I remember reading in another thread about Tesler’s law, which says that in software you can neither create nor destroy complexity, you can only move where it e

I remember reading in another thread about Tesler’s law, which says that in software you can neither create nor destroy complexity, you can only move where it exists. Costs in society are similar. The days of the traditional corporation, i.e. an organization that has shareholders, management, and employees made sense in the period of 1600 to 1950, but since then the world has gotten smaller. Our ability to shift costs (externalities) onto our planet has been curtailed by the fact that we’ve gone from a population of millions to billions. When you try to grow wealth by extracting stuff, sometime, someone, somewhere is going to feel it and will pay for it without any benefits to them. Regulation, has been shoehorned in as a solution. But it operates as a bandaid that no one has been happy with. Every regulation simultaneously goes too far and doesn’t go far enough. It shifts decision making power from one institution to another, (business to government) and depends on an army of bureaucrats, to implement. The fundamental solution is simple, make corporations pay for the externalities they create. This would be done at the point of purchase and would not grow the size of government because taxation systems that do this already exist. The implementation of this idea though is inconsistent and politically perilous because of path dependence. No one wants to pay for something they got for free before. For example, Citizens Climate Lobby has been campaigning for years for a Carbon Price and despite a lobbying effort from over 200,000 volunteers the US has yet to see a carbon price implemented. To do political lobbying for every externality like this would be a Sisyphean task. My solution, high concept, would be to make a society like Star Trek. We need to make a techno utopia, paired with social progress to sustain it. Although you can’t have Star Trek without warp drive, warp drive doesn’t make Star Trek, humanity had also evolved socially on the show. We will not travel faster than light, our warp drive will be computers. One of the keys to my approach is to have better models, models of climate, models of toxicity, models of the economy, models of human behavior, etc. That will let us have predictive capabilities to test ideas before they have consequences and model where costs are borne and bill the beneficiaries. The raw TFLOPs of our hardware will not give us this, rather human ingenuity and skepticism will. To achieve that will require giving people license to question and develop. This means giving teachers autonomy, instituting universal basic income, and creating public spaces.