Rob the Whole World; Give It Back

Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank.

Give a man a bank and he can rob the whole world.

And for my next trick, I will change the course of history.

There exist clear routes to human flourishing -- every person handed unrestricted access to nutrition, to medical care, to knowledge, to tools of self-expression, et cetera.

Abundance demands energy. We'll need watts to grow, to manufacture, to distribute, to communicate. We'll harness the power of particles, the warmth of our planet, and the shine of its darling star.

Acquiring/storing/distributing that energy, we'll collect/arrange atoms: nanotubes, hydrocarbons, processors, proteins, nanobots, tissues, diodes, textiles, creatures, screens, swarms, trains, houses, roads, cities, spacecraft, ad astra.

To arrange arrangements of atoms, we'll invent tools for invention. Computation affords abstraction and produces precision. Intelligent beings of all shapes/sizes will identify problems, ideate solutions, iterate, iterate, iterate, ad infinitum.

Invention takes time/energy. Such discretionary time/energy is called "capital". To incite flourishing, allocate capital to those who can/will incite flourishing.

Unfortunately, nobody consistently predicts who can/will incite flourishing; pairing talent with capital seems deceptively difficult. Trillions of dollars sit; billions of hands idle; millions of hectares stagnate. Few ventures are dreamt, fewer are designed, fewer are funded, fewer are built, fewer sustain themselves, and fewer improve flourishing. We can/should open these apertures.

But these apertures are critical fictions. Far beyond mere engineering, storytellers incept our collective consciousness. In a dream in a dream in a dream, we believe banks' computers' count coins and that those bits/coins fall fairly when flipped.

We weave dreams to allocate capital to ideate inventions to arrange atoms to incite flourishing. It is not enough. We need more flourishing. My patience wears thin; my appetite for risk wanes existential. Flourishing feels as likely as extinction.

And so I'm staging a coup to usurp that entire pipedream pipeline.

Obviously, there is no tutorial on how to acquire such power, nor any foolproof guide on exercising restraint. My current strategy is naive: I want the good guys to win, so I need to (1A) become a "good guy", (1B) adopt tamper-resistant self-correction mechanisms, and (2) acquire enough power to win.

I once believed that such power would be impossible to attain. But now I see it sitting in the saddest mud puddle, awaiting any fool who wants it.

Armed with a fool's scepter, I'm finding fulcrums to tilt this little planet: telling the tallest tales, inspiring minds, spreading smiles, curating talent, attracting capital, counting coins, allocating cash, leveraging intelligence, manufacturing abstractions, arranging atoms, meeting needs, caring deeply, inciting flourishing, making happy, ad absurdum.