In Order to Accelerate, We Have To Let Go

The word I'm seeing everywhere right now is "accelerate". Specifically, with regard to the e/acc (Effective Accelerationism) movement.

I've seen some whispers of this movement over the past few months, but it really came to a head when a news outlet decided to dox Beff Jezos, a pseudonymous Twitter account that has acted as a leading proponent of the movement.

And that made me take notice because, as it turns out, Beff Jezos is actually Guillaume Verdon, who has an incredibly impressive background that includes research at Google X and Quantum Computing.

As someone who wishes that was my background, I started to pay much closer attention to the movement and those involved. I don't consider myself part of that movement, but I do align with the majority of the ideas contained within it.

Except for one slightly important detail.

I think that if we truly accelerate right now, society will tear itself apart.

I'm in the process of writing a paper on using Quantum Economics to understand the vast majority of society's problems, and if we accelerate in today's economy, it will end up resulting in an incredibly destructive fight for control.

In a nutshell, it's because we've got a large number of people living in a linear-growth economy that exists within the exponential-growth actual economy.

This is why the economy seems healthy according to the data, but if you ask people down toward the bottom of the economy, it sucks.

Right now, we've got an economy that only works for people who understand the reality of the economy they live in. People have been trained their whole lives to use the economy as a guide for what they should pay attention to. They have to plan their lives according to how much money they can make and what lifestyle they want to live.

But think about the reality of the US economy to an average observer:

We value teachers at $60-80K per year, but Mr. Beast is well on his way to becoming a billionaire.

How can you reconcile those numbers in terms of the value they provide to the world?

The answer is that most people can't. To understand how each of those things is priced in the current economy, you have to see how some prices have been controlled by existing expectations. And yet, the education provided to kids is one of the best ways to determine how successful they will be in life, right?

Here's the difference:

Mr Beast was able to track his performance and increase his earnings based on his results.

A teacher, on the other hand, has to grow their career only according to the local market for teachers, unless they want to move to a different market.

But, if a teacher wanted the chance at Mr Beast-level distribution and earnings, they could do so by sharing information on YouTube or building some sort of online business around capturing the work they are already doing and making it useful to a larger audience than just their classroom, right?

Except here's the thing: I bet a lot of teachers have things preventing them from doing this. And they most likely don't even know it's an option. Instead, they are continuing to be put under higher and higher pressure from an economy that sees them as a rounding error, and instead, we focus most of our efforts on making numbers on the spreadsheet go up.

We've turned the economy into the perfect money machine, learning how to print more and more money.

But the more we print, the more pressure builds up at the lower levels. If we accelerate too much, there will be so much money printed and so little of it captured at the lowest levels of the economy that civil unrest will grow and grow until something bad happens.

Whew.

Ok, so let's assume that we want to avoid that outcome, for some reason.

If we want to avoid that outcome, we need to let go.

Specifically, we need to let go of what we think money is or how valuable anything is.

We've created a world that values things for their existence in a data-scarce environment and dropped it into a data-dense environment.

As such, it's really easy to break existing systems. In a data-dense environment, there's always a way around a data-scarce architecture.

As more and more people realize how powerful of an economic machine the internet can be, more and more people are opting out of the games that were sold to them as the safe bet. Universities have skyrocketed in price because we decided it was valuable that we educate the population, so the government incentivized that, which led to those in the know taking full advantage and exerting a bunch of future pressure on participants in the economy without actually providing any actual value. All they did was provide needed liquidity and then waited to collect.

That is not a valuable service and yet it is one of the most lucrative ways to make money.

Instead, it's all about gambling. Trying to figure out exactly who you should lend to that you might be able to make money back from them. It comes down to a calculation of risk.

What if, instead, we let people freely spend? One of the things that the internet has given us is a place to indulge ourselves in any number of ways. What people value is incredibly flexible when we get out of the realm of physical goods and into the realm of ideas.

Here's the biggest problem: we don't know what kind of negative outcomes we might experience. There is too much change.

Humans have never before experienced such disruptive change in such a short time frame.

We look around and all we see are possibilities. Oh, maybe I'd be happier if I looked like that or had that car or this or that. The best way to see if that works? Get everything you wanted.

And find out that wasn't what you needed.

That is actually valuable to the economy, even though it seems like it would be harmful.

Every decision to buy something can be observed, and the outcome of that decision can be used to evaluate the value of future transactions.

So if one person makes a bad decision and has a bad outcome, that gets seen by 5 people, who then don't make that decision, right?

Of course, how to define a bad decision is the next part of the problem that we need to solve, which is harder than expected, because decision and outcome are usually not instant, which means outcomes have to be watched over time. We can gain even more insight by tracking what information led to the decision, and what subset of that information led to the outcome.

And therein lies the problem. Prices are observed at the time of the decision, but those prices are incredibly highly compressed information. We need to decompress that price information into the knowledge that went into the decision vs the projected outcome of that decision, and track it through time.

This results in an interesting phenomenon.  This timeline around the transaction has a higher value than the transaction itself, because it can be used to inform all possible future decisions.

Of course, this requires two things to be true:

1. This information was captured.
2. This information is available to all participants in future transactions that are similar to this transaction.

If you can guarantee both of these, any money spent therefore creates value in a given economic system, regardless of whether or not there was actual value created leading up to or resulting from that transaction.

Economics is the study of how humans create, measure, and exchange value.

When the value is stored in a physical good, there's some pretty simple math you can do to determine the price.

But when it's an idea? What if it's information?

How valuable is that? It's not based on the storage cost of that idea or the information you have access to.

Instead, it's based on how it can be used to amplify the information you currently have. Therefore, the value of information is dependent on the information it's being combined with and future information that will future multiply that value.

In the current economy, we can see how hard these types of things are to measure. We are constantly trying to prepare for the future we want to see, which means that we take money out of some systems, put it in others, hoping to mitigate risk. The same money can exist as a matter of record in many different systems. It's taken out of some system and replaced with a number in a spreadsheet, and moves throughout the economy that way. Owned, yet not held. Passed around in hopes that someone else will put that money to work in a way that is beneficial for the initial holder.

We don't want people running off with our money. All about the money that we "own". This means that we have built systems in place that are complex, hoping to prevent bad actors from working against the interest of people who play by the rules. But reality keeps changing and the rules aren't made to change quickly.

This means that bad actors will always have an advantage in current systems.

So we have to build new systems that are adaptable to change, not resistent to it.

The best way to adapt to change is by having a secure future. A secure future is something that should be guaranteed collectively, not individually. Because if my secure future means that you have an insecure future, you are incentivized to try to take from my security to aid yours.

But what if society guaranteed everyone's future to be at least what their present is, no matter what happened?

This is actually incredibly powerful in preventing bad actors from behaving badly. If they are a good actor, they can never go down, only up. If they are a bad actor, they might have a slightly higher now, but at risk of a stable future.

This way would incentivize people to play long, infinite games for the betterment of humanity. They would work together to increase everyone's outcomes. There might be bad actors, but the value created by the alignment of the good actors will more than make up for anything the bad actors are doing.

But, I'm not terribly hopeful that any world governments as they currently exist will go for this at the present time, which means it's up to the people.

And the good news is that every system is relatively easily replaceable, once you decide to drop away existing ideas of money and how that applies to morality. Instead, you need to focus on creating value in a repeatable manner, increase the scale of that value creation, and allow people to benefit from that value creation without having to understand quantum mechanics (or, the more difficult legal structures that surround how money can be used, invested, extracted,moved, etc, etc, etc....)

By creating these systems that can grow and overtake existing failing systems, we'll be primed to fully accelerate. Because acceleration will simply move people from the old systems to the new at a faster and faster rate.

The best news of all? It's not actually that hard to build robust systems to generate value and turn that value into liquid currency that can be moved to different systems.

In addition to my paper on Quantum Economics, I'm working on another one that will outline an architecture we can use to build an AGI based on that economic model, and will be looking to potentially raise a little money to run an experiment around this, so stay tuned for more, coming soon.