An Opinion Piece By Ian Falconer (Fishy Filaments’ Founder)
Showing my age and paraphrasing Madonna – We live in a material world and we are material beings.
Over the majority of my working life, software-driven business models have offered a shining city on the hill, an embodiment of Winthrop’s American dream of opportunity and equality. AI seems to be the next step on that pathway – a double-down bet on black, because it will be better this time and social media taught us so much. It could be. It might be. But I’m not betting my house on it.
My thesis is different – that by changing the underlying foundations of our physical world, by the discovery of new processes, by the production of new materials, by reworking our physical, chemical and biological relationships with the world, the social and economic systems that we have built on top of that expanding knowledge since The Enlightenment will be able to provide a far more robust, equal and fundamental forward development of humanity and its relationships with and within that world.
You cannot program your way past physics. You might be able to understand the physical world better using programming, machine-learned or otherwise, but to actually change the world itself, you need to work in that physical world. A great example of this is Formula 1 which is a living lab exploring how well we can digitise and de-digitise the world, shifting between the human mind, computer models, wind tunnels and real world racing cars. And it is never, ever 100% right.
A theoretical material will remain theoretical until you make it and re-inform the digital model of reality. Feeding Large Language Models with their own output might accelerate their rise to ‘usefulness’ and make economic sense, but its a step away from our universal ground truth in the physical world.
The power of money in the human mind is undoubted, but it is the software of economics. And economics is ultimately the servant, not the master, of the trade of materials. Change the nature or the supply of those materials and new economic models and tools must be developed.
Double entry book-keeping was the Ventian trader’s secret sauce before Pacioli blew their cover by writing a text book on it. Their trading network had been operating for decades and had already become dominant. Writing was developed by the Sumerians to support the commodities trade as humanity switched from scarcity and movement to agricultural sufficiency and onto the pathway to urban development. Agriculture came before accountancy. These tools do not define what we can and must do in the physical world, they communicate it and facilitate it.
Right now we are seeing the old economics of consumption resisting what has been termed The Circular Economy, which, however you wish to present it, is simply the more efficient use of materials. As a concept it’s a switching of valuation model of physical assets from temporal ownership towards lifetime impact. Or if you are an academic internalising the externalities. Thats ‘software’. Thats programming. A Circular Economy singular and unified is the software cart before the material horse. To imagine an economy entirely made of closed material loops is not a real world solution to real world problems.
But Circular EconomIES ? For sure. Once it has been mined gold has been in a near-perfect circular economy for millenia. Its notional value mainly sits outside its physical usage. So we can imagine a use for gold that overarches physical consumption. We can step outside a temporal value model for that asset.
We are seeing attempts to value nature, pollution, social interactions and more. Some of these re-valuations of assets are using our old concepts re-worked and sometimes we are trying to open genuinely new conversations. I give the example here of capturing a transient value of electricity by storing it as crypto currency – which is a genuinely interesting idea if coupled with excess renewable energy – but its a terrible idea if powered by coal. The material matters.
So my plea, my demand, my own work entire, is to start with materials and our relationships with them. If they work in the physical world, if they provide better outcomes (less pollution, healthier lives, more profit ?) then we should ditch the old tools and write the new economics to fit them.
These fundamental, fungible, physical things that we all depend on to eat, drink, shelter under, cloth ourselves with, transport us around, comfort our children with and, yes, even to be a store of our theoretical wealth.
Without them war, peace, interplanetary travel, cryptocurrencies, AI, our next breath, they are all zephyrs. Like politicians they pass by.
Get real ! Be real ! Change the world with better materials. Then you can feed your Large Language Models with a better reality.