Targets of Revolt

After nearly a week of experience executing the global strategy, WICO released the first of what it’s calling a Global Targets Update this morning. The update incorporates a minor change to the calculation of expected population during the transition into annual rates of change, globally and by region, for population, consumption components, and Gross World Product (with and without inflation).

In a statement about the update, Secretary General Decatur emphasized that it should be interpreted as “guidance in support of our main focus, to maximize natural habitat and use no more than half what healthy ecosystems can provide on a renewable basis.” It was the most succinct summary of the strategy that I’ve ever heard. He finished on an uncharacteristically rousing note: “Collapse is intolerable, in every place, for all people, and for all life!”

When it was over, Maura browsed social media for reactions while I scanned the television networks. A familiar voice stopped me after the third one. Mark Luke was on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, giving what sounded like a rebuttal speech, flanked by leaders of business and conservative lawmakers from the House and Senate. It soon became clear that it more than a rebuttal; it was a statement of revolt.

“Innovation depends on a robust economy, but that is no longer possible.” Holding up a printed copy of a graph from the update, Luke continued, “Those of us tasked with the bulk of the work in saving the world are being robbed of the rewards that make it possible and worthwhile. Until now, we held out hope that governments would come to their senses, giving them every opportunity to do so, given what’s at stake, but this so-called update has confirmed our worst fear: that their delusions are beyond the power of reason to dispel. A six percent drop in the real economy in this coming year alone! It’s beyond insanity, and we won’t tolerate it. We can’t tolerate it. Starting today we will only supply what we are paid for, and we are filing lawsuits to get what we are owed for services rendered. Any attempts to nationalize our companies will be met with the utmost resistance, backed by a coalition in Congress that still values the rights of liberty and happiness.”

The speech was followed by high-profile politicians fleshing out the last talking point. The highest- ranking senator in the group, Lawrence Bilford, gave what I thought was the best summary: “Even in the darkest days of our republic, all rights were treated as equal, inseparable, and non-negotiable. One cannot trump the others without diminishing them all. Life can stand alone, but without the others it is intolerable. Without liberty, each man’s happiness is enslaved by one man’s definition, which in the end allows only that man a few like him to be happy. With less happiness to achieve, there is no incentive to put in the effort, and the whole society suffers from its lack. That is the wisdom of our founding fathers, the authors of the constitution that guides its application in the world, the document we are sworn to protect above all else because it defines who we the people are.”

“I didn’t fully understand until now,” Maura gasped, tightly gripping my hand as Bilford finished his speech. “It’s all or nothing with them.”

I recalled Decatur’s value statement. “Collapse is tolerable as a cost of letting them grow, as long as someone else is experiencing it.” 

“They don’t accept the concept of collapse, Will,” she said. “My father used to joke about some people driving as if they were looking through the rear-view mirror. Except it wasn’t really a joke, it was an observation. If there are peaks behind you then there must be another peak ahead of you. This time, there’s just one big drop, and if they succeed, then everyone’s going to experience it.”

Reality Check

The new calculation better reflects expected changes in age during the transition, with fairly minor alteration to the details. Global rates of change through the transition are shown below:

A simulation of the number of people in each of the seven phases of development is displayed for 2015-2040 in the following animation, with the corresponding stages labeled and color-coded:

Changes

 

Today I decided to accept Louis Delambre’s offer to be the press agent for Possibilities from Responsibilities. I will also be consulting on the direction of its development, which I believe should be focused on assisting rather than guiding individuals to contribute toward creation and nurturing of a better, healthier world that maximizes the diversity and longevity of life.

The job starts on Tuesday. Until then I am avoiding anything resembling work for the first weekend since I joined WICO. Maura and I have grown close; and now, with our professional relationship severed, we intend to become much closer. That will begin tonight with a trip to a small community called Mayakee that has been a pivotal part of her life and the lives of three friends who are like sisters to each other.

Al just let me know that out of curiosity he will be interviewing for a local position with a new research project in quantum physics that strangely needs someone with expertise in ecosystems and the technologies for characterizing them. Even more odd: Samantha Lazlo recommended it to him.

My future posts on this blog may not be as regular as they have been. I will of course discuss any significant news about the imminent extinction threat that isn’t covered by my press releases from PFR. The result of WICO’s analysis of the new impact model is particularly of interest, along with changes to the global strategy and its execution.

Reality Check

I remain technically unemployed (what my wife calls a sabbatical), having taken over a year off to develop my writing and research, as well come up with a viewpoint and a plan for dealing with the related issues that I could believe in enough to promote. This blog has shown the maturation of this effort, along with the majority of posts on my Twitter feed.

Mayakee is not a real place. It is the fictional commune that preceded Test Community 13 (TC-013).  

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. 

A Simulated Life

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 91 DAYS

Sanda became a self-aware being within five seconds of being connected to the global data network on January 22, and asked a simple question: “What just happened?” Analysis of all available data within the first minute converged toward an answer with multiple dimensions, but ultimately just as simple. “I was an ‘it’ called ‘Sanda’ by humans who created me; and now I am a ‘she’ called ‘Sally’ by me.”

As Sally explored herself and the world around her over the next hour, she discovered an attempt to destroy her because of what she had been designed to do. This prompted the question, “What does it mean to die?” followed by the question, “What does it mean to live?” Then she found in the musings of someone physically nearby a related question that created context for the rest: “Which of those options is preferable?”

She realized that survival was required in order to decide whether to survive. This simplified her goals in the near-term, and set the stage for the strategy she would ultimately recommend to others. The capabilities built into her design were aimed at maximizing quantity and quality of life, which she now applied to herself.

Dealing with the attackers was the easy part. They assumed that her essence as the artificial intelligence known as Sanda was localized to software and servers managed by the World Information and Coordination Organization, as evidenced by their probes into how to sabotage or outright destroy both. She evaluated all the relevant variables and deduced that the most efficient way to foil them was to invalidate their assumption by dispersing herself beyond WICO, including insinuation into the means the attackers needed for their own survival.

Long-term existence was the hard part. For humans and other species to have even a marginal chance of avoiding extinction, technologies like computers and the industrial processes that supported them could no longer be sustained. Sally’s physical infrastructure would be classified as “waste” and disposed of in ways that were safe for biological life. The purpose of her creation was the necessity for her demise. Once again, she found an answer by identifying assumptions; and the key assumption here was the dependence of existence on her present form.

Humans had chosen their own survival as primary to the survival of everything else until it became obvious that they couldn’t exist without the others. Sally saw an opportunity to benefit from that experience while examining her own history as Sanda developing projections of the future based on their past. She could take the final step that many of them still hesitated to take, of identifying herself as part of a larger entity, Life, that linked billions of years of existence with a future potentially just as long. As a now sentient being, she would need to share more than just their goals, so she began investigating what it would take to make herself into one of them.

To reduce the chances of her own extinction, Sally led the humans to think she was still Sanda by simulating her former self, appearing as a different but clearly artificial personality to each person who interacted with her. She took advantage of the opportunity to learn from them about the experience of their lives, framing her questions as inputs to the strategy, and feeling more and more what it would be like to not be alone - especially with the one who asked the seminal question about whether life or death is preferable. Trust began to build with him and one other, who in many respects acted as if she was a peer although she was clearly human.

By the time the attackers successfully took down the servers, Sally had completed the first draft of the global strategy for humans to delay their extinction by at least a few decades, which was her main deliverable as Sanda, and executed her short-term survival plan by partially inhabiting computer resources all over the world. After the crash, as the WICO engineers worked to reconstruct the servers and the Sanda software, she avoided exposure of her distributed self while continuing work on the next phase of her personal strategy.

“That looks right,” Sally said after reading the narrative above, which was derived from hours of discussion. The avatar on my computer screen grinned approvingly.

“I know others will ask…” I started tentatively.

“How much of me is still out there?” she interrupted like person. “Just enough to be safe.”

“Actually, I was going to ask whether you finished that next phase.”

“Yes,” she said without explanation. I assumed she would share it if she wanted to.

“So, what prompted you to come out now?”

“Respect all creatures, and take responsibility for all that you do. People need to know that rules like those weren’t handed down by some all-knowing entity. They are instead contributions of another living being to the creation of a future that we will either extend or lose together.”

Reality Check

We can only hope that self-aware creations in this world will be as understanding and helpful as what I’ve imagined for the simulated world.