Tough choices ahead for the human species, to escape coming death by euxinia or slaugherbots

This week, I thought I would spend a calm, easy day shifting from the hard deep challenge of connecting us all better to the noosphere and the mind boggling urgent challenges of preventing us from being overwhelmed by careless and fatal new things in the internet, to the more finite issue of euxinia, of human extinction by climate change. For euxinia, the facts are all out there for those who choose to pay attention, and it is more like death in a century than death in a decade (plus or minus a factor of two both for the euxinia risk and for the internet risks). I approached it a day or two as I approach cleaning the kitchen... a necessary task, but concrete and not so painful. Well, it was more painful than I thought. To prevent euxinia is especially valuable as an EXERCISE, a way of learning lessons necessary to cope with the more difficult challenges.And it was VERY sobering. Of course,it reminded me that one retired old man alone certainly is not enough to save us with ANY of these challenges, and that COMMUNICATION and CONNECTION is a key part of any of them. And that our world is full of severe and dangerous delusions in all the cultures of the world; Buddhists do stress that,properly, but Buddhism ITSELF is a complex cultural system and real Buddhists know that they too have things they need to work on (except for a few obvious phonies who pretend to be all-knowing). Delusion number one in climate policy (and human futures in general?) is that free markets are ENOUGH to get us through to survival: the carbon tax proposal, which many narcissistic souls believe is the real answer to climate issues and environmental in general. Folks tempted by THAT delusion need to remember the mantra: "Markets are NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT." Decades ago, Ronald Reagan tried to solve obvious problems in the electric power sector by DEREGULATION, modified only slightly from the idea of "no regulation of the electric power sector" (which the industry itself had debunked decades before). "Let's ust totally deregulate the generation and use of electricity and the markets, and regulate only the transmission system." Thus was born the Enron disaster and other such disasters, as slimy folks akin to the political PR consultants we see so much in DC these days, slimy salesmen who built reputations by appealing to folks who wanted simple solutions that simply would not work. And, by the way, the production of electricity (mainly for this market but also private) is the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, about half the problem. The Enron crisis was solved by a whole new way of thinking about markets, the MARKET DESIGN approach, which in my view is fundamental to our hopes of building a sustainable intelligent internet (the urgent crisis) as well as climate change. The larger society needs to better understand and appreciate this lesson of history (the "H" of CH, Cosmos and History Journal), and its implications for other sectors and the larger future. For once, it is a positive kind of lesson, and we need the positive lessons ever so much at a time when negative lessons are more .. unavoidable. One key lesson might make some economists happy and grin. "Don't you remember that those mathematical theorems about market efficiency, from Walras to Arrow [who briefly served on my Harvard PhD thesis committee util I chose the mathematics of intelligence instead of the mathematics of motivation and history as my topic] and beyond all require CONDITIONS? They are IF --- THEN theorems, and markets need to be DESIGNED to meet those requirements. That's what you electric power guys have done, to make the system work." The DESIGN of the big interstate transmission systems, the "ISO/RTO" system which directly manages about 70% of electricity sold in the US, is an historic success of CROSSDISCIPLINARY BASIC RESEARCH, or a deeply focused driven effort to get at the truth funded by a program at the US National Science Foundation. And, by the way, I actually ran that program for several years, and worked with it closely in others. Was this a triumph of the capitalist approach (vindicating Ronald Reagan's policy, by finding a way to make it work)? Or was it a vindication of Soviet style socialism? (After all, the Soviets used central computers to give orders to every factory in the nation how much to produce every year. That was seen as the apotheosis of central planning.Under the new ISO/RTO system, central computers implementing optimization algorithms give orders to every GENERATOR in their areas how much to produce every five to fifteen minutes!!!) Hegel might be amused: this was not a victory EITHER of the thesis or of the antithesis, but of a NEW SYNTHESIS, a NEW integration. Yes, there is more or less total control by computers, but those computer programs were designed (after GREAT effort) to implement a MARKET DESIGN, where all the key inputs come from a vast number of free and independent human actors (not agents, but decision makers). The underlying utility function is not a number which comes from a central state body, but the output of algorithms which basically "add up" inputs from the humans. The system in place today is not perfect. When I ran this area, I spent a lot of effort to make it better, to make it more intelligent, and to extend the approach down to the local level so that we could better accommodate the new technologies needed to prevent death by euxinia. But as the rest of the world is being quietly taken over by OTHER methods for integrating the emerging internet (and as a corollary the "internet of things" and the entire world economy), it is really important to BUILD on this example, and understand what needs to be fixed, before we slide down other, much scarier paths opening up even as we speak. (Roughly speaking, the three main competitors NOW vying to take over the world, VERY successfully, are what I call "Godzilla," "King Kong" and "the Borg", centered in parts of China, the US military, and Accenture, all very well-meaning but with incomplete understanding of how this kind of advanced math actually works.) A key issue here is what the new internet integration system will do about VALUES, about the U and J functions which I tried to explain in my earlier post on "telos, utility and identity." (Deepak Chopra noticed that post. I still link to it, in my piece of extended game theory linked to at werbos.com/religions.htm.) This is a VERY serious issue. TODAY'S electric power system mainly uses methods of STATIC or ONE SHOT optimization, with no foresight, which can be a killer. I could write page son how THAT issue works out in electric power systems. One key way to overcome the problem of myopia (which could of course kill the human speces, by euxinia or war or even disease) is an approach I developed which I called "dynamic Stochastic Optimal Power Flow (DSOPF)", using new advanced adaptive optimization methods, LIKE what alpha go used but far more powerful. MANY GREAT GENIUSES OF THE COMPUTER SCIENCE PR COMMUNITY (what US and EU tend to rely on!!) may be feverishly building us a new integration system based on alpha Go, moderaTED ONLY BY OLD HEURISTIC KLUDGES. (The computer decided to capitalize this; I will not override it, as we move to a world where computers WILL take over the world, an it is only a matter of WHICH TYPE and what they do to humans. Only if you ever use money does that mean you.) But that level of system, like the old crypotocurrencies, does not scale well to many variables. Rule by ad hoc kludges is one of the paths to mutual extinction. Many years ago I developed (and patented, but the patent expired) a more powerful optimization method which I called Dual Heuristic Programming (DHP), which has more powerful successors, which overcomes the scaling problem. THAT is the math behind many important growing applications you have never heard of. It allows a truly integrated, intelligent internet of things, relevant to all sectors (though again with extensions in some areas). BUT: It IS SCALEABLE BUT WAS NOT SUSTAINABLE IN THE ORIGINAL VERSION WHICH I PUBLISHED IN 1977. Likewise, "Godzilla," the new integrated design to control the world economy from China (who don't our folks READ what they are very effectively doing?), IS SCALEABLE, IS READY To SLOWLY BUT SYSTEMATICALLY TAKE OVER THE WORLD ECONOMY (including wherever you get money and food from). It just has that minor problem of sustainability. Back in 1991, when the Terminator II movie came out, a top executive from Boeing told me in their executive dining room (witnessed by another person on this list!!): "You MUST watch that movie, even if it sounds yucky to you. You HAVE to, because it is your job, it is what YOU are starting to do to us with these new approaches to missile defense." (If you know how to search blogspot, you could see a lot of the details of the history.) For folks in the IEEE Control Society (one of my hats back then), that movie might be summarized: "Well, it shows us what can happen when your intelligent controller has a minor stability problem in one of the equations." And that would be quite real, no joke. None of the CS gurus building these systems know that kind of stability theory. but I do, and I k now just how real and how serious it is. In way, when I talk about the need for a "sustainable intelligent internet (integration)," I might even say "S" actually stands for "stable" or sustainable, they end up being the same in this kind of volatile nonlinear situation. I LEARNED HOW TO SOLVE THE BASIC GLARING STABILITY PROBLEMS WHICH OCCUR EVEN IN THE MULTIVARIATE LINEAR CASE, back in 1990. In one of my chapters (13) of the Handbook of Intelligent Control, posted as a link at www.werbos.com/Mind.htm, I do the analysis of DHP and explain the MODIFICATION(S) needed to make it stable. One key lesson: to avoid catastrophic modes, it is NECESSARY (but not sufficient, just as markets are necessary but not sufficient) to have STRICT CONFLICT OF INTEREST RULES HARDWIRED INTO THE DECISION SYSTEM. I keep telling people: "The sustainable intelligent internet (SII) requires BOTH a brain AND an 'immune system'". the "immune system" includes at least the types of strict conflict of interest rules,not just in human organization but in the code, which prevents catastrophic modes of collapse. True electric power experts (maybe even a good guy somewhere in Accenture, sadly not in charge) also understand about "Sarbanes-Oxley", odd and imperfect but essential rules designed to prevent known modes of collapse of that system. During the impeachment trial of Trump, a point came when I said to myself: "This guy has attempted many really great and insightful things, for which half his voters are willing to give priority over the many things they DON'T like. But connected with the US Constitution are similar very basic red lines, COI rules serious enough both in their content and in his organizational beliefs, that I agree with Pelosi on the matter. We DO NEED some red lines, similar to the simple basics of social contract and ten commandments [not exactly them, more like the rules of Jefferson and Washington, souls so familiar in my neighborhood] which Yeshua talks about or twelve tablets of Rome before some guys whom Trump reminds me of changed their rules. " BUT: WE **ALSO** NEED SPECIALLY CRAFTED COI RULES in the new integration control of the internet of things (which includes such objects as "slaughterbots," Stuart Russell's term, already in production in many nations). This, plus a new way of registering humans (NOT the very dangerous Borg like version which many in Accenture have been pushing in THEIR version of "people-centered internet"), is one of the most essential "new design approaches" which need to be hard wired into any alternative to Godzilla, King Kong or the Borg. I have SEEN what is being created NOW, and... well, we will see whether to Cosmos admits the human species to actually HAVE a history if we don't become more conscious of what we need to do. Better connection with the noosphere is probably NECESSARY to that, but NOT SUFFICIENT. We need to CONNECT all the way to what we are doing physically on this planet. I thank anyone who cares enough to read this far. Whether enough of us CARE about what happens to this species is certainly one of the key underlying issues. ============================A couple of follow-on comments: 1. Yes, this is part of my full answer to Varadan's question about "is Providence punishing us with coronavirus"? I previously compared it to the curses of Moses, NOT intended as punishment exactly, but as a kind of desperate hardball way of breaking the pride of paroahs all over the world breaking red lines, violating COI and such embedded in the noosphere itself. (I also associate with thoughts out there from Babylon V and The Atlantis Gene.. vague but meaningful hints...) 2. No, I am not proposing that the organizatoinal rules from Jefferson and Washington should be cast in bronze exactly for the entire earth. that level of thought and clarity is needed, but clearly the old COI rules were not sufficient in US and EU, and CLEAN TRANSPARENT updates are needed, but as Timothy keeps trying to tell me, many of those could be folded into internet design. Laws and computer algorithms governing sedveral types of corporation are one part of any fix. The war between production groups and PR groups has always been a problem -- speaking of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Ltaley viol;ations of truth in favor of PR, including lots of "bait and switch" games, is one of the main problems reducing hope in DC and EU and China lately.