Holonic Earth Operating System
= Integrated, well-thought out proposol for a global coordination system to produce for human needs within the planetary boundaries
URL = https://docs.theos.io/introduction
Excerpts
Theos:
"With the advent of the internet, and with the latest advances in AI, complexity science, and blockchain technologies, we now have the opportunity to create novel protocol-based social coordination systems. Widespread transition to a new paradigm now involves people opting in to a digital social-economic network when they are ready, instead of necessitating the difficult and slow process of conventional political transformation.
The need for elected human representatives and centralised institutions is replaced with consent-based protocols which define how we conduct our relationships with one another and our environment. These new ‘economic’ protocols can be designed with different rules and explicitly defined objectives embedded into their architecture.
Needs-driven Economy
Since our needs drive what we consume, the economic food web begins with them. By leveraging blockchain technologies on the internet layer, geo-localised needs could be broadcasted as requests to the entire economic network.
As every economic participant will be able to see what is needed and where, potential providers can leapfrog the information barriers to economic interaction, like the need for market research and advertisement. Consequently, every person is immediately able to contribute towards fulfilling needs, leading to broad inclusion, equal opportunity and economic participation.
Prosocial Incentives
After collecting humanity's shared needs, incentives can be introduced to motivate economic activity. In social systems, incentives are often used to align people’s attention and behaviour towards certain activities, steering the group behaviour.
The profit motive is the main reward construct in the prevailing economic protocol - the DNA from which our group behaviour emerges. Profit arises directly from the system of market-based pricing - wherein suppliers set their own prices and therefore profits as high as possible. The market then requires competition to bring prices and profits back to an equilibrium. Although profit can be earned by improving value to consumers, over time, profit-maximising strategies tend to serve the self-interest of suppliers - ultimately converging on behaviours which are detrimental to people and the planet.
Resource Ecology
When producers organise to satisfy requests, they will need to combine resources and labour to produce the required products or services. Resources are linked together into "recipes" which relate all products to their constituent components, in specified physical units. Every time a recipe is requested, orders for its constituent components (i.e. resources) are requested too.
These recipes are then chained together into a web called the resource ecology - a graph built up from resource recipes where each node represents a unique type of resource. The resource ecology can be likened to a transparent and shared web of supply chains in which every resource is geo-localised. By shifting from a concealed collection of abstract, linear supply chains to a transparent geo-localised resource graph, local providers can easily fill gaps in the resource web and optimize long supply pathways. Consequently, the resource ecology harmonises the efficiencies of globalisation and the resilience of localisation.
In the proposed design, the self-interested profit motive is replaced with a well-defined incentive to serve one another’s needs. The aggregated information about geo-localised needs can be used as a parameter to steer a reward function, such that higher rewards will be assigned to those who fulfil the most prevalent needs first. In essence, the community publishing their needs are indirectly setting a needs-based incentive. The community is rewarding suppliers who fulfil their needs, instead of suppliers setting their own prices and profits for themselves.
Following these rewards, producers emergently orient their behaviour towards the fulfilment of the community’s needs. This is similar to the way whereby people currently pursue profit, with the key difference being that the reward now encourages prosocial behaviour.
By replacing profit with a prosocial reward, we remove perverse incentives which reward antisocial individual gain, rebalance the power relationship between people and producers, and realign one’s individual incentive with a measure of common good. This simply could not be achieved with the competitive price system and profit motive of the prevailing economy and monetary system.
Resource-Based Economy
With the resource ecology available, we are able to replace market-based pricing with resource-based prices, where the value of any resource reflects what it costs to be produced. When a product is requested, its resource-based price is calculated. The values of its component resources are summed together, cascading through recipes until the most basic resources at the extremities of the food web. Here, the value graph is rooted in the most fundamental physical units like energy and human time.
Since the value of every resource is directly equal to the sum of the values of its constituent resources, prices come to reflect the true costs of production. Thus, a fair-trade economy is established, free from profits, economic rents and speculation which seep into market-based prices.
Resource-based pricing enables us to directly relate all of our economic activity to its impact on the resource base. Since resource-based prices are not measured in dollars, but rather physical units, economising on price directly implies economising on resources. Cradle-to-cradle life-cycle costs, from production to end-of-life can also be traced and included in the prices of goods the moment they are created. Moreover, the needs-based incentive gives the resource ecology no incentive to produce surplus to what is needed. Sustainability and a circular economy becomes an emergent consequence of the protocol."