Peaceful Shock and Awe

It feels like the only true moment of global shock and awe that was peaceful in nature was when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. There is even an argument that this was achieved  during the height of the Cold War and it was more about one-upmanship than advancing human exploration. There are other big events out there, but I delved into what events stunned the world and brought us closer together as a whole and it is difficult to find any event that doesn’t have its roots in violence and conflict.

So I’ve got this idea...

It became so desperate that I started looking out towards events or achievements that could be considered Peaceful Shock and Awe events. I’ve grown up with the phrase “Peace in the Middle East,” but I doubt I’m brave enough to tilt at that windmill. Inventing time travel would most likely do it as well, but I lack the necessary physics to get started.

I spent time and effort and countless showers attempting to find my own big idea to chase after, backed by St. Jude. And then I pulled out the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals. And right there, number one is the fight against poverty. I believe a lot of social ills stem from poverty: crime, poor education, substance abuse, homelessness, deteriorating health, inequality, etc. But that’s a bit grandiose to go after, you’d need to have arrogance...I am an American.

So I’ve got this idea. It’s big and audacious and has an almost zero probability of actually moving forward. And this idea is broken down into steps, each of which are near impossible and littered with a minefield of impossible situations and difficult questions. Privacy concerns, under developed technology, I’m just one guy, it all holds this idea back.

Context

I have always like the idea of Universal Basic Income, UBI. And the idea seems to be getting traction. Here’s an article in Time magazine looking at how UBI addresses: Inequality, Economic Insecurity, Debt, Stress, Precarity, Robots, Extinction and Populism. https://time.com/5571472/basic-income-society-problems/

Unfortunately I don’t have the means, charisma or power to enact a system as large as UBI. That’s the kind of stuff governments do. But what if you didn’t need a government?

Step 1

Back to the idea. So many companies are so very similar. They are going through the same series of questions, the same series of actions, the same series of decisions and they have done for literally thousands of years. Could we not automate a lot of this? A quick Google Search or a look at YouTube will tell you that if you put the words ‘automated’ and ‘business’ together in a search you will find an endless supply of mid-twenties generally white, generally men, who have generally spent too much time at a gym telling you how you can fully automate your drop shipping, Amazon, essential oils empire. And as a bonus you don’t need to code and you might even win a set of steak knives.

Is this a good sign? If this lot are attempting to sell this impossible dream to the YouTube masses then it must not actually be doable. Just a pipe dream or a pyramid scheme or a passive income typhoon (I made that last one up, but I like it). Well I’ve built 80% of a fully automated business that looks for and takes in it’s own inspiration to design, manufacture, market and sell t-shirts. It’s not the greatest business idea in the world, but finishing up the last 20% which allows the business to run customer service and deal with incidents such as returns then I’m sitting with a business I can flip a switch on and just watch it go. If nothing else it’s a proof of concept. This can be done and it doesn’t involve a smarmy git telling me how excited he is for me while leaning on his rented Lamborghini.

Step 2

I’m fairly confident I can get step 1 ticked off the list. But this wouldn’t be an impossible goal if all the steps were easy. Step 1 saw me helping the algorithm out and setting up some of the infrastructure it needs to run such as the e-commerce site it uses to sell through, the links to manufacturers are set up as well as kindly pointing it in the right direction like finding a drunk on the street on New Year’s Eve.

Step 2 entails the algorithm looking across a community for gaps in the market. Finding a gap the algorithm takes an appropriate amount of money and sets up it’s own infrastructure to build a business, it chooses it’s own products, design, manufactures, markets and sells all while maintaining some modicum of customer service.

I like to think of this algorithm looking across the UK in the spring time and noticing festival season. In response it starts up a company, sets up a bank account, puts together a website, builds a product list: tents, wellies, glow sticks, condoms… Then markets it to relevant consumers and presto changeo it’s got a going concern. Maybe this business doesn’t need to exist for the foreseeable future and it shuts down in the winter like a seasonal business. Perhaps it spins up businesses that are tailored to individuals. Who knows what the possibilities are?

Step 3

So that is getting a bit mental, but I already know the technologies I’d use to build most of it. They are readily available and we haven’t seen pigs fly just yet. Step three goes a bit further, it attempts to answer the question, what if an algorithm could not only set up a business with intangible assets, but real live assets like premises and employees. I have yet to discover a contract I couldn’t automate or business transaction I couldn’t digitalise (for better or worse). Sometimes there are limited options as it is difficult to find a solicitors that will let you digitally sign a contract for a lease, but they do in fact exist. If each step represents another rung in the ladder of proofs of concepts then this is a big one.

Just think of the questions: What if your boss wasn’t a person? Perhaps things tip towards robot overlords subjugating the human race or perhaps we could start to get businesses that have the capacity to think of something more than profit as a motivating factor. To the algorithm profit is just a variable it needs to maintain to continue the endeavour, but what if for instance we turned up the need of the algorithm to come up with an idea that reduced unemployment within the community? What if we asked it to reduce crime? I wonder what it would do?

Step 4

The idea get a bit wishy washy at this point, but if a system such as this was running within a community perhaps it could interface with the community? If you could find the mechanism, it has been suggested to me that perhaps the algorithm could set up a credit union. Any in the local community could sign up and receive a share and get paid dividends from the work of the algorithms. Perhaps some of those driving factors could be to keep money and the economy focused locally as opposed to being siphoned off by large scale corporations? But better yet, in an ideal world there is a possibility (like the same possibility I’ll fly to Mars) that this could generate enough profit to allow the community to receive payments amounting to a UBI that has successfully side stepped the need for a government to enact it. Hmm, sounds pretty amazing, if only we knew an arrogant American who could get started on it...

Peaceful Shock and Awe

Finally moment of Peaceful Shock and Awe comes in the form that if this could all work. This really is an impossible list of ‘what ifs,’ but if it could work then the moment where the company declines the approaches of government or large scale corporations to purchase the algorithms and open sources the code for all communities to benefit from. Giving local municipalities a head start to run up their own economies that they have a say in.

I don’t immediately see the harm that this could cause, but I’m sure as the idea currently stands (and again impossible list of steps to achieve) it will have enormous potential to do bad things. But this might be the greatest challenge of the entire project, is that a system like this has to be tolerant of bad actors. If it falls over the first time someone cheats the system then its of no use. I’m sure I won’t discover a new better economy for the world, but I’m hoping that if I can take a step or two, perhaps I’ll inspire someone to help out, and they can inspire someone to help out and together as a group we are much smarter than me. We can build something that does work, that does tolerate the assholes of the world. But most of all something that wins me a Noble Prize, I’m not big into awards and things, but I like wearing a tux and I’ve got brothers and that would pretty much trump everything.