TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* The Great Leap Orbward feat. Molly White

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

For this week's bonus, the assembled gang of Riley, Hussein, Nate, and Alice speak with Molly White (@Molly0xFFF) about WorldCoin. And Orbs. We didn't set out to say the word 'orb' so often, but it's impossible to avoid when covering this topic. Which is: a group of crypto guys who are convinced that AI will become so advanced that it'll obviate every human's job, so the only way to manage it is to create a cryptocurrency for UBI distribution. And you sign up for the cryptocurrency by getting your iris scanned by an orb. This is 100 percent real.   Check out all of Molly's work here! https://www.mollywhite.net/linktree/ Get the whole episode on Patreon here! https://www.patreon.com/posts/87129276 *SCOTLAND ALERT* Get tickets to our live show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on 4th August here! https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/event-details/trashfuture-live-at-the-edinburgh-fringe   *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

I do have to ask this question though, so this is meant to take place the transactions, the verification, etc. on the Ethereum blockchain. Correct, yes. And as you said, that's not particularly good for transactions, and we're talking at a scale of every human being and the idea being that every human being is now connected to the internet, which is actually more internet users than are using the internet today. So where are they going to be able to scale this? Like how are they going to be able to get the bandwidth,

the data, the energy use, all this stuff, has this been addressed at all in any way? Yeah, the artificial general intelligence will... Oh, it's gonna invent nuclear fusion and solve the fuck. I'll be right, Roger. No, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don, don't, don't, don't, don, don't, don't, don't, don, don't, don, don, don, don, don't, don't, don, don't, don't, don, don, don, don't, don't, don, don, don't, don, don't, don, don't, don but it can't break 256-bit encryption. That's the one thing. It is God, but it cannot fucking break encryption. That's what I think. Well, it wouldn't, because it's, you know, it's nice.

It's good, it's nice. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't made by a bad guy. It was made by Sam Altman. It was nice. Yeah, no, I did touch on that a little bit and the article that I read about this, which is that, you know, you need to have internet

and a smartphone to be able to use this. And right now, only about two thirds of the world has those things. I think that's maybe not the biggest bottleneck because like you mentioned, they're using the Ethereum blockchain. They are using a layer two Ethereum blockchain called Optimism, which is faster than Ethereum, but like that's a low bar. So far, Optimism has not done more than 900,000 transactions per day. So if we're talking about billions of people, you know, there's kind of a raise to go. There's more people than that.

And there's a couple more. No point me on this, but I think that might be more, actually, only 900,000 people on this planet. Everyone else is fake. I don't want to alarm you, but not only are there more people in that, they sometimes transact more than once a day. What? No, fuck, shit, okay.

So the problem might be doubly, as doubly if not triply as large. As long as no one needs to do a transaction more than once every 20 years or so, I think it will work just fine. Yeah, you should just do one big shop and then leave it for a few days. The biggest shop, the mega shop.

Yeah, you know what? Like people disparage cultures where their currency was just one large coin that they rolled around, but you know what? Like they didn't have the problem of multiple transactions a day. This was just a thing that was simple. So if we're going to go back to a simpler and cleaner way of living, then we just, that's the model. Yeah, that's it.

Well, back to, I, it's worth going back to looking at some of Sam Altman's old writing and interviews to uncover just a little bit of how he thinks and how that sort of fits into the world coin thing. So the driving philosophy here, and this is a post we were talking about yesterday, Molly, is his belief that Moore's law applies to everything ever. That is not a political problem, that it's not a social problem.

It's just weight and the technology will make everything better, right? It seems to be, it is sort of techno-solutionism taken to its most extreme, that we just need to keep building like the crypto guys have told us us and we will solve every problem ahead of us. He says in this, in this post from a couple years ago, in the last couple of decades, costs to the US for TVs, computers, and entertainment have dropped, but costs for housing, healthcare and higher education have soared. Redistribution of wealth alone won't work if these costs continue to soar. Why these costs are soaring? Who knows?

Maybe because they're not subject to laws of transistors. They're subject to different laws. I don't know. Yeah, also that law, which is in itself pretty tenuous. Like, no, it's fine. A guy had this idea about computers, we can generalize it to everything and the things that we can't generalize it to, don't worry about it. We just go to generalize harder and we'll make up for it. So he says, AI will lower the cost of goods and services because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chance. That's why you only have to do the one big shop.

Yeah. And if the robots make other robots, the cost to rent them will be much less than it was when humans made them. Economic inclusivity in such a world means everyone having a reasonable opportunity to get the resources they need to live the life they want. It matters because it produces a fair, stable society, it can create the largest slices of pie for most people, as the side benefit it produces more growth. Capitalism is a powerful engine of economic growth because it rewards people for investing

in assets that generate value over time I think world coin kind of puts paid to that particular sentence Yeah, yeah, well the the entire podcast kind of does you know that we've seen that capitalism is very good at rewarding people perversely for no reason including us I also imagine that there's always operates on the principle that when free labor is achieved finally by AI and robots and things like that, that's going to lead to the enrichment of all of humanity as opposed to like, what everything these people do when given the opportunity seems to suggest which is to be like, oh, you're all more locks now.

Die. That's all. That's what's going to happen. His solution to this, of course, is Georgeism again. Oh, okay. But yeah, instead of, because Georgeism, as we all know, is you find the one thing to tax. It's the one weird trick. And if you tax that, everything's fixed. So Georgeism lands traditionally. Land was Georgeism. And so, uh, Altman says he's building on Georgism by replacing land with a kind of AI tax.

So your tax and confusing power, or whatever. So as you alluded to earlier, Molly, like the idea would be somehow all of these things will be taxed voluntarily, or maybe via political power, to create some kind of equity fund that gets paid out through world coin, right? That's the idea.

I think, although it's very much hidden away in his other writings. They speak very widely about AI-funded universal basic income, but the actual mechanism is not mentioned particularly prominently, probably because a lot of the people who think this is a great idea don't like the idea of taxes So it says a great future isn't complicated. We need technology to create more wealth and policy to fairly distribute it Everything necessary will be cheap and everyone will have enough money to be able to afford it Yeah, it's if you just say it. Yeah, I guess that's not a problem That sounds my so yet use the phrase fully automated luxury gay space communism, but I assume it is just

around the corner. What if we don't do it the future is and we'll be trying to. Yeah, you know, we actually were ahead of the curve on this one. I was just thinking too though, because I'm reminded of stuff like this in the United Kingdom where they'll have a tax that's gonna generate funds and it's also gonna like, you know, discourage a bit behavior they want

to discourage. And for example, I think the sugary beverages tax is a great example. This is gonna raise a bunch of money for, of course, the NHS, if it wasn't getting it. But by taxing sugary beverages, and what happens is, if I remember correctly, the tax was actually placed on manufacturers, who then was like, okay, now we'll never use sugary again. Every beverage in this country will now have as per team in it, because we're not paying this tax. And so, to me, it's like, oh, we'll do an AI tax. It's like, all I

can think of is, um, the only, you have an AI tax or using AI, you also have surplus pool of basically more locks who have no purpose anymore because you've taken all the jobs in this hypothetical future. So it's, to me, I just envisioned it's just like, here's your abacus, you swine fucking to very very basic Computation for us. That's how they avoid the attack you have to hand work out the hash function for this bitcork You and all of your descendants will spend your entire lives trying to come up with the hashing function that will mind the next world coin I was gonna say it's not georgism, but it's like of a similar vintage of British libertarian guys just like it's paradise. They've created the best way humans can live. More laws didn't go far enough. We can do it even worse. So this is also something you can look at back at a 2016 profile of Altman in the New Yorker, but this was

more about his role in the head of why combinator is friendship with Peter Teal. He says, when I remarked after spending a few days together, the writer, that Altman never seemed to visit the men's room, he said, I will practice going to the bathroom more often, so you humans don't realize that I'm the AI. Cool. Okay. Thanks, man. I'm always saying.

I mean, not only have they copped our slogan from 2017, they also copped no P.J. anyways. Talking about his hobby he says I like racing cars I like flying planes and I like prepping for survival my problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end the other most popular the most popular scenario would be an AI that attacks us and nations fighting with Newx over scarce resources I try not to think about it too much but I have guns gold potassium iodide,

antibiotics, batteries, water, gas, and masks from the IDF, and a big patch of land and big sir. He talks like, if all the characters from Ender's Game had PTSD. He got a Shalom 4-A-1, I presume, which is the one Israeli gas mask they make in which they made billions of,

which is just fine, but you can get them on eBay for very little. I hope this guy breaks his leg and like, you know, day one of the apocalypse. But also, like, aside from anything else, we've talked about like, you know, what capitalism rewards, what capitalism rewards is this kind of like baffling, infuriating, completely baseless self-confidence that's like, yeah, no, I think I'm actually going to be fine. I've read Corn Mac MacArthur's the road, but I'm built different. So, yeah, that's the thing, like, katanas that I can use.

We all get world coin. He and Peter Teal go get to live in Big Sur or New Zealand with their IDF gas masks and having a great time. Again, if you live in rural New Zealand, go for a walk with some quick, dry cement, and start looking for air vents and bunkers. It says, democracy only works in a growing economy, and without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail. And yeah, I guess now we've just added another ingredient to the democratic experiment, which is the orb.

So I guess all I have to say is, Mary Orbmas, to all of you who are on the call with me. Yeah, I hope we cross albs in future. I too hope we cross orbs in future. May the orb be with you.