Can a Business Be a Country?

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Tuvalu is shifting online, because their physical country is predicted to sink beneath the waves of climate change.

“…ensures that the government can continue to function, coordinate itself and the people, manage our resources, our tuna industry, and our domain name”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-27/tuvalus-plan-to-create-digital-twin-metaverse-climate-change/102223008

Because the income from tuna and the .tv domain name will continue, regardless, they need a way of giving some income to their citizens. In other words, without the land they become less of a country and more of a business.

Tuvalu will become a business, but retain many aspects of being a country, like having citizens.

So I am thinking that businesses can be set up to imitate a “country that becomes a business”.

That means that the business is owned by people, but every owner has an equal share.
That means being democratic.
That means ownership requires no effort or input from the owners.

So, how to decide ownership? It won’t be the workers who own it, any more than the tuna fishermen of Tuvalu own their country.

The Tuvalu people belong together by existing physically on the same islands. That is their commonality.

For a business, the closest to that is the fans and supporters of the business – their customers. Customers contribute to the well-being of a business, and they care about the success of the business. Customers can be big or small, but how much they spend doesn’t necessarily reflect how much they like it, so a one-vote-per-customer model sounds good, just like a country.

However, because it is so cheap and easy to become a citizen-customer of a retail brand, profits cannot be distributed equally amongst customers – otherwise people will just buy products to get the (ongoing) profits. It will only work for a non-profit, where being a citizen has non-monetary rewards and/or engagement.

AI Beats the Stock Market and Rules the World

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“Stockmarket Charts” by Negative Space/ CC0 1.0

People have been using computers to try and beat the stockmarket/sharemarket ever since computers existed. And for the most part they have failed. Certainly anyone who had an advantage has not been able to keep it secret, or stop others working it out. So we get told that AI cannot win at stock picking.

But that is when computers only look at the technicals – price movements and ratios and the like – pure numbers. The same can be said for the forex markets. People who do (supposedly) profit from these via skill are not numbers people – they research and use instinct and are cautioius.

Generative AI has quickly moved into the areas of words, images, video and even sound. These are not primarily mathematical, but the AI can be trained to spot patterns and make predictions. If it knows my writing, it can predict how I will finish a sentence. Of course it isn’t prescient, but an educated guess is all a stock-picker can make anyway.

Stock movements are triggered by all sorts of things. The layman in me knows of at lease these:

  • Company announcements
  • Economic indicators
  • News affecting sectors
  • Currency movements
  • Rumors
  • Boredom (stock is static and something else is shinier)
  • Re-balancing of funds – especially the top 50 type

There will be more, of course. The thing is, all of this, combined with the technicals, is knowable by AI, and patterns can be found. Analysts might know that a CEO being accused of anything sexually improper will definitely make a share price drop. But by how much, how do you weight such news? And what decides if the stock price recovers or not, later?

I predict that an AI system will one day be able to make stock picks based on news combined with fundamentals, enough to beat the market.

My only doubts are:

  • How much better can it be than humans?
  • How long will it take?

Could be that it needs 1,000 years of data. Or 10. No way of knowing until you try.

When and if it happens, the degree of improvement in results over human analysts might not need to be much at all. Once you have certainty in the level of good predictions it can make, then the bets can be ramped up using financial leveraging, whether that is borrowing money cheaper that the returns you will get, or trading in derivatives.

Then, if nobody else has access to such a tool, the owners (or even the AI masquerading as the owner) can very rapidly become the richest entity in the world, and then some – with all the power that brings with it.

Prolonging the Ukraine War

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I never write about wars. Mostly because there are so few these days, but also because they do not interest me, and I don’t have much understanding of how they work.

But for an everyday person like me, it is becoming abundantly clear that the west wants the Ukraine war to take a long time. Last week the US sent missiles that could travel twice as far as the previous ones. This week:

The PM has now ordered the defence secretary to examine ways that the UK can provide Ukraine with fighter jets.

The RAF has a limited number of aircraft it could theoretically provide Ukraine – including about 20 older Typhoon jets.

This at a time when Russia is starting to win again. Not when Russia was retreating and such gifts could have ended things. Not at the beginning of the war. It is as if they give Ukraine only enough to keep the war going, and never enough to win.

And it makes sense. A war that takes 2-3 years will keep weakening Russia in all sorts of ways – militarily and economically of course. They will be less of a threat for a decade or more, as long as they don’t get to take over all of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, despite protests of how they cannot afford it, the West loves giving their weapons industry business.

Unless Putin does something crazy, or gets toppled, or gives up, the result seems to be incredibly obvious – in a year or two Russia will have some of east Ukraine, and the war will be over. But to get there 100K+ more people need to die. Truly sickening that men playing games can do so much harm.

The Return of Sponsorship

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Soap Operas were named after being sponsored by a soap company. One company instead of a variety of ads.

ChatGPT etc will spawn an answer service (as distinct from a search engine). It might only happen when we fully understand what it can give accurate answers to. Quite possibly it outputs answers and ideas to explore. The latter being a fancy way of saying it is not confident of being correct.

People will learn what an answer service is good for. It won’t be for finding a local plumber! Which means the types of ads we see in search engines won’t necessarily apply.

If you want a summary of the best features of an iPhone, then perhaps the ads we are used to seeing on Google can appear there. But I expect it would be more like this:

  • Sponsored ad at the top, from a sponsor – one advertiser who sponsors all queries of that type. For example, an electronics store could sponsor all tech queries.
  • Embedded affiliate links to products – possibly a link to something akin to Google Shopping
  • A list of suggested resources, commercial or otherwise, at the bottom
  • Below those resources, some contextual ads, like on Google Search. Yep, relegated to the bottom, but still existing because why not.

But the sponsorship will be new and lucrative. All requests for the system to conjure up imagined lyrics can be sponsored by Spotify. All generative images by Adobe. And so on.

It could become new/fresh/different enough to become a successful form of advertising. We might see the return of soaps sponsoring TV shows.

Passenger CoPilot Device for Cars

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AR glasses will come, but it is taking forever, so I thought about intermediate technology that might help it become real.

Imagine this:

A detachable large tablet for the front passenger of a car. It will not work unless attached to a special hinge which ensures that the driver will be unable to view the screen.

The screen shows the same view as the windscreen, but with AR elements overlayed.

The copilot then does what they have often done historically with paper maps. They help the driver. Useful for these scenarios:

  • Finding the house/building that is their destination
  • Finding out where the closest gas station is – or charging station
  • Checking alternate routes
  • Getting info on business and places that they are driving past – that restaurant has a lunch deal!
  • Ordering something before arriving

Why it works:

  • Technology already exists, and could be quite cheap
  • Avoids the dangers of similar in a HUD for drivers
  • Unique selling point for the car brands who offer it
  • A low-commitment entry into the AR space for Apple, Alphabet or Meta

It could also be used for audio playlists, car data, adjusting air conditioning, games, movies (with bluetooth headphones) – the latter uses for back seat passengers with a screen built into the back of the front seats.

Being built in is good for safety.

EmptyCoin

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EmptyCoinTM is token token.

I cannot say it is a token token, because that would imply that it is quantifiable, and it is not. You cannot count EmptyCoin.

You can gift EmptyCoin to someone else. It is a token of appreciation, it has no quantity or value. But it is acknowlegement.

EmptyCoin is real, it is just tricky to understand in a society where everything is assigned a value.

I have EmptyCoin is a way of saying that I grasp that not everything needs to have a numerical value, that existence is sufficient. Peace cannot be counted. You cannot double peace. My love cannot be worth 3x your love.

EmptyCoin is real, it exists. It is mined from dark energy by the self-transforming machine elves who reveals themselves to users of DMT.

Users of DMT are gifted EmptyCoin, that is how it has been seeded in our dimension. Those users are given instructions on how to distribute it.

Until now they did not realise that they were a delivery mechanism for a multi-dimensional crypto-currency that carries no value and cannot be enumerated.

It can also be found in nature, in our dimension, as a by-product of calculus. Whenever anyone attempts to multiply something by zero, EmptyCoin is released.

Just by reading this, you have been gifted EmptyCoin, you now have it, and you can gift others.

You do not need to tell someone you have gifted them EmptyCoin, but your life will improve simply by doing so. So will theirs.

AI and Private Data Training

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For conversational AI, there are many contenders for winner, and probably there will be a winner who rules all, because they are all being trained on public data (the Internet).

For using AI to create images in Photoshop, or spreadsheets in Office, they already have monopolies, and those abilities will simply cement the monopolies further.

But there is a world of potential uses that need to be trained on private data, and that will help one AI business rise to the top. First mover advantage from training on private data.

Example:

In business meetings with client I often need to recall data to respond to a question. It is far better for me to know it off the top of my head, than “excuse me while I look for it”. AI can listen the conversation, and based on its learning, know which data to surface for me, and present it on my screen or AI spectacles.

That takes training. A company like Zoom could (with permission) listen in on meetings and get a head start.

Don’t be surprised if Microsoft wins. They already have Office and Teams. They already have OpenAI. And they can easily buy the companies who can access the private data for training.

Google doesn’t have the same potential for data access. Far fewer people use their platforms for meetings.

The other angle is hardware. If Apple can get their AR glasses out there en masse in businesses, those glasses can listen in (with permission) and learn.

Amazon won’t even partake, thankfully. But they will go after home automation (a talking house), but never be sufficiently innovative to own that space, and hopefully do not buy the winner.

4-factor authentication & the vault

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For 3FA, the standard options are:

  • something you know – PIN or password
  • something you are – fingerprint or face scan
  • something you have – a phone or dongle

For most purposes that is plenty, but what if you need an extra level of security. It could be, for example, to access a Swiss bank account. Or, I propose The Vault:

The Vault is where you store documents that you would keep in a safe at home. Birth certificate, for example.

It can also be where you keep your BFF list. By mutual agreement, and retractable at any time, two people decide that each can always access the latest contact details of the other – phone, address, email, current location – when they access the vault. A good way of keeping track of relatives, for example.

The Fourth Factor is location. You select one or more physical locations that are not your work or home or family member’s home, and you are there when you set up the Vault, and you have to be there to access it.

Simple, and easily done via any phone, and to steal that fourth factor would take a lot more effort from the bad guys. 3FA should be highly safe, but 4FA feels safer, and is fine for things you only very occasionally access.

Note – location-based authentication has been invented, it just doesn’t seem to be used, or imagined to be used as above. It has been about basically being physically present at work.

Augmented Reality and Supermarkets

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So I came across this image and it got me thinking. I belong to several supermarket loyalty programs, something they are quite good at is remembering products I have bought and telling me (in emails) when they are on sale (on special as we say in Australia).

So, forget about fridge apps, and online ordering. I’m thinking purely of an enhancement to what I already do as an in-person supermarket shopper who uses their loyalty program.

It works best if you only use one supermarket…

  1. Open the loyalty app
  2. Photograph the box or barcode of a product that you had bought and just used
  3. Speak your opinion – Growly likes this dog food

In a multi-person household, or even if you are scatter-brained and single… it means that you have a system that remembers which brands you like, or dislike. Per person.

So not only does your emails about sale items become more enhanced (things you prefer, not just things you bought), your AR experience in the supermarket can be awesome. The AR glasses and show you, like the image above, the products you like and where they are. For example, Oliver’s favourite muesli bars, or Maria’s preferred variety of apple. You could walk down every aisle and let the AR do most of the thinking for you. Faster and fewer mistakes that get you yelled at when you return home.

Lab-Grown Human Eggs and Human Sperm

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While scientists can behave ethically, few let ethics get in the way of advancing knowledge and techniques. If they can do it, typically they will.

Which means that now or in the future, someone is going to create a human baby completely outside of the human body. And by using stem cells, it can happen without the permission of the genetic parents. Crazy!

Mice have already been born from real mouse sperm and lab-created mouse eggs. They were healthy and soon became parents themselves, so they passed the hybrid burdle.

2009: Human egg cells grown in a lab.

2016: Lab-created mouse sperm makes babies

2016: Lab-created mouse egg makes babies

2022: Lab-generated human sperm

2022: First synthetic mouse embryos

You can see the trajectory… it will happen – synthetically made humans – it is simply a matter of who and when. China is an obvious bet.

And factor in that declining populations are a problem for capitalist societies, and we could be making artificial kids purely to be worker consumers.