the ability of first responders to arrive at the scene quickly is enabled by a decentralized traffic prioritization system composed of each driver on the road; the algorithm runs in the agents' ethics module, taking into account cultural values distributed thru education & gossip

this system features two kinds of consensus:

the implicit expectations of citizenhood, which serve the purpose of establishing a shared moral foundation

and emergent local consensus, wherein independent agents make decisions to yield the way, giving an illusion of premeditation

as the former erodes w/ the fracturing of society & the notion of a single cohesive public opinion, a different foundation will be needed to enable this sort of coordination

I expect a market mechanism to take its place, vehicles bidding for priority

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RT @pee_zombie
we do seem to be missing a Purpose Narrative as a society, here in the decadent West; most people seem to not really have any notion of what its all for, what we're wor…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1616156599428448267

imagine 10 years down the line when most cars will have some smarts & be networked & self-driving to some degree; you hear sirens, and your car asks you if you're willing to yield, for an immediate transfer of BTC, paid by the priority-seeker. if you accept, your car pulls over

you can even preconfigure a general policy for these situations to avoid the need for instantaneous decision making

this will naturally generalize to a pay-to-play state of the road w/ non-emergency vehicles utilizing the same infrastructure

is this bad, good? it's inevitable.

this is even beneficial for the anticar crusaders, who resent the portion of their tax money that maintains the road infrastructure; you can monetize them using these same rails! pay a toll to enter, tax the priority fees.

financialization allows for alignment of incentives

finance is unsavory only when it's visible; everyone knows its uncouth to talk too much about money. just like the plumbing, it should quietly work in the background w/o us having to speak of it.

ubiquitous microtransactions will bring us into the glorious hypercapitalist future

so much of the modern world is inefficient and kafkaesque precisely bc of the lack thereof; every interaction point between multiple systems is inherently a market, but typically a private and inefficient one, not allowing for competition or price discovery, allowing for rackets

while some resent the financialization of the world, it's, on the contrary, a very good thing; an at-scale society is a massively complex system, requiring many more regulatory controls to keep parameters within bounds

the requisite compute power scales nonlinearly