The S-Bomb

Imagine a technology whose destructive potential is 100 times greater than an H-Bomb. Group Genie may have created it.  Please read the superprograms project first,  to understand the positive potential of superprograms.

 
Summary: Superprograms have a huge potential to improve the world. However, superprograms are a technology that can be misused like any other technology. Some people will use the power of superprograms to accelerate the harm they do. For instance, aggressive for-profit businesses and repressive governments will likely use corrupted superprograms to train their people to become more efficient. There’s no way to stop this misuse.

In effect, the announcement of this new technology creates something like an arms race between those who use these programs to help themselves and others, and those who use them for gain or to oppress others. In other words, unless warned, decent people will tend to say to themselves, “Superprograms are a good idea. I will use them later on, when it’s convenient.” Meanwhile, oppressors and profit-oriented people will say to themselves, “Superprograms will give the edge to whoever applies them first. I will use them as soon as possible!”

But if decent people recognize their natural tendency to put off the use of superprograms, and if they recall that the decent people of the world far outnumber the ones who are oppressors or consumed by greed, they will realize that their best security is to adopt superprograms as soon as possible and also pass them on to others, as soon as possible.

To impress upon people the potential downside of superprograms, we’ve given superprograms another name: the S-bomb, a technology that could give economic and political oppressors the ability do tremendous harm.

   

Let’s imagine different kinds of people. Many people with children will see it as a form of insurance for the long-term security of their families. Many young adults will also want to use it and pass it on, because they probably want the world to stay stable for the course of their own lives. People who care about helping others and doing good will pass it to their friends who care because it offers methods for doing more good. But people focused exclusively on profits or on maintaining and building power will also use superprograms. They will ignore our other upgrades like the Golden Rule 2.0 and supergoodness since they will just want to use the methods that give them more power to exploit people and the natural world.

All together, the use of complete superprograms (by an increasing amount of decent people) or partial superprograms (by an increasing amount of the oppressors) will raise the bar for learning. You will be competing for jobs against people who use superprograms to accelerate their learning. Your country will be competing militarily and economically against oppressor countries that use partial superprograms to train their soldiers. So you might as well join the trend early on.

The only protection against the oppressors is to pass this on to the decent people that you know as soon as possible and support them to use it and pass it further on, to gain an early lead. Then, through sheer numbers, the political and economic actions of decent people will keep the oppressors in check.

What we have is a race against oppressors, but also a race against the accumulated negative actions and inactions of humanity. It may seem unwinnable, right?  But you need to have faith in the power of chain reaction (viral) growth.  [See the chain reaction chart in the Project Cluetrain write-up to see how fast things can grow.]

At the very start, when there is only a handful of participants, our predictions may seem grandiose. But sit and think about how fast good ideas go viral and spread around the world. Superprograms are an upgrade. What makes you think they won’t go viral?

What’s the worst that could happen? Superprograms could dramatically increase oppression and hardship if the oppressors get the early lead. Their short-sighted actions can also lead to major collapses of our mutual life-support systems.

If so, why are we taking the risk? Two reasons: First, someone else will probably come up with these or similar ideas, and they might not be as altruistic. Second, we are also in a race against global environmental problems and economic shortages. Billions would then die or suffer dearly anyway.

We don’t think there really is any other viable alternative.

During World War II, Einstein wrote President Roosevelt to warn him about a new form of chain-reaction energy, nuclear energy. His fear was that if the Germans got an early lead in developing atomic bombs, it could be horrific. By giving superprograms the additional name S-bomb, we are notifying you of something similar: There’s a new form of chain reaction energy—superprograms. If the oppressors get an early lead, it could be horrific and lead to a very ugly, oppressed. And if superprograms aren’t harnessed to offset the kinds of environmental and economic problems that Lester Brown and other groups warned us about, it also could be catastrophic.

We at Group Genie believe that the majority of people are decent. They may be preoccupied with work, their own needs and the needs of their families. They may even be somewhat selfish. But we believe that they can grasp the upside and downside of a new technology like superprograms. As with the Internet, we expect early adopters to win big. As with the Internet, we expect those who lag behind to be penalized. But we believe that the stakes are much higher this time around.

One of our sayings we created at Group Genie is, “Raindrops make rivers, and rivers move mountains.”  We are not asking people to have faith in us, we are only a tiny creativity team. We want you to have faith in yourselves and faith in numbers. Each of the people reading this knows others. Some people will take your word, if you say that this set of Group Genie projects is an important document, containing some extremely important methods and ideas. And after you pass this on to friends, they will likely pass it on to others. Probably media exposure will follow, but at Group Genie, we think that it’s essential that people have faith in the individual action. That’s why we are starting with this one-to-one chain reaction of communicating the ideas. You have great power, raindrop-make-rivers power.

The middle-income people of the world make up about 10% of the world’s population. The dominant economic power is not the assets of corporations or even the assets of major governments. The dominant economic power is the value of the work that the middle-income people of the world can do. [Compare the holdings of world's roughly 600 billionaires with the total income of 700 million people each making $25-000 to $75,000 a year.  In less than decade, the middle-income people have earned more than the billionaires have total.]  Therefore, in our analysis  the fate of the world is in the hands of decent middle-income people of the world. Our belief is that they alone—probably people just like you—have the power to both liberate the oppressed, and stabilize the planet. But time is running out environmentally, and the number of middle-income are being decimated.

By the way, you might get the erroneous idea that we are implying class warfare and that all wealthy people are oppressors. That is not the case. Wealthy people and leaders can do a great deal of good. But everybody already knows that. It’s a given. What people don’t fully grasp is that the greatest force is still in the hands of ordinary middle-income people. If you are middle income, then like it or not, you are a central character in your world’s coming-of-age crisis. You do have the world in your hands. Group Genie has worked hard to provide methods with the firepower to turn things around. But it’s up to you to use the methods. At the early stage, when some of the methods are in a very rough state, it will take more perseverance and patience, but we must rely on you for feedback to help us refine the methods.

 

Plans and Needs: We expect to produce a video focusing on the S-Bomb aspect of superprograms. We believe that the comparison with the Internet, and the winners and losers it created, will get traction with most viewers.

   

Potential Impact: We expect that this project will encourage decent people to become more aggressive in participating in superprograms and in trying to understand other Group Genie projects.