Vinay Gupta Explains How to Stop the Future from Destroying Us

Explaining to the uninitiated exactly who Vinay Gupta is, and what he does, isn’t easy. 

The last time I interviewed him for VICE, nine years ago, the article was headlined ‘The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total Collapse of Humanity in Order to Save It.’ Gupta was described as a “software engineer, disaster consultant, global resilience guru, and visionary.” It’s less a career than a vocation—one that reflects a life spent joining together all the scattered dots of where human civilization is now, in order to eliminate the threats that menace its future.

Gupta was part of the original ‘Cypherpunk‘ generation that shaped the utopian early days of the internet in the 1990s. But as well as being a long-established figure in computing, he has a broader history of applying his problem-solving engineer’s mindset to the issues of a sustainable human presence on Earth.

Nuclear war. Resource scarcity. Climate change. AI. Network states. Space travel. In his work as a “global resilience guru” for the US government, the Red Cross, and various think tanks, universities, and institutes, Gupta has run the worst-case scenarios on these and other nightmares you haven’t even dreamt of yet, in order to stop the future destroying us.

Along the way, he’s invented the Hexayurt—a cheap, easy-to-build temporary shelter that could house millions of refugees at short notice—and coordinated the launch of Ethereum, the blockchain platform whose cryptocurrency Ether is now the second largest in the world. Today, he runs Mattereum, a company he co-founded to apply galaxy-brain blockchain tech to real-world assets, aiming to transform the global economy and the daily lives of us all.

Donald Trump recently declared that he would make America “the crypto capital of the world,” while the planet’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, has bet heavily on the future of blockchain. But the crypto world continues to be tarnished by scams and hacking thefts. Amid all this noise, what will become of the dreams of the original crypto-anarchists, like Gupta, who pioneered all this stuff in the first place? 

In a wide-ranging conversation on the hottest day on Earth since records began, we discussed the race for immortality, sulphur clouds, and how building “20 new Londons” may be required to keep humanity’s show on the road. (No one said this was going to be easy.)

VICE: The last time we spoke, you’d just moved full-time into the blockchain space. Did you know then that it would consume the next decade of your life?
Vinay Gupta: Yeah. The expectation was it would be a 10-to-15-year project because the objective wasn’t to build something and flip it. The objective was to build something and operate it. What I wanted was control of a substantial piece of planetary infrastructure. And then I wanted to tax people for access to that infrastructure and divert that money towards things like the Hexayurt.

The goal was to have a billion people using something, every single day. And I wanted it to generate enough wealth that I could go and privately finance climate mitigation work.

That’s interesting, because I thought the big motivator was to develop the tech and embed it in different industries, as a means of creating social or political change.
So you can get to some stuff that way, right? If you want to combat embedded violence in supply chains, doing it via the mechanism of ‘running a company’ is sane. That’s a thing you can reach. But when it comes to hundreds of millions of people needing housing, you just can’t get there in a commercial context.

So the stated goal is to generate enough money to build two experimental cities, one of which is expected to fail and the second, it is hoped, will succeed. In the process, we hope to figure out pretty much everything we need to rehouse hundreds of millions of people efficiently.

What do you mean by building two new cities?
In 2017, I was still thinking small—how to deal with 350 million, 500 million refugees displaced by climate change. But I’ve seen estimates from legit sources as high as a billion. To soak up that number of people, you probably need 40 new cities the size of London. Of course, some will resettle inside existing countries. Others will wind up inside camp-style infrastructures. But even then, you’re still talking about setting up something like 10 or 20 new Londons.

How is that even possible? How could you possibly imagine that? Well, you know, it helps if you start a little crazy. But the technology platforms necessary for building dozens of new gigantic cities do exist. It’s actually entirely possible that we can do that. And those cities could be leapfrog cities. So we wouldn’t build Victorian-style infrastructure in layers, we’d go straight to the best and the newest and the cheapest and the fastest. And we’d build the cities on that infrastructure base. I think that’s a very credible plan for dealing with climate change.

It’s incredibly ambitious. But, you know, ten years ago I was not thinking ambitiously enough.

And which institutions are going to help do that?
Right now, no one. The UN can’t do it. The Red Cross can’t do it. Nobody currently is thinking on this kind of scale. That’s why it’s still “futurism.” That’s why it’s not done yet. So my approach is to keep developing the technology package—the policy, the doctrine, all the rest—and then, as the climate refugee problem becomes more and more acute, start looking for the necessary political support to actually go out there and build something. 

And does blockchain play a role in that? 
Yes. Blockchain is a very benighted technology. But that’s not because it’s bad technology. It’s really good technology. It’s benighted by the fact that most of the people it’s attracted are just bastards, right? I mean basically, 2018-2019, there was an en masse arrival of incredibly effective scammers. The pyramid scheme people basically just washed out of the rest of society, arrived in the blockchain space, the nerds had no psychological or legal defences for dealing with these people, and they wound up dominating the blockchain space.

And so the blockchain world itself has a kind of moral crisis, where you have the open-source social crusaders on one side, and then you have these guys running enormous scam factories on the other. And they want the blockchain to develop in two very different directions.

The manifesto you wrote at Mattereum talks about how the blockchain can improve transparency and accountability in public life. How much of that is about a transformative political vision and how much is it basically about making capitalism more efficient? Or can they be the same thing?
If you’re going to create a world where somebody can buy a piece of real estate on the other side of the planet without ever having seen it, the level of transparency and accountability required for doing that is also what you’d want if you were going to start checking for slavery in supply chains. So, if you establish a global trading infrastructure which is extremely trustworthy, you can then start demanding that people like clothing manufacturers use that infrastructure to issue their assets. And it doesn’t work in a piecemeal way. It has to be systemic change. But that systemic change comes with so much associated economic efficiency—and particularly capital efficiency—that it begins to look like a realistic way of tipping the world from one equilibrium to another. Look at e-commerce: that was a one-way flip that we’re never going back from. Similarly, if we had a highly transparent economy, we’d flip to that and never come back.

That’s the kind of opportunity we’re losing access to because the blockchain’s got such a terrible reputation for scamming. And that really sucks, because the alternative to the blockchain is that the internet continues to become more and more corporate and dominated by intelligence agencies—in an age of AI.

Let’s talk about AI. I probably notice it most on Twitter. The deep fakes seem to get better and more commonplace every week. 
It’s clearly happening. It’s not like, ‘Maybe AI will happen, maybe it won’t.’ It’s clear that both technology and culture have kind of agreed that AI is going to be a thing. And now it’s on.

I used to tell people, don’t worry about AI, there isn’t a robot in the world that can tell the difference between a cat and a dog. And it went from that to being able to recognise 150,000 objects in about a year. And then we went from categorisers to generative AI, and off it went to the horizon. And I think we’re now in a very weird part of history. It’s like the early days of the Industrial Revolution. You’re not really sure each day what shape everything is going to take, how it’s going to be. It’s a very weird time.

I’m not so worried about the large-scale problems of AI. I have a feeling we’re going to be pleasantly surprised by AI at the big scale. But the small-scale problems could be serious.

What do you mean by large-scale and small-scale? 
So the large-scale stuff is, like, AI takes over the world, hijacks all the nuclear weapons and then threatens the human race, that kind of stuff. I think in most situations, if we did wind up with some kind of AI breakup like that, we’d probably be better off rather than worse off. You know, if you have an AI with an IQ of 350—which is smarter than all the human beings in the last 50 years put together—and that AI takes over the world, it’s not going to immediately start building death camps. In all probability, it will spend 20 minutes designing a global economy that works, and then get on with doing whatever the hell it needs to do.

So what’s the difference? Is small-scale AI something like the IDF trying to determine how many people it’s OK to kill? How many civilians will be “collateral damage?”
Absolutely, that’s exactly the kind of horrible worst-case scenario. The Gaza apocalyptic war AI thing, that’s kind of a different bucket. But what if we take something relatively simple—like your bank has no customer service other than AIs.

‘Can I please speak to a human being?’ ‘No, that’s not part of our policy. Your account doesn’t let you do that. If you give us an extra 250 bucks a year, then you can talk to a human.’ And those kinds of uncaring, brutal corporate systems becoming fully automated, when there’s no way around it, ever—obviously disastrous for human welfare.

With AI, I’m just wondering about the daily texture of life where you don’t know what you’re seeing, you don’t know whether to trust what you’re seeing, don’t know if you’re interacting with a human being or a machine…
Yeah. I mean, on that stuff, to be honest, we are completely screwed.

“An enormous number of really smart people completely fucked up the world.”

Meanwhile, there are these Silicon Valley tech elites talking about ‘Network States’—essentially leaving democracy behind and creating their own communities and even de facto countries.
The billionaires already have this stuff if they want it. With network states, what we’re talking about is the upper-middle classes of San Francisco. Net worth, between $5 million and $30 million. That’s not enough to buy a really nice house in San Francisco, and with massive amounts of crime, very poor government services, horrible problems with zoning and traffic, the San Francisco upper-middle classes begin to get itchy feet. But if you’re them, where do you go? New York? LA? Seattle? What about some corner of Algeria where you can just buy a resort town, stick a bunch of Starlink stuff on the roof, set up your own gated community, and cut a little deal with the local government so they mostly don’t bother you about stuff?

It’s not such a crazy break from what rich people have always done. San Moritz. Monaco. Take your pick. There are lots of places that have been playgrounds for the rich. But when they add the word ‘state’ to it, and they start wanting control of the law, then it gets weird.

These folks clubbing together to make nice little enclaves that suit them. Okay, fine. Then they say, ‘But in these enclaves we want to tinker with our kids’ DNA so that they’ll have higher IQs.’ And then everybody goes, ‘Wait, what?’ And that’s kind of where we are right now. Maybe no one is tinkering with their kids’ DNA yet, but I’m using it as a ‘for instance,’ right? 

People injecting themselves with weird life extension stuff. Okay, fine. It’s your body, you’re an adult, knock yourself out. That doesn’t cross what we would consider to be a red line. It’s weird, but it’s no weirder than people taking illegal drugs. But then you go to things like changing the genetics of your kids, and at that point, you’re crossing a line where you’re changing the law. Not in ways that enable you to do weird stuff to yourself, but in ways that will allow you to do weird stuff to other people. We’re at a point right now where these enclaves are beginning to talk about life extension and other things which are neatly contained: AI research, nanotechnology research, genetics research. But soon, a lot of these things might be harder to contain, right?

But surely these unregulated technologies would end up spilling out of these communities. And these are people who, you know, love making money and developing ideas that change the world…
Yeah. And that would be a whole new game. You sort of think, surely the American government would do something about this? But if the Americans run off the rails and they wind up with huge disputes around the upcoming elections, there may be no brake on rich Americans legging it for other countries and cutting a deal, which is basically, ‘You let us do what we like and we’ll choose to live here.’

At this point, it gets very science-fiction; looks very cyberpunk, very William Gibson. What are they doing? They’ve got some weird enclave in the middle of nowhere, private jets flying in and out, satellite internet, everything is encrypted, everyone is anonymous. You know, what are they doing down there? ‘Weird tech research.’ What is the weird tech research? ‘Well, they’re regrowing nerves, some weird compounds of stuff.’ Okay, fine. ‘And that’s allowing for direct neural interface, and people go down there and get their chips installed in their head, and they go away again.’ It’s kind of like medical tourism only you wind up with a permanent silicon chip in your brain that allows you to be a better programmer.

How far out is that? Five years?

Where are we on climate in your view?
We’ve done nothing at all to reduce demand for carbon, other than substitute carbon for electricity in some places. But the possibility of doing geoengineering and not having it destroy the world is stronger than ever. There’s a pretty good chance we might be able to geoengineer our way out of this. Do you know the whole sulphur thing?

What’s that?
We took the sulphur out of the fuel used by ships for environmental reasons, and it appears to have caused a massive immediate spike in global warming. The sulphur was causing clouds to form. The clouds were reflecting away from the sun, and we stopped putting the sulphur in the boat fuel, and now we have a problem.

The laziest response to this is: We start putting sulphur in aviation fuel instead of boat fuel, because it goes into the atmosphere higher and it’s a lot more effective. And we potentially fix global warming in a year. Or we destroy the world. But probably not. Isn’t that an amazing idea? I think the science is sound, but I also don’t think we have any choice. Government action has been completely ineffective. At this point, we’re kind of screwed if we don’t try.

But that’s a huge roll of the dice.
Yes it is! It’s a huge roll of the dice which has become necessary because we didn’t do any of the safe stuff to stop the problem. We’re left with only dangerous options because we refuse to take any of the safe ones.

Why is the world dying? Over consumption. That’s all there is. It’s just over consumption.

There have always been ways of doing this that would work just fine. The laws of physics do not doom us to destroy ourselves. Why do we continue to destroy ourselves? We’re just that stupid. Number one cause of huge environmental emissions that we could fix easily: insulating housing. There was a pressure group, Insulate Britain, that was all about insulating housing. “This is urgent: we have to insulate all the buildings immediately.” And I think they basically got banned as terrorists, right?

They’ve disappeared, haven’t they?
They have. And why? Because the people are too stupid to understand they’re being handed a fucking solution.

There’s no way out of this, in your view?
Oh no—there’s no way that we won’t figure out a way of fixing this. The question is how much damage will we do before we get there and how damaging will the solution be? When we finally decide to pull our shit together, it’s amazing how fast we can move. We will get to a point where it’s like, ‘Okay, no more fucking around. Put some smart people in charge and if anybody disobeys, shoot them.’ What does that look like? Maybe it’s insulating all the houses. Or letting people drive around in lightweight cars. Or working real hard on finding some substitute for animal agriculture. ‘Yes sir. We’ll get started.’

It’ll need a wartime atmosphere, essentially.
But we should already have a wartime atmosphere. Heat domes keep forming in America and it’s like 200 degrees in Kuwait. All the fucking vultures are falling out of the sky precooked. If you’re making a movie about massive climate disaster, and why didn’t they do something, you’d make this movie right here. Again and again and again the evidence piles up. Holy shit! We are fucked! And then everyone goes right back to whatever they were doing before they had that realisation. And that’s where we are. We are totally fucking hosed. Not because the technological solutions aren’t there but because we can’t apply them. How do we fix that? We get desperate enough to let the smart people run society for a while, and then they put everything back where it ought to be. And that’s it. Nothing else is gonna work.

Oh, and here’s the punchline on that. Artificial intelligence. Maybe the AIs will be the things that force change. Because if we say to an AI ‘what would be a sensible environmental strategy’ and it says, ‘do this,’ maybe people will listen to it in a way they won’t to humans. Maybe it will come up with answers that we haven’t noticed already. What if we had automated intelligence helping us design our environmental policies?

We are in a super weird situation right now. The world is dying of stupid, and we’ve just invented a robot that’s smart. Holy fucking shit: Maybe it will save us. Because by ourselves, we are done. Geoengineering, it’ll work just fine; solar power, it’ll work just fine; lightweight cars, it’ll work just fine; insulating your homes, it’ll work just fine. All these things will work just fine, but we’re too fucking stupid to do them.

You say we’re done, but you’re actually saying that we will spring into action at a very late stage. 
And with a bit of luck, it won’t be too late. Dumping sulphur into the atmosphere in blind panic—no guarantees, but in all probability, it will be OK. But terrifying. If we were smart, we’d be cutting demand. We’re not cutting demand because we’re not smart.

There is an intelligence gap. We have a tiny number of staggeringly intelligent intellectuals building things like nuclear bombs and the internet, and the vast majority of the population is living trapped in a world with these terrifying geniuses fucking up the entire structure of reality with shit that was never meant to exist. Human beings are geared for living in villages and farming vegetables with pointy sticks. That’s what they’re ready for.

We’ve assembled these cosmically complex macro structures that required thousands and thousands of geniuses to assemble. And then the ordinary individuals are dwarfed, confused, and terrified by a world they have no relationship with.

That’s a very important point, I think.
That’s why people are stupid. They’re vegetable farmers and deer hunters stuck in a world that was designed by armies of PhDs building the most complex things they could possibly imagine.

We’ve made a world where almost everybody is stupid almost all the time. An enormous number of really smart people completely fucked up the world. They invented coal mining, they invented steam engines, they invented nuclear bombs, they invented bio war, they invented AI. But we’ve had large teams of incredibly smart people building things that are beyond understanding for nearly all humans, and now even the smart people are totally lost.

If you happen to understand roughly how nuclear power works, you understand jack shit about how the internet is engineered, and you know nothing at all about modern biotechnology. We’ve created a world in which most people are stupid most of the time. As a result, most people make horrible decisions, most of the time. We can’t even get the basic stuff right because most people can’t tell when the basic stuff is correct.

Going to a war footing might fix it. AI might fix it. AI might actually give us a lot of freedom, but war footing probably won’t. But absent one of those two things, I just don’t see how we get any change out of any of this because it all seems to be completely fucking wedged. And I continue to try and survive and stick a little leverage in here and there.

Follow Joe Banks on Twitter.