Distributed sensors are enabling citizen scientists to dig up all kinds of data that otherwise might be hidden away.
Sensors embedded with Google Street View vehicles have discovered that industrial methane emissions from Ammonium Nitrate fertiliser plants are 100 times higher than reported, and have been grossly underestimated.
This single industry is producing three times more methane (a gas that’s 84x more contributory to Greenhouse Effects than CO2 in the near term) in the US, than the EPA’s estimates for all industry in the entire country – Three times over, in fact.
Again, that’s one single industry producing three times more than the estimates for ALL other industry in the US put together.
It illustrates that we have no idea what’s really happening in the world – who is polluting, with what, and to what degree.
That desperately needs to change. We must make such externalities transparent, accountable, and enforceable.
Today, global GDP is $80 trillion or so. However, all of the externalities that we have created in the process are not on the balance sheet. Using emerging technologies and bringing ethics and economics together, we can begin to account for externalities, and thereby we can create a more sustainable and equitable form of market economy.
Externalities describe the effects when someone does something that affects others who are unrelated to that transaction or behaviour. When you go to the local store and you take a bottle of juice and a bag of chips, your 10-minute convenience creates a 10,000 year externality as that plastic is non-biodegradable. This is a cost to people in other places, and to the future, to people as yet unborn, who must pay the costs that we defer to them.
The result: Quadrillions of unfunded externalities are not on the balance sheet. All kinds of horrible effects have not been accounted for. We have, in a sense, cheated our way into a nice, comfortable life — for some of us, anyway — by not paying for externalities. This has created the situation in which we now find ourselves – a series ever-worsening environmental catastrophes that threaten to send our civilisation into a death spiral.
Good governance is concerned with the management and accounting of externalities, but it’s generally done after the fact. Somebody creates a huge mess, and then an authority declares that the offender must pay a fine. This means that only the grossest effects tend to be noticed and policed, assuming that the authorities cannot be bought off.
We must do better. The confluence of Machine Intelligence, Machine Economics (distributed ledger technology, blockchains etc.), and the emerging domain of Machine Ethics, herald an opportunity to do so. These technologies together will finally enable us to calculate and predict externality effects in a way that is transparent and accountable.
We will, in the 2020s and 2030s, be able to start accounting for externalities in society for the very first time. We can include externalities within pricing mechanisms, to make people pay for them at the point of purchase, not after the fact. Therefore, products or services that don’t create so many externalities in the world, will, all things being equal, be a little bit cheaper. And so we can create economic incentives to be kinder to people and planet; we can enable people to profit from being kind.
It is my conviction that this development can enable us to transcend the polarising socialist versus capitalist dichotomy. We can enjoy our free markets, we can have our cake and eat it; so long as we do the proper accounting. Automated Externality Accounting is going to revolutionise 21st Century governance.
