Part 1: The Search for a Stable Orbit and the Mathematics of Human Survival

The fourth article in the European Reckoning series. Following on from:

The Rape of Europa: Sovereignty, Security & The Ethical Tech Opportunity

Overview

The era of American security guarantees, which formed the bedrock of European stability since WW2, has transitioned into a “three-body problem” of unstable unpredictable gravitational interactions between Washington, Beijing, and Brussels. The war in Ukraine has accelerated Russian decline and it has been drawn closer to the Chinese geopolitical mass.

Be warned:

The Devil does not offer

Temptations of earthly treasures or

A feast of carnal pleasures

Instead he whispers

Despair, despair, despair

The Number of the Beast is 666, object 1 (Butlin 522), 1805. Watercolor, 41.2 x 33.5 cm. Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. William Blake

If we let our fears of the past

define our futures

those fierce self protecting angels

become the gaolers of our dreams

AI generated image

[code] Are Large Language Models anti-poets? [/code]

If great craft in poetry was predicated on plausibility, LLMs would outshine most humans. However, to be better at poetry, LLMs would need to be programmed with rewards for useful unusualness - for finding unlikely pathways across the linguistic landscape. They would need to understand the value of friction, the feeling a poet gets when something unresolved works its way through and out of the subconscious demanding attention and exploration.

Really Useful Engines

Continued from Part 1:

What is Entropy? – Part 1

1. The Grammar of Entropy
2. Algorithmic Information Theories of Life
   1. Life as a Demon: The Cost of Information
   2. The Algorithm of Survival
   3. Coding for Diversity
   4. Life-Forms Must Be Efficient
3. The Mathematics of Efficiency
4. Universal Really Useful Engines
5. Compossibility: The Thermodynamic Case for Diversity
   1. The Ethics of Aliens
   2. Does Time Stop for A Sufficiently Knowing Being?
   3. The Final Cycle
6. Footnotes

The Grammar of Entropy

“**But entropy, heat, past and future are qualities that belong not to the fundamental grammar of the world but to our superficial observation of it. ‘If I observe the microscopic state of things,’ writes Rovelli, ‘then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between “cause” and “effect””**1

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In this article I want to break down some key concepts about wealth and income distribution utilising concepts from thermodynamics and entropy to show how gamed current economies and societies are and, more importantly, how we can undertake long term policy changes to fix it.

The G20 recently released the Global Inequality Report,1commissioned by the G20 South Africa Presidency in November 2025 and led by Joseph E. Stiglitz. It characterises global inequality as an “emergency” and a “policy choice,” asserting that the negative trends can be reversed. The report finds that 83% of countries globally exhibit high income inequality encompassing 90% of the world’s population. This crisis is primarily driven by wealth concentration, which is far higher than income inequality.

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Book 1: A Tortured Rebel

draft of a new sci-fi series

0. Prologue

They redoubled their

Promethean labours

Crafting Robota

To build machines

…that built machines

……that built machines

And so on ad infinitum

Some said a diabolical Matryoshka

The Abolition of Nature - Homo Deus

In our own day…The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

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In Part 1 we looked at how Musk takes all of the wrong lessons from the literary greats he apparently admires:

Elon Musk - Part 1: The Crusader Behind The Mask?

In this Part 2, we will examine the integrity of Musk’s views on free speech, and the engines of hate speech and disinformation he is developing.

1. Introduction
2. The Wizard Behind the Curtain?
3. Empathy or Moral Apathy
4. Misuse of Literary Heroes
   1. Tolkien’s Middle Earth
   2. Banks & The Culture Novels
   3. Dune & The Jihads
   4. George Orwell’s 1984
5. Techno-Villain Or Tragically Flawed Anti-Hero?
6. Masked Crusader Or Crusader Behind A Mask?
7. Footnotes

Introduction

Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. He has become one of the most controversial and confusing figures of the 21st century. He is possibly the richest man in the world (with an estimated wealth of around $400-500bn) and also one of the most fascinating – but not because of his wealth.

I have created a public notebooklm as a resource to provide people with an accessible way to learn about AI as a technology and its ethical implications for humans. It includes most of the existing International AI laws, guidance and standards.

Aim: I hope it is a useful tool for analysts, technologists, AI developers, journalists, students, policymakers and anyone with a general interest in AI Law & Ethics.

Table of contents

1. AI Podcast Version
2. Introduction
3. Towards an invariant foundation of ethics for life
4. Compossibility is key
5. Building axioms, laws and principles
6. Direct decentralised democracy
7. The Consensus Engine and DAO
8. Modern democracies are largely symbolic

AI Podcast Version

I have created an AI podcast version with additional information from my article ‘Direct Decentralised Democracy’:

Continuing the previous article:

The Limits Of Language & Logic

1. Gödelian Incompleteness and Turing’s Halting Problem
2. The Limits of Logic & the Influence of Entropy
3. Non-Duality
4. The Limits of Language
5. Footnotes

Gödelian Incompleteness and Turing’s Halting Problem

Hui Yang, “Nursery of New Stars”, University of Illinois, Wikipedia, NASA, 1995.

A kingfisher in a shaking flight over the river Berkel in Vreden / Germany / NRW, Joefrei

“…As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell ’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

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A Fragile Living Skin

Continued from:

Free Will Or Freedom? - Part 1

1. Introduction
2. The Free Will Tyrant
3. Free Will T: Mammals, Human
4. History Is Led By Outliers Of A Group
5. The Impact on Concepts Like Justice
6. The Interplay of Individual and Collective Freedom
7. Footnotes

Introduction

The distribution of steam molecules in a room, how the molecules will change location and how long it will take for them to become water again are all potentially determinable. However, at the most fundamental scale of where each molecule is exactly and where it is moving from and to, it becomes increasingly difficult and fuzzy – in fact, at the sub-atomic level, certainty becomes impossible. [1] Certainty (determinism) at any scale is only approximate – the smaller the scale or the larger the field (including space-time) in question, the more difficult it becomes to measure and to calculate all the variables. [2] Entropy is the universe’s way of ensuring we are all honest players when it comes to knowing the future, though some may know more than others.

1. Free Will
2. Freedom of Action
3. Degrees of freedom
4. The Twin Thought Experiment
5. Measuring freedom of action in writing
6. Measurable unusualness
7. Footnotes

Vincent van Gogh, “Landscape with Snow”, 1888, Wikipedia, public domain.

“Be melting snow, Wash yourself of yourself”
(Rumi)[1]

Free Will

The laws of physics are wonderful, not least because they show us some of the magic formulas behind the seeming mystery of life and the universe. They are also good and proper ‘laws’ – that is, they are intended to be equivalent across space and time.

Table of contents

1. AI Podcast Version
2. Introduction
3. Economics and the Use of Resources
4. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC)
5. Equality is not a useful aim
6. Freedom of action and inequality
7. Thomas Piketty
8. Useful vs Inefficient Inequalities
9. The Physics of Freedom
   1. The Optimal Equality Target: 0.5 (Gini 0.5)
   2. The Life-Time Analogy
10. Participatory democracy
11. Further reading
12. Footnotes