Conversation

Thinking of the “Old McDonald had a Farm” nursery rhyme Also “for want of a nail the kingdom was lost” Complex systems are a bitch to shut down. Essential services = ripples of dependence extending outwards from the most time-bound in time and social graph space.
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Once you allow that a few people (doctors, firemen, cops) must be able to respond to certain “emergency” events within tight hard real time bounds (minutes to hours) you end up with almost everything and almost everyone being essential if you push out the time horizons.
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At sufficiently large (n, t) every service becomes essential 🤔 Many doctors, nurses working this hour = a few cafeteria workers and janitors working today = delivery services (laundry, supplies) working this week etc Wakefulness rippling outwards in time and social graph
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3 bad things would happen at different time scales if world were to 100% stop People needing emergency help would die within hours to days People who must live off investments (retirees) would die within weeks People living paycheck to paycheck would go destitute in months
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People who like to rail against “growth” as a cancer seem to think it exists only for billionaires buying their 2nd yachts with rentier capital gains income and that the world can’t stop because they demand luxuries Nah, the world can’t stop because all levels depend on it
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There are less complex modes of civilization that don’t have this “cannot stop” character to them. But they can only sustain orders of magnitude fewer people, and those people won’t love as long, or survive as many emergency events, or feast/famine cycles as we typically do.
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The question of min viable tech stack/civilizational scale required to sustain modern standards of living has interested me for a while. Follow-up new question: how much can we shrink those minima if humans can rewild ourselves a bit. Not full-on solo survivalism, just like... 5%
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Alt way to phrase that question: how can we increase max duration entire world can pause without critical systems failing or people dying? Right now it’s probably 1 minute. And that would take intense coordination and advance planning. And luck (nobody needing CPR for 1 minute)
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Problem gets easier if you segment it. A shark sleeps one half of its brain at a time. Humans sleep about a third of the planet at a time. But human *systems* with min-viable staffing never sleep. But maybe an entire city could figure out how to sleep, systems and all, 5min/week?
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When this shit is done, this might very well make for a good next Apollo mission for humanity: teaching our world how to truly sleep. On purpose. Regularly. From top to bottom. Around a minimal definition of essential achieved with maximal automation.
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Seems like a deep and important complex systems habit. The best we can do now appears to be relatively shallow regional rituals of “public holidays” and “weekends”.
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