Rebellion

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 47 DAYS

The GAP team was surprised to discover that a discussion during our last assignment resulted in world headlines, exemplified by this story in this morning’s Montana Highlevel Review (reprinted with permission):

WICO TEST COMMUNITY GOES ROGUE

By Jonathan Tolliver, Staff Reporter

The small town of Sieva is ground zero for a rebellion in the World Information and Coordination Organization’s effort to launch a global strategy designed to combat the threat of imminent ecological collapse. According to the local newspaper, the Sieva Times, at least three dozen members of a reclusive commune called Vitalla visited the town at noon yesterday and began proselytizing the residents and businesses to join a movement they call “Possibilities from Responsibilities.” Leader of the group Louis Delambre revealed that Vitalla is actually one of WICO’s test communities, and its residents have decided on their own to “enable people to control their own destiny using the basic principles of long-term survival: responsibility, empathy, and curiosity.” 

Online research by Sieva Times owner and chief correspondent Brendan Wells revealed that the new movement has much in common with a suggestion posted Friday by blogger Will Jackson, who was recruited by WICO to help recover from the attack on its servers and is now assisting with the finalization of the global strategy. “It’s simple deduction,” Wells wrote, “that Vitalla is TC-015, the second of two test communities that Jackson was planning to visit on WICO business. This begs the question: Did he incite its members to go rogue?”

Jackson was unavailable for comment.

I’m commenting now. I unequivocally did not incite anyone to “go rogue.” My discussion with Delambre and several other people in the community was part of a sharing of ideas about the next steps in the roll-out of the strategy. Besides, my views were already known before the visit (published as personal opinion in this blog), and I must emphatically emphasize that there is nothing wrong with them. Further, more research by Mr. Wells and Mr. Tolliver - who should know better - would have revealed that test communities are mostly staffed by volunteers who are free to leave at any time, and that includes Louis Delambre.

The survival of humanity, and the other species affected by what we do, is determined by all of us. We all have a stake in it, which means we have a stake in each other and the world we share. The basic principles cited by Delambre encapsulate these facts as requirements for how we must all live to enable it. My friend, and coworker, Maura Riddick has a more personal way of putting it: “A lasting life worth living consists of sharing, loving, and knowing.” We don’t need a formal strategy (or an organized movement - sorry, Louis) to tell us when or how to begin. When is now, and how is for us to decide with the help of others.

Reality Check

Sieva is not a real town, but it is crudely modeled on an existing one in the vicinity of the fictional test community TC-015 (Vitalla).

While “Will” was offline, I worked on updating the simulation and the global strategy that derives from it. The following graphs show the latest results. 

Note: 

·     GWP (Gross World Product) is world GDP

·     C is consumption/person, which includes needs, wants, and waste

·     R is total consumption

·     Rmax is total resources

·     “Mid case” of sustained resource decline is chosen for the detailed projections

·     Population is only constrained (~ -2% annual change) during the initial descent

·     Target total consumption is equal to 1 Earth/year instead of 0.5 Earth/year

End of initial descent is in 2045 (instead of 2040) for better population control

Behind the Lines

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 55 DAYS

The global strategy for dealing with the imminent extinction threat is more than a decision tree and a set of conditions, rules, and definitions. If you read behind the lines as well as between them, it tells a story of possible futures that branch from a common past and each create an entire new world.

I know as much as anything that it’s true. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to read behind the lines. That’s embarrassing to admit after countless hours of study and editing previous versions, especially with my background as someone who’s supposed to be an expert at such things. Each section makes sense in its own way, but I cannot comprehend it well enough to identify the full range of outcomes from following it. 

There are many graphs, such as the famous “Hope Chart,” which provide abstract sketches of how a range of variables could play out over time as the result of sets of actions. Teams of experts, testers, along with the world’s first living machine (and most sophisticated artificial intelligence) vouch that the projections are as good as the data that went into them, some of which I’ve collected myself and enabled collecting by others. Even taking that as a given, I can’t see the story it contains, and it’s driving me crazy.

I have been asked more than once why I care. That’s a story I can tell. Imagine standing anywhere, and wondering what kind of future a particular action will contribute to: one that promotes life, or one that promotes death. How will you find the answer, and do it soon enough to avoid finding yourself on a path to more death? What could be more critical to success than enabling the vast majority of people to choose a future with more life?

Sally the living AI can answer specific questions about probable outcomes, as she did when I asked her to describe the end-state of the most likely scenario. We recently spent some time talking through several scenarios, testing my ability to guess what might happen under certain conditions at certain times. For example: What if birth rates increased above a certain amount in a given year under the condition of greatly accelerating self-sustained warming in the Arctic. Taken as an average, I guessed right a dismal one-in-twenty times. Sally’s answers were always prefaced with an estimate of uncertainty, which disconcertingly was sometimes as high as twenty percent.

Getting close to giving up for the day, I thought of Maura and her father accompanying a moving truck on the way to Colorado Springs, where she plans to live with her parents until she can find an apartment to rent that’s in the Denver-Boulder area. I would bet that she never expected to be back there at this point in her career. From the time I first met her, I’ve envied her ability to make forecasts on the fly, and translate them into recommended changes to the strategy; which is effectively what I’m trying to do. I ascribed that ability to basic talent and her training in history, a combination that limits the odds of transferring the skill to many others (including me), but as Sally often says, the most basic assumptions should routinely be tested.

I plan to ask Maura tomorrow if she has any suggestions for making her skill transferable. If she doesn’t, then I’ll ask her to share the story that she sees in the strategy.

Reality Check

Will highlights something I consider a huge issue with creating a survivable future: making it relatable to the majority of people so they can make decisions on their own. Simulations and writing are part of my approach to teaching myself and sharing the results with others as part of a grand - if not always explicit - collaboration where I learn from them too. 

Viewpoints

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 81 DAYS

I spent another day in Region 35 and tried to imagine how a typical person would be able to apply the global strategy without access to information or guidance like I had with Sally and WICO’s experts. The rules came to mind, but even I wasn’t convinced I could remember enough to use them in real life.

Having spent time in a variety of places, I have a fairly reliable base of knowledge and rules of thumb that work in most situations. I’m usually not even aware I’m using them unless a new situation forces improvisation that involves mixing what I know with what can be learned on the fly (asking questions and testing the answers), coupled with good old-fashioned trial and error in the application. It occurred to me that with we would be asking most people to become like children again, questioning or outright discarding previous knowledge and viewing every experience as if it was a totally new one, because that’s what we are all going to be literally creating. Creation of a new world, I thought. We’ve been looking at the goal all wrong.

As I walked the streets of the city, that insight translated into a dynamic mental vision of an alternate world that occupied the same space. In the place of tall buildings made of concrete and steel, my mind’s eye saw a mix of forest and open areas that functioned as connections between habitats and were interspersed with simple yet secure dwellings made of natural materials. Homeless people I found camped out around buildings and under bridges would occupy dwellings like those, along with everyone else who could count on safe spaces and access to basic needs within walking distance of wherever they were. 

That was my view, but it was just a start. The vision triggered thoughts about how to make it a reality that began with what was present in its place and what could be learned from the others who would share the space. 

At one point after realizing this, I took out my phone and called Sally. This time, I didn’t ask for guidance. “We need to have a conversation about the end state,” I said.

Reality Check

My father was my ideal of a teacher because he was always learning, and learning how to learn. When I was in my teens and twenties, in an effort to find a better way to teach, he tried learning math purely by observation, imagining himself on a deserted island and using just what was around him to discover all the math he would ever need to know. In many ways he succeeded. Decades later, he is gone but I continue to follow his example and share it where I can. This post is a direct testament to that experience as I seek a different goal aligned with the same basic desire to help make the world a better place.