There are many similarities between slave ownership and fossil fuel usage[1]. The steam power changed the perception of labor and contributed to a complex and long process which resulted in the abolition of slavery in many parts of the world: a society without slaves became much more productive than a society with slaves. Aidpla.net is an organization implementing a business model which shows that nowadays, the fight against climate change can be economically favorable even if we think exclusively in the short term.
We claim that nowadays there is a present economic interest in the fight against climate change, more powerful than the economic interests of burning fossil fuels. We claim that cloud computing (including artificial intelligence) can be a game changer for climate change, just like the steam engine was (after a complex and long process) a game changer for slavery.
Anything which is controllable and measurable by humans and has an universal value at a global scale, is precious because it can be used as a meeting point for all humans, an universal measure against which all other things of value can be compared to. For instance, cloud computing services have a natural tendency to form walled gardens due to network effects and always involve a transfer of sovereignty to the cloud provider, favoring cloud providers which represent interests which are seen as universal at a global scale.
“Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”—John F. Kennedy
The greenhouse effect is one such universal value, because the carbon (and methane) emitted or avoided anywhere in the world contributes to the greenhouse effect equally, regardless of where it was emitted or avoided[2]. Of course, climate change will not affect all people equally, but the fact that many of its effects are unpredictable and irreversible leaves a sense of fear which is roughly universal, that is, everyone will be severely affected by climate change in one way or another and no one knows beforehand how will climate change affect them or their closest ones.
“I think that what is essential for this problem is a global consciousness, a view that transcends our exclusive identifications with the generational and political groupings into which by accident we have been born. The solution to these problems requires a perspective that embraces the planet and the future because we are all in this greenhouse together. Thank you Mr. Chairman.” — Carl Sagan (1985) [3]
To fight climate change there is a clear need of transfer of sovereignty to some global authority which is seen as universal at a global scale and exclusively committed to fight climate change[4]. Moreover, a walled garden would be a powerful tool to incentivize the economy to become climate friendly by differentiating economic activities, because a walled garden allows efficient enforcement mechanisms, such enforcement mechanisms are a realistic version of what a global law and global courts can be. In a walled garden it is easy to exclude an entity that does not comply with some decision, a differentiation of different economic activities is possible, with some being subsidized others paying taxes, incentivizing (and in the limit enforcing) the global economy to become more climate friendly.
Of course, the exclusion of an entity from the cloud computing services is only an incentive and would only become an enforcement in the limit that an organization is excluded from crucial cloud computing services which cannot be easily replaced.
Aidpla.net is an organization implementing a virtuous cycle:
it is exclusively committed to fight climate change;
this allows it to be seen as universal at a global scale;
which in turn allows it to offer far better cloud computing services than the competition, due to network effects.
Such network effects are exclusively due to its commitment to fight climate change, which is a guarantee that its exclusive commitment to fight climate change will prevail in the future.
This allows it to be seen as universal at a global scale. And the virtuous cycle repeats itself.
Unlike Greenpeace which is dependent on donations and thus it is strongly influenced by the interests of its donors, Aidpla.net is a self-sustainable organization which is both dependent on and promotes the fight against climate change.
The only organizations that can offer cloud computing services which can compete against Aidpla.net are other organizations exclusively committed to fight climate change, which is not a guarantee that Aidpla.net itself is here to stay, but it is a guarantee that the business model of cloud computing services using the universal character of the climate protection will prevail. Since contributing to the prevalence of the business model is itself a powerful tool in the fight against climate change, then there is a guarantee that Aidpla.net will collaborate with other cloud providers with the same business model and thus there will not exist major walls between all these cloud providers exclusively committed to fight climate change. This further favors cloud providers exclusively committed to fight climate change, such as Aidpla.net.
Purpose
Aidpla.net is an organization whose purpose (which is not the same as the services the organization provides to its customers) is to solve the problem of global warming (focusing on methane and CO2). We at Aidpla.net are convinced that it will work in the long term, not because we think our solution is particularly brilliant but because:
the world MUST find a solution. If we think not in decades, but in centuries, we are not talking about 2ºC above average warming, we are talking about profound exponential changes to the climate, perhaps 20ºC above average warming. That combined with an exponential growth of the population, makes the status quo unsustainable in a centuries scale.
it is the only viable solution. Note that viable implies peaceful, since non peaceful is not viable because of the nuclear weapons. There will be no hegemony of one country (say USA) over all others in the next decades, which means that governments by themselves cannot solve it. A profound change of the status quo due to the rise of automation and Artificial Intelligence seems unavoidable in the next decades, thus this change must be such that the problem of the global warming is also solved.
It is not the purpose of the organization to become hegemonic in the new status quo, but rather solve the global warming problem through a trigger mechanism, that is, to prove that a business model exists where protecting the climate generates a sustainable and scalable profit already in the short term. The key is that the profit is scalable, then many other competing organizations will implement a similar business model which protects the climate. The end (almost) of slavery across the world happened just like this: some organizations proved that with the aid of steam power and fossil fuels, it was sustainable and scalable to convert the slaves to employees. Most of the rest of the world followed through, because slavery was clearly not sustainable in the long term.
There is an ongoing rapid change to industries and societal processes in the 21st century due to increasing interconnectivity and smart automation, joining technologies from artificial intelligence, gene editing, to advanced robotics that blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological worlds. Crucially, knowledge-intensive activities are now the core of the economy. Moreover, the fact that knowledge-intensive activities are an ever bigger part of the economy causes significant gains in productivity. Since knowledge-intensive activities do not emit pollution by themselves, then interconnectivity is now more profitable than burning fossil fuels. Due to the fact that emitting CO2 and methane has the same effects for the climate irrespective of where in the world the emission occurs, organizations whose sole purpose is to protect the climate are perceived by different countries and different people as truly universal organizations favouring its interconnectivity. As a consequence, protecting the climate generates a sustainable and scalable profit already in the short term.
Even in the long term, the profit from protecting the climate does not have to be bigger than the profit from burning fossil fuels, it only has to be big enough to sustain a healthy economy. The same happens with the many environmental and public health regulations that already exist today, many of them reduce profits but they do not reduce profits enough to justify the damages that would come from the economic activities that violate such environmental and public health regulations.
The fact that the sole purpose of an organization is to protect the climate does not imply by itself that such organization cannot be more powerful than for profit organizations. After all, a for profit organization is just another strategy to generate a healthy cash-flow, since then any need of cash can be sourced from the shareholders who get a share of future profits in return. What it matters is whether the cash-flow is healthier for an organization that just protects the climate than for other organizations, that is, if the money that comes in is consistently much more than the money that is needed to pay the expenses of the organization. Then the organization can invest, pay lobbyists, grow healthy and powerful, while it dedicates the cash in excess to directly protect the climate instead of distributing it to its shareholders.
Services provided
The aidpla.net organization will be a global authority, ruled by proper laws. Nowadays, all the states are formally states of law. From totalitarian regimes to democratic regimes, all are governed by a constitution and jurisdictions that ensure the compliance with the law. The totalitarian regimes refuse any discussion about the law, while the democratic regimes debate the law[5].
There are two branches in aidpla.net:
The court: a group of selected public figures across the world who will decide on all potential conflicts affecting the organization, including complaints from clients, based on previously written public rules by the other branch;
The founding workers: the group of people who works for the organization, which has executive and legislative powers. There is a goal of creating another branch with legislative powers in the future, once foundational work has been done. In any case, from the beginning the organization will be organized as a state of law with conflicts decided by an independent branch based on previously public written rules.
The recent drive towards serverless cloud services means massive cost reductions, faster and easier path to production, global applications by default. However, companies become much more dependent and vulnerable, there much bigger connection and coordination between serverless nodes[6] and thus there is a pressing need for trustworthy global authorities.
The services provided by aidpla.net are of four types:
Software as infrastructure: Starts witth Open Policy Agent and Dissens (Decentralized Identities for Self-sovereign End-users)[7], openvscodeserver(code editor)[8], and other crucial open source software to manage private data and payments through serverless cloud services, this software needs regular updates. Software maintenance/update is a service that companies are willing to pay for, because software with critical bugs or backdoors (that can be introduced at each update) managing the private data is dangerous. Trust is needed and our business model is more trustworthy across the globe than for-profits (who are easy to manipulate by some governments) or donation-based (who are easy to manipulate by some donors).
Global arbitration: Once companies and people’s private data and payments become part of global applications, then virtually any service can be ordered through global applications. There is the need of a global court and global laws to solve efficiently transnational conflicts. For instance, Amazon’s arbitration between stores and clients. This can only be done through arbitration, but the court branch of aidpla.net is in a good position to provide arbitration in crucial cases.
Green Treasury: There is the need of a global authority for green taxes and corresponding green investments, which would also provide a payment system. Initially, the green investments will be on seaweed in the southern coast of Portugal, following the advice of Greenwave.org, but it will evolve as soon as possible into a legal framework implementing a market for green investments where in case of conflict the decisions are ultimately made by the court branch of aidpla.net.
Marketplace of recommendations: once virtually any service can be ordered through global applications and there is a global arbitration to solve conflicts, there are all conditions to create a global market. For this market to be truly global, we need to abstract services into a common form factor. Certainly, selling groceries locally is much different than providing specialized online education across the globe. Both these services can easily provide some kind of global application to their clients, from crucial information (which groceries are available today?) to the service itself (an online video-lecture) what they cannot is to know which clients across the globe may be interested in their application and vice-versa a client does not know which global applications across the millions available fulfill some need. Thus the common form-factor for global services are recommendations. Aidpla.net will implement a marketplace of recommendations, where many search engines will compete to link clients with global services. Whenever someone makes a search, the software of Aidpla.net will list the relevance that different search engines attribute to either the final recommendations they have for this particular search, or to intermediate recommendations to other search engines. The final relevance will be the product of all relevances along the path towards the final recommendation, we define relevance mathematically as a probability. Different paths of search engines can lead to one same recommendation uniquely identified through an hash, in that case the final relevance is the sum of the relevance of each path. The revenue comes from providing peer-to-peer software as infrastructure and also from providing a platform for common people, small businesses and small marketing agencies to be able to implement simple search engines with their specialized recommendations, charging a fee for the money generated through the platform. Note that the prices of a recommendation can be negative for some non-anonymous searches, which correspond to an ad placed by a marketing agency in a search engine (the origin of the non-anonymous search). The peer-to-peer sofware from Aidpla.net will filter how much information the person is willing to provide to the search engine and also manage subscriptions to different search engines (since some search engines may charge a monthly fee instead of a per search).
By being a marketplace of recommendations, aidpla.net will be entrusted with immense power by the global economy. Aidpla.net will not pretend that its services are free, it will not pretend that it has no agenda, it will simply not pretend. It will be fully transparent about its costs (including hidden costs such as giving up private information) and agenda (solve the global warming problem), with conflicts solved through rules known to the public by an independent court branch of Aidpla.net, as if our atmosphere would be a second country of every person on Earth. The fees charged for these services will reflect the agenda, and will certainly differentiate between different economic activities: heavy fees for polluting activities which will be effective taxes, and negative fees for activities that are good for the climate which will be effective subsidies. The court branch of Aidpla.net will solve any potential conflict.
We stress once again that since contributing to the prevalence of this business model is itself a powerful tool in the fight against climate change, then there is a guarantee that Aidpla.net will collaborate with other organizations with the same business model and thus there will not exist major walls between all these organizations exclusively committed to fight climate change. That is, the atmosphere is big enough for many “countries” to coexist in peace.
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