Daily pages - September 06, 2021

My big insight last night was the idea that even if sometimes the work that needs doing is on ourselves, we still need to ship. That points to a blog or a digital garden as a place to publish/ship the insights that come from those efforts.

I don’t know if I’m asking too much to say you should ship from those times, but I don’t think I am. I’m not talking about daily blog articles, but after it’s all said and done, what came out of it? I’m obviously dating myself, but I think of it like the end of an episode of The Waltons, where John Boy is writing what he learned from recent events.

Thoughts on abundance.

Abundance is tricky because short of a replicator from Star Trek, it’s difficult to understand how we can achieve full abundance in things like food and material objects. It’s fairly clear, in retrospect, how information and in turn music and education and movies could all become abundant. Digital distribution is non-rivalrous. Nothing is lost as you make a copy of a song for your phone or stream it from YouTube.

You still can’t stream food, and yet we’re mostly experiencing an abundance of food in the world. We’ve gotten good at growing it in large quantities, though we need to get better at maintaining or increasing those yields while making the whole process more sustainable. I feel like, even with the changes that are coming with climate change, we know so much about growing food, even hydroponically, that we’ll be OK.

In his book about abundance, Peter H. Diamandis talks about things like health care getting cheaper and smaller to the point where blood tests, for example, could be so abundant that they’re practically free. So that’s part of the answer. Do we have the materials to give everyone in the world a video camera like the one they used to film TV shows in the 1960s? No, those were huge and used a lot of materials, but now we all have the same functionality (or better) as part of our phone. So the whole meme where you look at a desk in 1990 and ask what items are still on your desk in 2019 is valid. Almost all of those functions (formerly provided by physical objects) were replaced by computer software and databases. So even physical objects are becoming abundant in that way.

I think of the paper microscope that I own. That is a huge reduction in material (and the kinds of materials) from a traditional microscope. And I know that team is continuing to work on similar kinds of projects.

This all comes down to “more from less” as a principle. We are continuing to do more with less to the point where abundance is emerging. I had thought to have More With Less as a pattern, but abundance makes more sense. And weirdly, I don’t remember even making quite this clear a connection between the two before tonight. I must have at some point, but it has not been something that comes to mind immediately.

I had realized at some point that More With/From Less was pretty much the only principle of sustainability. Most of our problems come from the More for more approach we’ve been taking, and we are running up against the limits of doing that without destroying the planet.

I know there’s more to fixing the world than more with less. There’s no moral compass there, and I just recently read about a “philosophy” based around something similar, but critics looked at it and said if an AI were programmed with this mission, it would likely destroy human life. It kind of reminds me of the high productivity machine that would end up using all matter on Earth to create the widget it was assigned to make.

Anyway, I think it makes sense that I’m trying to balance the ethics with the practical principles. I don’t want to take the ethics for granted. We are trying to create a “better” world and that has ethical considerations. I can’t help think that this book is going to be too little too late, but I still feel like I need to write it. Even if it’s just for my kids. It’s my best synthesis of what I’ve learned about making the world a better place. I feel like it’s my responsibility to put it out into the world; like I will likely say in the book, your contribution might make all the difference.