Scott Clavenna
The Killer Amp is You: So Hurry Up and Die March 7, 2008 at 9:40 PM
I talked a while ago about the elusiveness of the “Killer Amp,” and ended, perhaps in a cop out, saying there isn’t one for greentech, only the White House and Congress have the power to truly invigorate this market through policy, not a compelling new application at the consumer end.
But maybe I was going about this the wrong way. Looking for analogies to the telecommunications industry, where killer apps grow on trees and ripen for picking every year before the first frost, perhaps missed the point. Telecom and energy markets aren’t the same, and never will be. Utilities have never really responded to a market pull from new applications - there are no energy market equivalents to the iphone, video-on-demand, or even email. There is, in the end, only economics. So I gave up looking.
Time passed. I did some reading, and got an idea. Two ideas, really. The first came via the Boston Globe, which recently summarized a range of proposals around reducing one’s own personal carbon footprint - personal cap-and-trade or cap-and-share, among others. You get a carbon allowance from the government, and if you use less, thanks to your commitment to the bus and bike, you can sell your excess allotment on a regulated market to the Hummer-drivers in the ‘burbs. The killer amp, in this scenario, is you, the consumer, now made aware of your energy choices with real specificity and consquences, and the ability to profit or lose individually in a market that ideally could be quite efficient.
The second idea came from a group of futurists, funny little human curiosities who makes careers, or blogs, out of preposterous speculations in fine language. They talk of saving the planet through various methods of willed human extinction. You die, your children die, and that’s it. The planet lives on without us, and the better for it.Really, that’s a plan put forward by a logo-challenged organization called VHEMT that envisions a rather pleasant, voluntary extinction of the human species. As the population ebbs, kids grow past adolescence, our planet will begin to heave a global sigh of relief, recognizing this grand gesture as one meant for her. That last generation will walk among an Earth slowly retreating towards Eden, then take leave once and for all, with a brief apology for all the nuclear waste, PCBs, dammed rivers, torched rainforests, and acidified oceans we have left for her to clean up and make whole again.
Having sat through Children of Men, which assumes such a global condition (minus the voluntary part), it’s hard to grasp the pleasance of this. The movie was cast in such a sepulchral grey and suffused with such violence, I left the theater feeling covered in ash and a bit of blood. Thinking of VHEMT, the idea that all of humanity would go in for this to save a Mother Earth murdered by a wee number of hyperconsumers in America seems, to keep the Brit-tone going, daft.
Nick Bostrom, of Oxford University has a better idea. Whole Brain Emulation. “Uploading” one’s self into a vast mother computer that would not only hold us in an eternally virtualized state but allow us to continue to develop, take a next evolutionary step free of mortal limitations. The idea has been around for quite a while and is a darling of sci-fi writers, but with computing power increasing at the pace it does, the idea that we can in a computer system replicate/emulate a brain, i.e., a human “life,” is approaching plausibility and has some of these same the killer amp is you folks thinking it’s a way to end the human race’s continued savaging of the environment while preserving our intellect. Think, Second Life, with better graphics, forever.
Right, right, someone has to keep the power on. That’s easy, the robots will. Someone has to fix the computers when they fail. Robots again. But who repairs the robots when they fail? Well, you just create a class of robots that come with whole brain emulation of the original robot repairpeople. Maybe it is plausible, just needs some time to season, get the price of terabyte RAM down far enough, million-core processors into production, and robots.
Thinking it through, this is a game everyone has to play. You would need some special robots to hunt down and kill the people who refuse to die or stop having babies. You’d need a real global, coordinated plan for that, and some convincing PR, considering this is motivated by planetary goodwill. But inevitably Will Smith would show up and fight those robots and reveal this was no grand plan to save the world at all. No, it was a plan hatched by a ruthless corporate megalomaniac who just wanted to sell more robots!
Personal cap-and-trade. The Killer Amp. It’s a safe start.
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