2023-01-26
The technocrats who would rule the world may not understand that they do not understand.
What you don't understand you cannot control.
They would control the world through their AI algorithms - but could the AI understand the manufacture of something as simple as a pencil?
Could it really track its "carbon footprint" (or whatever other notional key performance indicator(s) they may from time to time dream up)?
Well, perhaps for a pencil it could be done? After all, it's simply a question of breaking the problem down into its constituent parts, tracking each individually, and then apportioning some part of the cost of each constituent to the resulting pencil. Yes, this would be a multi-levelled process but in principle ...
But what about the accuracy of the necessary assumptions underlying each individual part? For instance, the costs of the pencil factory. What assumption should be made about how many pencils we should amortise these costs over? And there's a whole chain of sunk costs to be considered in terms of railway infrastructure that has not merely to be amortised across pencil-wood freight but all freight and (unknown) future passenger volumes also. And are the trains be run on wind power or natural gas or some mix of fuels?
Ultimately the whole costing exercise becomes dependent on a vast incomprehensible number of assumptions that nobody can say will be accurate.
Over history we have adopted accounting practices that in simplistic monetary terms have some success at representing something sufficiently close to the truth to be generally useful - but bankruptcies and monetary and economic system failures attest to the limited success so far in this regard.
So what chance of success in tracking a pencil's actual contribution to "climate change"?
