This essay is aimed at people who want solutions more than this guy…
Nature is perpetually in flux. It’s cute but true to say change is the only real constant. Preserving nature is a contradiction in terms. I am not a green. Nature is only green because that’s the color of efficiency with respect to its goal: Leveraging sunlight and water to create sugar from the dirt. We can do it better.
Everything we think of when we think of nature was a previous era’s destroyer. Oxygen, trees, flowering plants, life above water, insects… All of it was destructive and transformative. Humanity is natural. What we do and make is equally natural. Nothing about us violates the laws of stars and stone. We can not escape nature. It will exist, even when time and space do not.
The current arrangement of life forms is transient with or without us. Ultimately even we are transient. And so without a shred of irony or guilt I quite seriously advocate replacing Earth’s ecology (passively or actively) with an anthropocentric one. One not built on perpetual fear, pain, chaos, starvation, and mass murder.
Update: I also advocate body cams and live streaming for all non-classified official, public official, activity. And deception with awareness of or intent to harm, being made a felony akin to fraud, and manslaughter if a single death among believers due to belief can be established.
This will never happen of course.
Fission, open AI, open robotics, basic income, and a wealth cap.
Power, actuation, distribution.
Fission
Because it’s the most efficient today existing way of extracting calories from dirt. Nothing else comes even close at the terrestrial scale. Only a Dyson Swarm is in the same league. And that only counts because it’s simply a vast upscale of known technologies. Fusion would compete if it existed, but it doesn’t yet. But even if it did fission would still be on the list because fission provides more than just electricity and heat. Fission also produces a whole spectrum of special materials ranging from super batteries to cancer cures.
Robots/AI
For all the compulsory labor any society we choose to build needs.
Progressive tax and a basic income I
To insure the production from the new ecology is distributed with human comfort in mind.
For the first time in history, we can make labor voluntary. We can transition humanity into a chemotrophic phase of evolution, as opposed to phototrophic.
We’re already doing this in a sense. We use our technology which consumes electricity to produce more food than we ever could by hand. We eat oil. Literally, qualitatively, and figuratively. So I propose instead we switch the portions of that mechanical metabolism that can handle it over to the vastly more efficient and more abundant food source. Fissile material.
And no we won’t ever run out. Tectonic and volcanic activity is always lifting and stirring material up into the oceans for use to harness. Even uranium specifically is endlessly renewable. The sun will run out of hydrogen before humanity runs out of uranium. And that’s just one easy source of fuel allowing for fission. Thorium is everywhere also.
Other than the qualitatively eternal energy foundation upon which to build a human future, why fission? It seems the chemical limit for energy density without losing excessive energy during manufacture and refinement is similar between food oils and fossil fuels. Gasoline and olive oil have very similar energy density. Nature and the refineries have apparently hit a similar wall.
For some perspective of how much power is in there, just consider that fuel air explosives, which are just air mixed with gasoline, are at least 4 times as powerful as dynamite. Gasoline, and therefore olive oil, are more energy dense than dynamite. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’ll correct this if I am. But regardless, it’s certainly all dwarfed by fission.
Fission, as I’m sure you know from popular culture and atomic weapon fame, is almost magically energy dense. One kilogram of uranium-235 contains two to three million times the energy equivalent of oil or coal. That is an almost Sci-Fi level of power. “Almost,” only because it’s not science fiction, it’s just science.
All energy can be measured in the same unit we use for food. Calories. (Kcal.) Any task requires calories of energy. This is the great equalizer. Humanity and its technology are one metabolism. Entropy’s arrow. When we eat a plant or animal we are eating a combination of sunlight and fossil fuels. These fuel sources are incredibly weak compared to what’s literally in the dirt.
Robots and human sacrifice.
Applying this entire-picture, wholistic, way of thinking to the human process of completing tasks, you realize that “the robots,” specifically total involuntary-job automation, are morally urgent. Why? Because currently we run our society on a human sacrifice lottery. Literally. (I use this word a lot to clarify that I’m being entirely serious as opposed to hyperbolic or euphemistic.)
Game it out in your head: By us having humans drive the trucks, knowing with absolute certainty that some will fatally crash, and accepting it, we all behaviorally agree that moving stuff around is worth X randomly selected lives. Sidenote: This is another reason why fission. Because life per watt, fission is the safest form of power. Only hydroelectric comes close, and that at the cost of staggering scale surface disruption. (Think the Three Gorges Dam.)
Breaking it down further into hours lost the exchange is immediate. An hour of labor is an hour of life. We buy and sell lives. Our cars might as well run on blood.
The only reason we accept this lethal madness is because we see no alternatives, or we don’t see it at all. Robots are the alternative. See the robots.
Progressive Tax and Basic Income II
That is my beef with both capitalists and most socialists. They both are pro slavery. Socialism worships this lottery in the form of deification of the worker. (An almost ancient Aztec situation when you think about it.) While capitalism on the other hand is like fire. A wonderful tool, if contained. A horrifying disaster if not. Right now 26 people own half the world’s wealth. That is like when a fire reduced the solids volume of a home by orders of magnitude by converting it into ash involuntarily. Currently the best metaphor for the global economy is a planet sized capitalist dumpster fire.
We don’t need to put it out, but we need to contain it. And this is as morally urgent as the human sacrifice situation. Indeed it’s arguably part of the same elephant.
A wealth capping progressive tax is as badly needed as a basic income. A wealth cap isn’t needed to pay for a basic income. Frankly we can just print the money needed for a basic income and the knock on benefits will vastly out weigh any inflation caused, which could be countered by other means if even needed. (Poverty costs trillions per year anyway, that cost instantly vanishes the moment you deploy a UBI. It’s fiscally obvious. Moral urgency satisfaction is only the first benefit.)
A wealth cap is needed to prevent gross concentration, stagnation, and oppression. One person having that much wealth is in this context analogous to one person starting a forest fire. Steps must be taken to prevent this sort of wealth inequality type arson. Our forest sized garden needs firebreaks and sprinklers. It’s that simple.
There is a separate and similarly urgent need for a high basic income. To prevent gross deficiency that gives rise to all the horrors and costs of poverty ranging from petty crime to institutional psychosis. Poverty, is cheaper to deal with up front. Like how it’s cheaper to change the oil than replace a seized engine.
You’re likely familiar with the concept of medicare for all, well I propose additionally Unemployment Insurance for all. Just extend qualification to everyone and expand the system as needed. Though I’m sure specific systems debate could provide a better way than my off the cuff suggestion.
Regardless, in the end, if the flow of money is like the flow of water, we need rain and evaporation, or drought and flooding will destroy everything we ever make.
And that’s it. That’s the core set of changes I think would essentially fix our social problems. The rest are secondary issues. These are the primary colors of human prosperity.
Fission, open AI, open robotics, basic income, and a wealth cap.