Welcome to the 2nd part of our 4 act play. This afternoon, Todd Huffman will be the master of ceremonies on the section of culture. How are we going to change our civilizational operating system? A cambrian explosion of governments is very provactive and it's one of the most radical tihngs. He's the only thing that has talked about setting up more governments than Dr. Who has overthrown. 3:45 to 4:15 will be a break. I love the conversations. Who has met at least one person they want to know? And then we have arts and entertainment. I know and like everyone in that session. Then a break. What time does dinner start? The dinner at the Hyieght. 6:30.. How to get to the Hyeight. The information will be at the front desk. The reception goes from 8:30pm until midnight. Okay, so. It's my great pleasure and honor to introduce Todd Huffman. Todd was working the most closely to make this happen. Todd is a board member of Humanity Plus. Todd is so interesting. Todd is one of those guys, and you ask him "where were you yesterday" and he'll tell you Afghanistan. His project in Afghanistan was "how to create more geeks in Afghanistan". That's actually a pretty cool project. Todd, take it away.

This session is on culture. This isn't covered in the conferences. Our lifestyles are going to change. A lot of the aspects will change. One area that advances in the sciences and technologies are happening. Our first speaker is also on the board of directors. He's also on the Seasteading Institute. How technology can change the way that we create new governments and change the way that people live their lives.

Thanks Todd. The tough after-lunch slot. I have a crazy idea and a lot of energy. So hopefully it will keep you awake. Homesteading the high seas with extra transhumanism goodness. One of the most visible aspects of H+ is increasing our individual abilities. Intra-human augmentation. Increasing our abilities to organize and communicate. Take the internet, it upgraded our individual knowledge by giving us access to Wikipedia, and better opinions that Steve Omohundro talked about, without upgrading us individuals. Call it inter-human augmentation. Upgrading our forms of socialization. This is transhumanity 2 and it matters. There's a whole package of new ways to look at things. Long tail. Mass customization. The reprap. H+ using stuff to get healthier. Quantified Self. The culture of startups, it's above self-experimentation.

When something is a technology, it can be improved. Government is the tech of social organizer. It's the set of rules and institutions we use to resolve disputes, protect us, and provide for the common good. It's a set of written procedures. Just like any manufacturing process or chip design. Not only is it a technology, it's an information tech like code. When Dubbai created their free-trade zone, they hired a retired judge, they wanted to copy that superior technology.

The quality of how good your rules are really matters. This is a picture of South Korea and North Korea. One is lit up a little bit more than another. The capital, natural resources, just a huge difference in rules that led to a huge difference in growth and health. Rules and cultures are the main determinants of technological growth. Economists thought that capital was the most important. The signs on thosewere actually pretty small. When you have lots of resources, you have fighting over this fixed pool of resources. The greatest drivers of wealth and growth are these intangible factors of productivity, like rules. Education and IQ might be mis-guided. But if you move a Mexican worker from Mexico to U.S. the multiple of their productivity is much higher than the drop out from high school, and a PhD, being less, than a worker moving from Mexico to the U.S. So, a future super intelligence might have a higher productivity multiple, getting people into better systems of rules, will do better for productivity.. If this room is the space of all possible forms of possible social organization. The chance of best form of social organization is somewhere in here, is small. We may not know what a better form of government is. We can experiment to find it.

How can an infotech follow the law of Less rather than the law of Moore? Who ever heard of an infotech that barely advances? I think of the political world in three layers of meta emergence. Policies are what people talk about. What should the minimum wage be? What should the health care be? These policies are emergent of systems. Public choice theory tells us how democracy is imperfect in certain, predictable ways. Public choice economics is emergent economics. I need two people to sell margaratias on the front beach. People are all on this beach. They are going to go to the margaritas. Equilibrium. So, thank you. So the optimal place for these two margarita sellers on the beach, it's right in the middle. That's what split the people. If voters are aligned on some single axis, parties want to be in the center to split the vote. This is 2% of the public choice analysis. Here's the interesting thing. We know about emergent behavior. We know how rules dictate emergent behavior. Sometimes the rules matter more than the desires of the agents. The result is the medium: two parties want to remove to the middle. They want to go to the median voter. This is the result of the system we have set up. It matters what the median is. They could be over there, or over there. This is a system for telling us what the center is, which is not the best center. A lot of what people want, is being thrown out. It's because that's the logical outcome of that set of rules. The same thing is true at many other levels. Only by using our heads can we analyze these things to achieve the values.

Let's step up a level from democracy to what I think of as the governing industry, how they fade away, compete. Citizens are the customers. Public services are the product. My observation is that this industry innovates very little. They develop slowly. There are several reasons why. This industry has a huge barrier to industry. All land is taken, and sovereignity is not for sale. You have to win a war, an election, or revolution. This is a ridiculous barrier to entry. Who is going to do a startup when they have to do that? You can't do self-experimentation or startups. If you have an industry where Microsoft is the smallest firm, how many people are going to innovate? Most areas of tech have a fairly low barrier to entry. The other really bad characteristic is lock-in. It's really switch to switch from one website to another. Easy to switch car insurance and phone insurance. It's pretty damn hard to switch countries. How can a startup get customers when it's so expensive to switch?

Anything with these characteristics is going to be dysfunctional. Operating systems. They are hard to write. It's hard to switch. You have to get all the apps written. People have to learn their new thing. You get a new entrant. Apple, Microsoft, Linux. The structure of the industry. It's not because Microsoft is a bad company because Windows is bad; xbox is a good product in a competitive industry. Emergent behavior and look at things as happening because a bad anti-competitive Bill Gates is in charge or something. The structure of the industry and whether it encourages innovation or not.

I see a parallel in tweaking political systems and tweaking policies, and human augmentation. To get these bigger profound effects, we have to tweak the entire system. We need to actually augment ourselves. How can we fix it? The reason the floating systems help is this. Instead of needing to win a war, it takes a few hundred people, and a few hundred million dollars. It's not easy, but it's a big improvement. This is the straightforward way. This is the royal carribean freedom of the seas, and the empire states building, these are to scale. This cruise ship spends its life moving at 12 to 15 mph. So we can build these ocean cities out of modular units. You can change countries without moving out of your house. If a seastead building starts an unpopular war, the only buildings left are the newspaper and the military barracks. These changes will have enormous. Now the government is this cartel, oligarchy, we'll get something more like web2.0, governments innovating and learning by experimentation. Seasteading isn't just about running to the ocean because it's empty. Water has different properties. Building on it will result in different ideas.

Some of the implications. Connections with transhumanism. This is not a utopian idea. It's meta-utopian. In order for this to work, there has to be some better possible government out there. We'll experiment and get it. One society startup would be an app. We don't want an app, we want an infrastructure. There's widespread disagreement over this. There's the conflict between security and freedom. Here's the thing. Not only will diverse sociteties let us achieve diverse ends, but also diverse ends.