Post #20: The Pitch [draft]

Here’s an audio version of this project’s current elevator pitch:

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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“two people wearing tuxedos in an elevator with one person pitching to the other person, vaporwave” by DALL-E

Then here’s a text version that includes the elevator pitch and some additional italicized concepts that I didn’t have time for because the elevator arrived at our floor…

• How do we know if the future we’re heading towards as a civilization is better than, the same, or worse than our current experience, our current reality?

• In order to answer that question, we need to predict the future. Specifically, we have to be able to make a prediction about the future state of our civilization, and whether it’s going to suck or not.

• Like any prediction, we need data to work from. So what can we base our prediction on?

• Well, our future is going to be created by the work we do today. All the projects, jobs, companies we’re currently pursuing will result in our future. Perhaps an obvious statement, but there it is. So step 1 of predicting the future is to organize all the activities the 8 billion of us are currently pursuing into a dataset. Then once we’ve recorded civilization’s activities, we can evaluate the future that these activities are leading us towards.

• While both the database building and the evaluation processes will take some experimentation to figure out, the internet and web3 provide the perfect testing ground.

• As one web2 example, wikipedia has created a rigorous and somewhat decentralized process for maintaining information through a user-generated editing model. It’s easy to imagine a similar model being applied to collect and categorize “civilizational activity” information.

• With web3, we’re seeing many promising experiments including new voting & governance mechanisms, leveraging collective wisdom via prediction markets, and of course the use of blockchains to create difficult to corrupt and therefore trustworthy sources of information.  

• We can use these new tools to gain an awareness of our civilization’s direction, and then use that knowledge to ensure we invest our energy in the pursuits that are most likely to create a great future.

• But how can we be confident that our prediction is good? After all, if this new system’s prediction causes us to change where we invest our energy today, and then it proves to lead towards an even worse future, that would be bad.

• To avoid that risk, we need a control group. The best, but currently impractical control group, would be to clone human civilization into a simulated version. Then the simulated version adopts the changes and we get to observe the effects, and if it goes well then we can adopt the changes. This is similar to the idea of digital twins in manufacturing settings. Given the infeasibility of that approach today, another more actionable strategy that should result in a similar benefit would be a trusted collective memory. As a rough example, let’s say once per year every human on Earth recorded their impression of the quality of their life experience. Let’s say it was a 30 minute video recording or a thousand word journal entry or even an audio recording. Let’s assume it’s one entry per person per year, and it can’t be faked or manipulated. We could then analyze that annual collection, essentially running a sentiment analysis, and rate our collective experience each year. That dataset and analysis could act as our collective memory, enabling us to say, “10 or 50 or 500 years ago, our collective experience was worse than it is today. Therefore we like the system we’re using.” We could also use that collective memory to measure the rate of civilization’s improvement, motivating tweaks to our operating system if the rate decreases. 

• As previous posts have explored, this project of building a database comprised of civilization’s activities and then evaluating that database should start with a niche. To start by collecting and evaluating all the activities 8 billion people are pursuing is too much and would fail. My previous proposed niche is to start this list with a database of web3 projects and then evaluate which web3 projects should get more energy invested into them and which less. To clarify, the list wouldn’t be focused on saying “Company A deserves more attention than Company B.” Rather, the list would be focused on categorizing pursuits…for example, a web3 pursuit could be “decreasing gas costs on the ethereum network” or “increasing cross-chain interoperability,” and then evaluating those pursuits to decide where we should invest our energy. It’s possible and likely that multiple specific projects or companies would fall into a category.

Next Up

As a first pitch attempt, I know this thing is holey. I’m going to identify and try to address the holes, making the pitch tighter and more compelling.

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What’s this substack all about?

We need to upgrade our civilization’s operating system. This newsletter is a research project that explores how our current operating system came to be, which improvements would be helpful, and how we can make an upgrade happen. This substack’s goal is to land on a project that can be built to upgrade our civilization’s operating system.

I chose to write this publicly to get feedback on these ideas. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can join the Discord server called RelevanceDAO to share thoughts. Upgrading our COS and building our future is a team effort.