June 2023                                               LEQ                                                                by jo suter           

Lex Fridman asked Elon Musk a Question (LEQ) about humans colonizing Mars: What type of government, economic system, and political system might work for a new human civilization on that planet?  Elon agreed that colonizing Mars would be an opportunity to re-think government.  This is an important question, not only for future colonies in space, but to ask what a retrofit might look like here on Earth. 

Elon’s first idea would be to have a direct vote rather than a representative government  to decrease the influence of lobbyists. Not a bad idea. In addition, rules and regulations should be allowed to run out and not automatically be renewed.  To start a new Martian economy, Elon suggested that a crypto currency might work – maybe Doge?   Let’s push the LEQ question a bit further. 

What are the possible types of Martian government?

Most space exploration up to this point has been a military-type command and control, even with civilians aboard.  It’s just easier to have a chain of command.  Of course most of us would want a long-term colony on Mars to be democratic or have some variation of democracy in which leaders are chosen by the people.  It is unlikely that laissez-faire or libertarian government would be allowed on Mars (at least to begin).  The environment is too harsh and everyone has work to do.  Beyond that, it is possible that some space colonies could have a non-democratic, dictatorial type of government.  That would include an oligarchy or monarchy, both of which are less democratic.

What is the role of government and is that role different on Mars?  To start with, governments must be concerned about the survival of the colony.  Decisions must be made and disagreements settled.  Many people look to government for a vision of the future.  Governing must be more than simply a division of spoils and resources however. “Total Recall” is an action movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the hero with amnesia who returns to Mars and saves it from the Bad Guys.  Though not explicit in this movie, it appears that Mars is run like a corporation, sometimes a free-for-all, but not a democracy.   

Will there be nation-states on Mars?  The origin of the nation-state was heavily influence by the 30 years war in Europe, ending in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia.  This was an agreement in which the royals agreed to keep their hands off each other’s property.  We still fight, but since that time the nation-state rather than a feudal lord has become the object of allegiance for most citizens within their respective borders. 

If a colony on Mars divides into nation-states and expend any amount of energy fighting each other, they won’t make it.  Other mechanisms of keeping the peace must be created. Cultural stories may hold some of the keys.  Individual and group accountability will help too, so there must also be Feedback Loops created to filter and move useful information.  Survival of the group or colony will depend on it.

There is no doubt that colonies on Mars will be isolated and for that reason Martians will have to make many of their own decisions.  As Elon pointed out, radio waves that travel at the speed of light will take at least 4 minutes to reach Mars at the very least.  Screen writers of the movie “The Martian” ignored this 4 minute delay for the sake of the story line, but in reality, a Mars colony must be mostly self-regulated and self-governed.

This brings up interesting questions.  Will there be police on Mars, and will they carry guns?  Movie writers may not be technical experts but they have at least thought about some of these issues.  In the movie Total Recall a stray bullet could do a lot of damage – “Don’t shoot!  The dome will shatter and kill us all!”

Economy

Currency is not simply worthless paper.  It is a ticket to participate in the local economy and social interactions.  It is a communication tool.  What “backs up” a currency?   It can be the power of the federal government via collateral, or contracts and the courts. 

In Total Recall the citizens used a currency called “units” instead of dollars.  They were expected to work and apparently this is how they were paid.  Whoever ran Mars also coerced labor from the citizens by withholding the amount of air they had to breathe.  In our more civilized world we use “sanctions”.  This may have some effect, but may also be too general to be really useful toward achieving the desired end goal. 

Here on Earth, business and capitalism work rather well as a method of organization.  There are buyers and sellers using some kind of currency.  Verifying the transaction can be the tricky part.  Elon recalled that while at PayPal, he learned that transactions involving money are mostly about information processing.  That implies the key importance of good information as a fundamental requirement of any transaction, especially any digital transaction.  Who sold what, to whom, and when? 

The financing of capitalism requires an ever-increasing growth as measured by GDP.  But colonies can grow in complexity and sustainability too, not simply growing physically bigger.  This type of growth takes energy and organization as well.  Can financial services be separated from Capitalism?  Should it be?  Financiers will finance tobacco companies if it will make money for them. 

Will there be multiple currencies on Mars?  Counterfeit currencies may be locked out if good record keeping is done.  A transaction would have to exchange something of value to create a new currency.  If I can start a tobacco farm on Mars and sell tobacco, an addictive substance, new currency or barter schemes will simply appear!  Voila!  This creates a market place but would it be in the long-term interests of the colony?  No.  True wealth starts by people getting out of bed each day to create goods and services that are also of value to the colony.

A distributed ledger known as blockchain may have been a useful discovery that spun off from the invention of crypto currency, but the use of electricity to create value for Bitcoin (BC) is a gross waste of energy.  Plus, solving a long math problem to obtain a BC is really of no value to anyone.  It simply slows down the rate of introduction of BC into the mainstream, much like the stoplights that control the rate of entry onto a busy highway.

Yet BC has woven itself into the social fabric and tied itself to the US Dollar (which is also used as a measure of the value of BC).  Weather or not BC retains its position is not yet clear, since any contracts written using BC may not stand up in court.

One can start a new currency simply with a transaction.  The first BC was reported to be payment for a pizza.  If each coin has an ID (for larger denominations), then that ID plus a separate Verification of Buyer & Seller are sent to a bank.  The Buyer and Seller can use any currency they want if the Bank will accept it. 

If each large Crypto coin has its own ID, then counterfeit is much more difficult. With each Buyer and Seller having been verified independently by a trusted Verifier, a Bank can move the money from the buyer account to the seller account.  This also means that any currency, including local currencies, that can keep track of each coin ID can be used as a currency.  It might be necessary to keep each crypto coin intact and only of one value:  e.g. If I invest a (fictitious) local “Buffalo” coin equal to $100 USD in a local company and my investment increases to $360 USD, I can withdraw my money from the local bank with 3 Buffalos (traceable) plus $60 USD or $60 of a local currency.  The bank can mix or match in agreement with account holder.  So multiple currencies may be of value on Mars.  This redundancy in currency may not be quite as efficient but adds a layer of reliability.

Can currency  be “backed up” by a group?  If there is a local currency, then individuals can have both their own account but also be part of a group account.  If the individual defaults, then the group is liable.  This encourages discussion.  Much better than fighting.  But local currencies will still be a weak spot for counterfeiters or crooks.  In order to minimize this a combination of large ID-Crypto (each crypto has its own ID) plus a local currency might be used for transactions, as in the $360 example above.  The crypto-ID coin alone could be used for transactions between colonies.  The local currency is part of the open-book accounting and can be exchanged at the local bank.  The open-book accounting will let each person in that colony know what they spent or received each day, without details of what was purchased.

A local currency will have a limited number of people in that group but it is more transparent. In a digital system there is no paper money that can be hidden and “disappear” from the accounting ledger.  Every bit of currency can be accounted for every day.   The risk of any digital currency being used for surveillance can be lessened with Small Groups and local currencies. 

What happens if an individual breaks trust with their group?  There are several types of communities already here on earth, such as the Amish, in which the individual rule-breaker is shunned.  That means that the other members will not speak or interact with the rule-breaker for a certain period of time, sometimes a very long time.  It can be quite powerful.  The Amish are a group of people who will not pick up a gun to kill another human.  This is fundamentally a different type of power than that used by our legal system which is backed up by the barrel of a gun.  Shunning is a social pain and very real, but it won’t work if there is no caring and concern for other people.  Like the Amish, we have choices to make.

Inflation is something that steals true value, especially from those who are unable to automatically increase their income.   Inflation of 2% was thought to be optimal, but where did that number come from?  Maybe from the lag time of Goods and Services behind the injection of money into the economy?  Or was it a strategy to outbid someone else when information took weeks to arrive.  Neither of these apply when information is almost instantaneous.   Maybe a 2% increase in price is the level at which the buyer does not take time to look for better deals.

In his book “Small Is Beautiful”, E.F. Schumacher points out that capitalist systems require an ever-expanding GDP, but this cannot last forever.  There has to be some reset mechanism.  For finance, the reset turns out to be the boom and bust cycle of the market or the money supply, or both.  Once reset however, GDP-growth can continue, sometimes at a frenetic pace.  Some economists wonder if there are better measures, but until now it has been difficult to separate GDP from basic Capitalism. 

A declining population can be a drag on economic growth if one only measures GDP, the gross estimate of economic activity.  Population growth is not so important if the community works on becoming resilient and sustainable.   Yet how does one measure resilience and sustainability?  It will require gathering and filtering of information and ideas.  This includes the ability to formulate or discover useful questions, even hypothetical questions to probe the possibilities and estimate true value. 

Political Systems, Social Hierarchies, Small Groups and Feedback Loops

Political power is closely related to some official position or military rank but also related to positions in a social hierarchy (SHA).  Much of this is our own mental model.  The British may kneel to the King of England, but others may not.  In reality there are many complex layers to a social hierarchy, each of which is willing to use and abuse the level below.

Social hierarchy has its downside too, the most serious being the difficulty of moving useful information upward due to a natural resistance within the hierarchy.  Useful information from the bottom struggles to make itself heard without a specific, pre-determined pathway.  We need to develop new connections and new ways to Get Things Done (GTD) or Slow Momentum (SLOMO) of things already in motion.

Much of the work in doing this requires finding, filtering, and moving useful information.  We have the ability to do this with tools of modern communication.  That will not be enough, however.  Technology must be combined with small group structures to provide useful feedback to people in positions of power or to points of decision.  The term “feedback” here means specific information from a specific place directed to a specific decision maker or point of decision.  Biologists study feedback in plants and animals, both individual and groups.  Engineers build systems with Feedback Loops.   Courts, Contracts, and Conflicts all depend on Useful Information for adequate resolution and all can benefit from well-designed feedback. 

One social structure with practical applications could be a TenTwo group in which ten breadwinners support two of their own group with rent, food, and insurance for some period of time as decided by the whole group.  Those two people can then do any kind of work that they and the group decide upon.  They are entirely self-contained, making all their own decisions.  This can be started with incentives from the outside since many of them will not automatically organize.  The TenTwo group then has more power for self-direction than ten individuals acting alone but must use a decision-making process that is very efficient.

Small Group (SG) of all types can be more effective because of the FB within the group, giving time to think and talk.  Privacy of discussion within the group gives the individual deniability.  No matter the group’s decision, the individual does not have to go out on a limb and does not have to agree with their group’s public position.  This privacy of group discussion is an essential part of finding ideas that would otherwise not surface.

Human Martians will need to deal with the same common human emotions:  jealousy, pride, anger, love, sacrifice.  If we survive any length of time on Mars, these emotions will also rise to the surface.  Sub-dominant males or females, insolent teenagers and people out of power will try to prove their superiority over others.  Fights will break out.  Unless we can find ways to stop at this level, it will be the person with the biggest weapon that wins. Then we will again be on the same road to destruction.   So it is important to think about how to find and move useful information.

Feedback and Useful Information. 

It will take more than just frequent voting or higher voter turnout to change anything.  On the other hand, we don’t need a revolution or change of leadership if we can use tools of communication and feedback with small group structures.  Small groups that are truly random will give an answer that begins to approximate the same answer as a larger group.  Randomly selected groups of 10 can approximate the results of a group of 100.  The results do not need to be perfect if there are feedback mechanisms to make adjustments on a regular basis.  This was an argument of pioneers in the field of Cybernetics Science (The Science of Feedback) such as Norbert Wiener (“The Human Use of Human Beings”) who described the ability of a ship’s captain to guide a ship in the right direction despite changing winds and ocean currents.  The captain could rely on feedback, both from instruments and from trusted sailors. 

A dynamic process with feedback can be much more helpful to find problems that develop.  That statistical fact gives us a division of labor and a division of information gathering which makes it a useful tool or sensor in a feedback loop, bringing that information to a decision maker and point of decision.  Any dictator who loses feedback will see the downfall of his regime.  Creating of a Ministry of Truth is a sign that leaders are losing control of the story.  Random Small Groups can be used to challenge any story no matter what the source might be, if they can first ask questions, then think, talk and challenge each other.  They can challenge leaders or other groups, or just do something and then evaluate results with a similar process. 

Feedback loops can be designed from either end, from top or bottom, and can jump layers of an organization, though sometimes that means taking a risk.  John Houbolt, a NASA engineer who saved the Apollo program by pushing the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous design, was one person who risked his career by going outside the chain of command to write a letter to the head of NASA.

In a Mars colony use of Small Groups and Feedback Loops means that one group can also give feedback to any other group, not simply to their own.   Feedback does not have to be perfect.  The results should be testable by other randomly selected Small Groups that are given the discussion question, some privacy and time limits.  It is not a social club.  They must work quickly and efficiently, so an incentive might be used to get the process started.

Small Group Types

Small Groups of 3 to 10 people can be either random, self-selecting, or assigned.

-Randomly Selected Small Group members are picked by birthdate or other

   randomization process.  The purpose of R-SG is to gather and filter useful information. 

– Self-Selecting SG’s are the second type and are best exemplified with the TenTwo variety, 

   the purpose of which is to gain some privacy and independence of decision making with a

   support group that will support each other financially if needed. 

– The third type, A-SG, Assigns members and is designed for members to make the extra effort to look out for one another.  If one member makes a series of bad decisions and must return to Earth, then all those in his or her small group will return to Earth.  The need for this type of social structure can be seen in the mounting evidence of lone individuals responsible for mass killings.  Isolated physically and socially from those around them, their thinking patterns also become isolated and destructive.  Like the family structure, A-SG’s that encourage people to watch out for each other can help to set the base for a stable society.  Judicial courts could use this idea to explore group accountability. 

This is all about Finding, Filtering, and Moving Useful Information (FFMUI), something that Artificial Intelligence should do well.  Can AI-robots help us humans formulate better questions?  Bad decisions in history by leaders were often based on incomplete information.  The decision of Germany to enter WWI was based on faulty information leading to the underestimation of the strength of the Allies, the US in particular.  A well-functioning AI would not be able to tell the future, but possibly bring more relevant information to the decision.

Will there be media outlets on Mars and what is their role?  Sometimes the media can be trusted, sometimes not.  It may depend on who owns the media outlet but also depends on the filters used by readers.  Is the information I am hearing real or misleading?  Or noise?  Junk mail is getting smarter.  We must do more than “just say no” to misinformation, or drag our feet in an attempt to not think of unpleasant things.  An active search and dynamic filtering can be statistically powerful and meaningful. 

Do we need an enemy for motivation?  Fear is a great motivator, but it often lacks direction, like trying to push on a string.  However searching for useful information gives a goal, task, or a purpose every day and can be of great help.  AI should make Gathering Useful Information (GUI) easier if everyone is on the same side.  If there are two opposing teams, however, each using AI, then any information can easily become misinformation and difficult to analyze.  Even if simply played as a competitive game, Small Groups can help with this.  Those who are able to separate useful information from misinformation and noise will have more power.

Meaning, Purpose, and Morality – Do Robots Care?  

By the time we colonize Mars there will be further advances in Artificial Intelligence.  AI can be distributed over many computers, but here we refer to AI and Robots as the same,  simply to give AI more personality.  When we colonize Mars the ratio of Robots to Humans might be 1:1 or higher, depending on development of robots and what their task might be.  Will robots be programmed to serve or survive?  Can robots commit a crime?  Star Wars robots were owned by humans.  Not a bad idea either.  Maybe the owners should be responsible for bad bot behavior.

The larger question is “can robots be built to be moral, courageous, or altruistic?”  When C3PO was injured he said, “You go on, Master Luke”.  These robots definitely seemed to be on the side of the good guys.  

On a philosophical and psychological dimension, what is the source of the energy or force or impetus that is needed to move forward on any project or endeavor?  Does the leader have a vision and can the leader see further ahead?  Is it fear that drives the forward motion or does the motivation come from somewhere else?  Do we as individuals already see as far as we possibly can?  Will group dynamics extend our abilities?

Survival may depend on changing the cultural story, but there is great momentum in the story.  Movies like Star Wars deal with questions of human nature because that it what is interesting to the audience.  Bad Guys are essential to the script to create tension and to keep the attention of the audience.  So we must learn to use competition and apply it to many specific challenges – but without the bad guys.

Decision Making as Freedom

Too often people think and speak as if they are standing in front of some authority figure such as a parents or a judge (when they are really not) trying to play a leadership role.  This strategy may elicit useful information from the parties in conflict but not reliably.  Yet, one can sometimes find what is in a person’s heart by pushing that person to make a decision. 

A Hindu man came to Gandhi confessing that saying that he had killed a Muslim boy and therefore was destined for hell.  Gandhi told the man to find a homeless Muslim boy and raise him as a Muslim.  Decision.  We don’t know if that man did as Gandhi recommended or not, but freedom from the burden of guilt can be gained in part from making the right decision. 

Lawrence of Arabia was confronted by a group of Arabs with whom he was working.  They brought to him one of his friends who had allegedly committed murder.  Lawrence was expected to execute the friend in order to prevent a larger Arab uprising.  The pressure was immense, but in reality, Lawrence was in a position to ask something of the mob before he carried out the execution.  He could test their hearts and maybe show them other pathways instead of simply an eye-for-an-eye. If one pushes others to make a decision, either they can either hang onto the old story or try a new path.  It may require some courage, good information and ideas they can use to imagine alternate pathways.  One colony can push another colony to do the same.   This decreases the pressure on the second colony to raid the first colony for resources.  

The current situation of Taiwan being a target of takeover by China is an opportunity for the Taiwanese to say to China that they, the Taiwanese, may look favorably on reunification with China some time in the future if the shackles on Hong Kong are loosened and people are free to travel to Hong Kong to see for themselves.  This is a decision that can be made by China.  The right decision might avert war.  The question that prompts such a decision may not come from an official government body but from some element of civil society.  We can push others.  Challenge them to make a decision. Why?  There can be freedom in the making of decisions, even if those decisions are not popular at the moment and even if the question comes from unexpected sources.

Small Groups plus Feedback Loops are Key (SG+FBL)  

TenTwo groups are a buffer for job insecurity but can also be used to give feedback to other groups from the outside on many issues.  Like capitalism, we need competition to move forward, not simply altruism.   A nimble Mars colony should have an object or goal to push on in order to create a gradient.  It engages people who are otherwise not paying attention.  That is the basketball hoop, the baseball diamond, the tennis court and net.  These are all structures without which the game means nothing.  Pushing others up the hill may seem contrived, but it is temporary and not done out of altruism but rather to help entire colony survive.  This is in contradistinction to old stories in which the enemy is always vanquished.  Pushing others uphill may also be the best way to get around the natural resistance of a social hierarchy structure without stressing too many people out.  Rather it is a more gradual, steady climbing of the learning curve. 

Each of our own personal views of the world is pretty small, certainly much smaller than the institutions we build.   We closely watch other people around us and in fact learn a lot from them.  This social hierarchy can be very supportive but also very constraining.  At some point the pressure to conform mounts and then it becomes easier to push people down, blame the victim rather than stand up to those above or beside us in the hierarchy. 

Can democracy handle the changes needed?  We have the technology.   We need to think more about social structures that could be used to find and filter information.  It’s not automatic.  My information filter is different than yours, but we can create group information filters that are better yet.  A good place to start using Small Groups might be looking for waste in government, something that could be tried as a project in private enterprise.  The government could build better Feedback Loops if they want, but will they?  Leaders in power and their advisors may not be interested in change, so much of the change may have to start at lower levels.  Then leaders will follow.