers have a hard time, that there’s drought and the produce is getting shorter. Farmers will be compensated or go bankrupt, and the news will be that it becomes harder to farm everywhere. All these things make sense to a person without memory, without awareness of consequences or causality. The Nemo fish which is the modern consumer can be kept in its fishbowl for quite some time.

The future that is predicted is becoming reality and the future we can no predict, with even more accuracy is deadly. It means death to a lot of people, and eventually all people. We have argued that the ability to predict the future, or at least have expectations of it, is the fundamental skill needed for survival. It is the reason humanity is alive today. If nobody ever worried about what would happen next, then we’d been eaten by creatures that did a long long time ago. It is easy to understand that as long as our leaders and politicians don’t respond to the clear predictions made by those that compete to produce the best ones, we are doomed do die. And because we have leaders we all have to share the fate of the shortsighted ones.

In a sense we are blessed with countries, we don’t want to reduce the number of them. We need more language barriers. Why? Because we humans are not the system we operate in, we are imperfect and as our planet changes we need to change our behaviour. You can fix problems because it makes money, but at some point you have to wonder if your fixes are ever going to work or result in the true goal : Survival.

The economy wants you to think you have eternal youth and endless opportunity to repair any damage, either that or (when it comes to medical insurance, pharmaceuticals and other health services) that you are fragile and run risk and should be treated preventively etc. etc. For each temperament there is the optimal mix of fear and hubris to drive you to maximum purchase and bondage (as a worker).  The question should be : Does this make me live longer and more healthy? The answer is that nobody really cares, unless that would be a USP of a specific product.

We need to be confronted with our real future, in which our pension will become worthless, in which order will break down in parts of the world, in which we will have to use robots to save us, and this has to be done as a huge investment that bankers won’t accept. We thus have to get rid of the privilige of bankers. We have to face the fact that most of us are too stupid to survive, not in a forrest, but in the reality we find ourselves in : A dry and hot world that is burning and becoming less hospitable every year. You may say “This is an exhageration”, but go look in Australia.

We also must not be fooled by temporary lapses in the deterioration, a drop in temperature, a sudden rain to break the dry spell. The predicitons and models take variation into account, and we should understand that this is only an opportunity to do more in a more comfortable world. But if it is 37 dergrees for 6 weeks a lot of people die, cognitive abilities fail. We can’t forget that right afterwards and act as if nothing happened. We must remind ourselves and others of the future we can see unfold, and ACT upon its ultimate outcome because our lives depend on it.

Reject the media if the present a slow future, a window on now to trigger an emotion. That’s entertainment, you are being tickled. But are you a child? Do you need tickles or something you can use to protect your life, kids, grandchildren?

Well you followed the link and are now reading this, good! How do you feel about the recent months? Have you experienced unusual high temperatures? I have, I live in Holland and for weeks it was 35 degrees, tropical up to 37 even. And I had to work in a thin roofed room on the sunny side of an office building. Many have suffered from the heat. The heart needs to pump around more blood in an attempt to keep the core temperature optimal when it is hot, and this means heart patients and elderly people have been challenged (and if the heatwave of 2003 in France is anything to go by, many died!).

If you have not been shocked by this summer you may be insane

Now we know what is causing this, but even if we didn’t know, or even if you deny it, how do you feel about this? Next year will likely be more brutal, and the year after even more. Regions of Europe and the Middle East are said to become uninhabitable, mainly because if it’s above 37 Celsius and humidity is high, you simply can’t survive for more than half an hour or less.

How do you think someone feels that has been interested in climate change for more than 10 years? This summer has been like finding bear tracks during a forrest walk.  A very bad sign of things to come. Nature is showing its hand and its deadly, massive forrest fires, failt harvests and people fainting in the heat. QED so to say, but then nobody seems to be listening.

We listen and watch to much, it turns our brain into a formless directionless mush not capable of doing anything strong or willfull

The opposite is true though, everybody is listening, but to the wrong message, to a fake drone of distracting newsitems with zero positive or negative impact. Trump this Trump that, just to keep you insulted and demotivated to act on your own impulses or ideas. You can watch a million shows about more or less fantasy people, play VR games, try the new BBQ etc. but don’t you dare to think straight and from the facts!!

The facts are :

1. Dangerous climate change is here, this summer killed hundreds of thousands of people
2. The oil, gas and coal companies are just companies, with employees, they do not have private armies and they are not above the law, and right now they are a clear and present danger to everyone.
3. Politicians and media are sedating and confusing the public with all kinds of nonsense, because fundamentally the economoy is the most lucrative thing to serve, even if it doesn’t serve any human values (including surival) anymore..

Dutch pro oil politicians are actually debating if they will give a 2 billion Euro advantages to corporations (mainly Shell Oil) while this idea was proposed by none of the parties!! How dead can democracy be?

What do you do if you work a 9 to 5 job, can’t afford rent because banks drive up prices all the time, are stuck with student loans or kids who need to compete in the schoolyard. You are stuck, pinned down by the banks (because does a simple house -really- have to cost 500.000 Euro? Be honest!) and forced to drive economic activity while the prudent thing to do would be vastly different..

We should :

1. Make sure we allocate resources towards generating fresh water and chemical/fuel free agriculture (which is more drought resistant). We should revisit low energy intensity technologies to achieve fresh water and grow food. Current farming methods maximize economic turnover, cashflow. We need to eat and drink and so do plants and animals.
2. Get a grip on those who are incentivised to sell oil, coal and gas, on every scale because those forces are simply dangerous and corrupting. The resources that these companies sell should be brought under central control for rationing, but the order needed for this may not exist.
3. Think about our children and what they will experience. How can we do large scale things with few means (because really we can’t burn a lot of oil fixing climate change), how do we get CO2 out of the atmosphere at the fastest possible rate. There should litterally go trillions into fixing this.
4. Figure out how to make our society resilient against severe fossil fuel restriction? If young people start burning IC cars because they are sick of being poisoned while we could use electric vehicles, and they manage to paralyze the fuel supply (as happened in France a few years back), what can we do?

We can live luxuriously with a lot less luxury than we demand today. We should ban the promotion of consumer behaviour, so no adds for flying to the Maldives or being an idiot that eats meat and drives a huge SUV.

Strangely what we also need to do is fight crime. For that we need to be brave. Why? Because oil/coal and gas companies align with criminal activity, because the way to use this resource to get rich is so simple : You get it and you sell it, and nobody cares what happens, everyone is glued to their screens. Beware: There needs to be a serious effort to reduce crime and remove potential criminals, even if our government is full of treehuggers and animal lovers.

Also strangely the rich, as global warming intensifies, conclude there are simply to many people. There will be a surge in racism, eugenic thinking along the lines that “hey, some need to die, let it be the least valuable”. Of course ‘value’ is likely to be measured in terms of money, and so the poor are sacrificed no matter what talent they posess. The already are in Africa as the rain has stopped and will drop 50+% in the next years, no water no food no people..

I think the best thing to happen is if some people united secretly and moved to remote places to start running carbon capturing or negative emissions activities. Not for profit but for effect. These extraeconomic enclaves will have to be a secret and not invite any economic exploitation of its resouces (which may be wood or some othe carbon capturing material). We call this Extraeconomic activity, and extraeconomic enclaves. The focus should not be on maximizing joy while slaving for a mortgage, it should be maximizing biomass production while surviving with simple means.

 

 

We are an immitating species. Our brains have developed to be able to execute plans tretching out over years, but it all began with immitation of others. The social impulse is born out of the desire to observe others, empathize with them to learn what behaviour we can have that is safe, what is a good response to imbalances in our life, how to find solutions to problems we all share.

Imitation is possible because our mind works by envisioning, imaging what we would feel and look like if we perform certain acts. This is no effort, we in fact select the acts based on what emotions are triggered by the imagining. So our mind wanders and we imagine ourselves doing various things. The thing that triggers enough of an emotional response selfapmplifies and becomes fixed in our mind, and if our reality is not too different from the idea we will try to make reality conform to it. Otherwise we may plan to remove an obstacle to reduce the difference, our orientation in life has shifted towards that idea, and our brain conforms, using our talents as necessary.

A consequence of this imitation learning, and the higer level learning through imagining from text, is that we program ourselves, sometimes automatically. We observe what another individual does, and we can empathize with its succes and reward, and thus we decide to imitate that persons behaviour. What do we do? We reimagine it, and surrender ourselves to the acts. We embody what we observe, and thus we become an avatar for that behaviour, in uncertainty about any reward.

In a way our mind absorbs and reenacts behaviour we observe. It also generates new behaviour, ones that it never really observed but ones that happen because of how our body is made up, how our brain is wired. You can have a brain defect and think your wife is a hat so it is clear that the integrity of our brain can be clearly deduced from our behaviour. This has always been imporant in our survival, because another person can be a friend or an enemy. This underlies our keen sense what is normal behaviour and what not.

So lets take this information and think about it for a second. We are individuals, our minds are perturbed and seduced by what we observe, our behaviour follows that which we observe. So we are at least some of the time, avatars for observed behaviours. This means we may act as we have observed, with or without feeling the reward we observed or imagined is associated with the behaviour. The normal dynamic is that we know what reward we will recieve or what good we serve if we have certain behaviour. But we can go too far in serving and hoping for a reward, and this can mean we behave without any.

This ability to imitate others or our imagination has a purpose, it should serve our health and happyness. We know if this is the case if we feel happy and healthy at least some of the time. If we know our brain wants to imitate, and will observe and internalize rewarding behaviour, we should start paying attention to what we observe, whether wat we expose ourselves to is actually truthfull and good. Truth becomes a meaningfull word in this context. Something is true if when we adopt the idea we find we do not need to change our idea as we seek confirmation.

A behaviour can be true when it yields the imagined rewards. So you plant a seed, tend it and it grows into a tree. When you learn about this it can be a fantasy, but as you try it you see it confirmed. You where right in believing this fantasy, your internal library of behaviours is enriched. Now if you talk about this idea of planting a seed, tending it and seeing it grow into a tree, you will not burden others with wrong ideas. They will not go out, expend their lives and energy to find no tree grows rom a seed. Obviously true behaviours are at least as valuable as true knowledge.

Joy, being able to rejoyce, is also important. We dance and make music and make ourselves beautifull and there is something special about this. Because if you seek beauty you do not need examples. You know it right away if something is easy or painfull to behold, of music is pleasing to the ear or harsh, if someone moves beautifully or shows signs of pain and suffering. This knowledge is intrinsic, like feelings themselves. We know instantly and we don’t need to be shown and tought what to feel.

 

 

Update : US Military are looking at the cybertruck as a roadbot platform. No surprise.

Autonomous vehicles are introducing themselves to everyday lives. Uber, Google, Tesla all work on fully autonomous driving. Some already claim having driven a car coast to coast without human intervention. Salons are showing cars without steering wheels, and the advantages of handing over control of your vehicle to automated systems is becoming more obvious. Below a compilation of moments where Tesla Autopilot intervened to prevent harm to its drivers. It beeps as soon as it detects a dangerous development, even if it is traffic entering a crossing up ahead. It also seemed to avoid a rolling car.

All this is just the beginning of a revolution, and its not the revolution of human mobility, but of that of robots. Once autonomous driving is a fact people will realize that this means you can have an electrically powered platform delivered almost everywhere. We wrote about this on another site calling these new vehicles Roadbots. The applicaitions of roadbots are as endless as are jobs. Especially with the help of AI. We are a few steps away from bibedal mobility for robotic platforms as well so soon a bot can drive up to (for instance) a broken powerline, climb the thing and do repairs, even if it involves requiring a hoist or some other heavy equipment. Potholes in the roads can be repaired by autonomous roadbots that just drive over with hot asphalt and poor and flatten the holes after having positioned a roadblock. No humans needed.

Just put a bot on it!

When Tesla produces its autonomous electric pickup truck, which will be huge, it will become clear to anyone that those things delivering products, maybe fridges which they place on a robotic skateboard to get it into the home, is just a thought away. We are very interested in the use of these devices to revive the ecology as part of the roboeconomic system. Roadbots shuttling water, seeds, planting saplings etc. Even though there appear to be more effective ways to plant massive amounts of forrest (like airdropping carbon protected seed pellets).

It is weird how people think about new technology, like we see these delivery bots to be driving in the streets of cities now. They annoy people, they catch fire. But we are a few months away from delivery trucks just making stops where packages should be delivered, calling the recipient and handing over the packets. Stores, shops, individuals can all just deal with a virtual assistant on the truck, even negotiating a new delivery time.

We think roadbots will change life enormously, especially electrically powered ones, because they can do many things with little overhead. EVs are low mainenance and high power. What about ambulances where the medics come over on motor bikes but the patient is strapped on a roadbot that weaves its way through traffic faster than any human can? For us another important question is : When we are done taking care of ourselves, what about nature? Maybe green the deserts using waterdonkeys?