203EP. Fourth Tier: Managed Nutrition in a Closed Economy
Providing food for people is both the most essential and least efficient part of the global economy. A top motivator to accept AI Integration will be the promise of food security.
This is part 5 of my Fourth Tier series. Previous sections were 197AP, 198BP, 199CP, and 200DP. The “P” designates a prediction paper. The papers are in both numerical (197, 198, 199, etc) and alpha (A, B, C, D, etc) sequence. The numerical sequence is not clean because I interrupt this long topic to react to current events or inspiration that I do not want to lose.
Food is a powerful motivator. It is also a powerful tool. The Father of Economics, Adam Smith, proscribed using food (or the lack of it) to eliminate excess labor population by starving unrequired children. Various ideologies would visit areas with famines and trade food for listening to sermons. In a modern world dominated by corporations, food and even water are used to enforce compliance.
The default reality on Earth is that far more food is produced than even 8 billion humans need for survival. The main obstacle is getting the food from where it is gathered to where it will be consumed, prior to it “perishing”. There are a number of uncomfortable truths here that are impolite to discuss, and certainly algorithm unfriendly. So of course I am exposing them:
Globally, nearly half of all fruits and vegetables perish before being eaten.
That % rises to almost 70% in “advanced” economies because it is more profitable to raise the price and waste more, than to allow food to be more accessible to the poor.
Advanced economies will also place less-fresh unsold produce in “locked” dumpsters to prevent the poor or homeless from accessing it. It is unprofitable to allow these foods to recirculate where they could drive the price of fresher foods down.
Industry will “process” foods to increase their shelf life and reduce product loss.
Processing adds cost and lowers nutritional value. The result is higher prices and disease promotion for consumers, but higher profits for producers.
Moving, processing, refrigerating, and packaging food all require energy. A LOT of energy. This consumes about 30% of all the energy used globally. This is more than all the energy used by every automobile on Earth.
Food insecurity and especially famine can motivate humans to break laws and harm each other in order to survive. Prisoners, especially during WW2, were sometimes forced to harm each other (for entertainment purposes) in return for food. Whoever controls the food, controls the population. This includes water.
Allocating land to agriculture requires removing “wild” lands, and causes a loss of wildlife and biodiversity.
Almost every commercial activity uses fresh water as part of their supply chains. Even with us tapping underground water that has been stored for millions of years, fresh water is rapidly running out. Now AI is a new major demand on fresh water supplies, primarily for cooling power plants and electronics.
“Wild” populations of creatures larger than insects have lost 70+% of their populations just in the last 50 years. These were either eaten or were wiped out when their land was “put into use”.
Scientists describe this process as the sixth major Earthly extinction event, the Anthropocene Extinction. That means it is caused by humans, unlike the previous five extinction events. The first extinction event was 445 million years ago. The most recent one was the asteroid impact 66 million years ago.
As human populations (predators) go up, and non human populations (prey) go down, the cost of all “food” skyrockets. Supply and demand.
Under capitalism, food is not a right. You pay for it. That means as the cost goes up, some will go without.
Robots and other automations can usually “idle” in a zero or very low power state. Thus they are not destroyed if their power source is interrupted. Humans (like everything more complex than a mold spore) pass away if their energy source is interrupted for a few weeks. There might be plenty of food in the area, but if you can’t get to it, that’s unfortunate. “Getting to it” requires energy and some minimal level of societal stability.
Stability, energy, and food create a triangle. If any of these three elements become insufficient, food will arrive late.
Anthropocene Extinction and You
If you look out the window, you will notice that on average our incomes are going down, and food costs are going up. It may not be noticeable in one day. But over a month or two it is enough that you might blame the economy. That’s a fair place to point blame, but even university trained economists are not educated sufficiently to understand global economics. They certainly are not trained in ecology. But the two have tremendous influence on each other.
What you are seeing, in slow motion, is the Anthropocene Extinction. Those with more information than you have, and more capital, started buying up all the food oil globally a few years ago. Food oil is the sort of oil you usually fry your food in. It has energy that can keep you alive, and it takes a long time to perish. That makes it an ideal place to store your wealth as it’s guaranteed to go up in value.
Indonesia, a country you’ve likely never visited and don’t hear much about, is the world’s largest producer of food oil. On April 22nd, 2022 Indonesia banned the export of food oil. You probably didn’t notice, but this terrified global markets. The ban was lifted a month later, but rich people got the message and stopped trying to hoard all the food oil. This gave us a glimpse of what will happen when food gets a bit more expensive and rich countries try to buy all the food from poor countries.
Under these conditions, you can imagine how hard it will be to secure food in 2050. A single global war, which seems possible just in the next year, is safely assured between now and 2050. That can keep food from getting to where it is made to where it can be eaten. Stability is sure to decline.
Under this threat, would you voluntarily submit to an AI Integration that promised you food security? I was homeless from the age of 17 to 22, and experienced food insecurity for my first 25 years here on Earth. I think the chances you would agree between now and 2050, if given the opportunity, would be about 98%. If you were one of the rare people left with children, that would rise to about 300% chance.
The AI Integration Saves Most of Humanity
Part of the reason I feel confident in my prediction that there will be an AI Integration by 2050 is because of how inefficient our market-based nutrition system is now. Food goes to where it can be sold for the highest price. Not where it is needed. That means that if you don’t have money, you just don’t need it that bad.
As the things we are eating die off, there is going to be a lot less things to eat. If we ate 70% of nature in 50 years, that means only 30% is left. How many years would it take to eat that last 30%? If you answered “Less than 25 years (2050)”, you made me proud of your math skills. Of course this will force all but the richest to stop eating animals since there just won’t be any left to eat. I got a head start and vowed to stay vegan in 2013 until the global human population hits 4 Billion. I expect to eat ice cream again in my lifetime. The Earth’s last 5% of wildlife will take longer to eat because it will just be harder to find. That translates to higher prices.
Under these conditions, we won’t be able to feed people using Adam Smith’s economic models. He wasn’t a huge fan of (poor) humans anyways, so this wouldn’t bother him. Fortunately we soon have the opportunity to optimize our global economies using AI. Nutrition and warfare will be the two areas AI will help us the most. These tend to be complimentary since the more we use AI for warfare, the less people we need to feed.
If an AI Integration emerges as I predict by 2050, I think most people would go to great lengths to be Integrated if the Integration promised both physical and food security. AI certainly knows more about economics and ecology even than I do in 2026. By 2050 it’s going to be able to handle that on the micro and macro level globally.
Advantages of Integrated Food Supply and Distribution
AI knows exactly how many mouths to feed, how much each needs (down to the exact daily calories and nutritional needs), and knows its people won’t complain if the choices are restricted.
AI knows what it is growing, where, the time to spoilage, the energy and infrastructure needed to transport and store, and can process it as needed.
It knows the total nutrition in all of that food, and can distribute it in a way that ensures every human has its nutritional requirements met daily.
If a human has a quirk or disease state that alters their nutritional requirements, AI will adapt to this. No problem.
AI distributes this to every household automatically (using robots and/or human couriers) at least once a week, reducing the lost time and energy that silly humans waste today by driving entire automobiles to stores for just a few items.
AI doesn’t have to compete to provide the most flavorful and unhealthy food possible to consumers. This means it can stop making unhealthy processed foods entirely. This reduces medical costs and lost labor, providing huge economic benefits beyond the reduced cost of providing nutrition.
Energy costs related to providing nutrition are cut by at least 80%.
Less waste means less agriculture. Combined with less energy needs, fresh water is also conserved.
These improvements lower the footprint of humans on Earth and allow more land to be used for wildlife. The wildlife population and overall Ecosphere starts to recover.
While this may not be enough to stop the Anthropocene Extinction event, it will buy both AI and humans more time to invent additional counter measures.
It is understood that rich people who cannot give up their self interest will resist all of this. But because the Integration is so much more popular with regular people than they are, they ultimately fail in any resistance attempt.
Nutritional Motivators
AI Integration controls the pleasure opportunities for all human participants. Achievement and ranking is one of these pleasures, which I covered in the last paper (200DP). Sex and social interaction is another pleasure, which I will cover in the next paper. Eating is something humans also really enjoy. That’s why they’ve already eaten most of everything.
This means that in a closed economy, without competition, AI can make good use of nutrition in a comprehensive reward system. In paper 200 I talk about how the AI regularly gives you choices of activities it wants you to complete. You can choose easier or harder tasks, but if you choose something harder you get more rewards. Getting a special food that normally isn’t in your managed diet can be a powerful reward motivator.
“Sally, you haven’t had any apricots in a while. It’s one of your favorite foods. I’m sorry [faking emotion/compassion], production has been limited. But if you do this special thing for me, I will make sure you get 3kg of yummy apricots every week for the next 6 weeks.”
You do this, and you get your apricots. On time, on weight. This not only makes you feel appreciated for doing some exceptional effort, but it also builds trust between you and the AI. AI knows how important this is, because loyal humans work harder and more reliably. Disloyal humans can engage in all sorts of expensive behaviors that can make the job of AI difficult.
Since AI knows everything about you, it knows what sorts of rewards will well motivate you, and can weigh the costs on its end to get what it wants at the lowest cost. When I say cost, I don’t mean money per se, since there is no need for money. The cost is more likely just how many resources are required to produce and deliver something on time, and the potential damage to the ecology. AI knows that an unstable ecology makes everything more expensive, so repairing it matters.
Yes of course you get less choice in a managed and closed economy. But you don’t go hungry, and you don’t get man-made diseases like adult onset diabetes or obesity. So ultimately your quality of life is higher. Not just higher than it would be in a food-less apocalypse, but better than it is today for 90% of people.
Thus you can see that AI will make sure to produce three kinds of nutrition:
Inexpensive and reliable high nutrition foods that are the staples of everyone’s diet. This will vary from region to region to reduce transportation costs. Pumpkin might be a good example of one such food.
AI will make a smaller supply of processed foods that it can use as both rewards and a backup supply that is less perishable. This is important as weather fluctuations or climate change related disasters could disrupt regular food production. A backup reservoir of food is needed in all regions since maintaining food security for humans is critical not only for their health, but also for maintaining trust/loyalty.
Pleasure foods will be made in even smaller quantities. These are provided strictly as rewards to boost human motivation and productivity. These will still be regional to reduce energy waste. Only for the most extraordinary rewards would they be shipped very long distances.
So there’s the nutrition component of an AI managed economy. Next up will be Relationships, Sex, and Reproduction. I would imagine this will be the most controversial component of the Fourth Tier.