The first community world piece computer took some effort to erect, and it was quite awkward at first. This was the Anchorage homeless world piece computer. Two years have passed since then, and other individuals have begun tinkering with implementing their own local community world piece computers. As it turned out, sometimes it was a little easier to start by thinking in terms of the local scope, then work backwards to the individual scope. Those involved in local world piece computers would often experience the universal piece in the local scope then realize they have had the seed of an individual world piece computer all along. It was then just a matter of deliberately building it out and adopting the universal piece language in the same way they were helping to build out locally.

In fact, in many cases, an individual building a world piece computer was simultaneously building their local and their individual computer using the same effort—synergizing. The distinction was largely just a manner of perspective. After all, the time machine for peace was a social invention program. The Individual at least, knew that maintaining the universal piece process demands social support. It simply wasn’t possible to create an individual world piece computer without being a part of some larger world piece computer. This was in some sense, by definition.

In any case, the city of Anchorage has a particular quiet buzz about it. The buzz was something new, a chatter, not a noise, more a speaking hush.

Somewhere in Anchorage, Alaska

With mild apprehension, she walked into the conference hall.

This one was in an abandoned building that somebody from the Anchorage world piece computer was donating to the piecespace, probably a 100 by 200 foot room. This particular region of the world had a homeless problem like most. However, what made this homeless problem uncomfortable was that being homeless here was not like being homeless in Los Angelos or Chicago or Detroit or New York rather, this was Anchorage, Alaska. Sure the weather was often times similar to those places with colder climates, but here winter was longer, and with harsher lows. The real difficulty here, was the length of a winter, with dangerous low temperatures present around 9 months in the year. In fact, it is rare to find a 24 hour period in this region where temperatures and climate do not pose an immediate risk for hypothermia.

That aside, the conference hall looked more like a warroom, like from a spy movie or something. It was busy with chatter and movement, a wide range of Human expression, tone, tambour. There was the occasional alarming shout coming from a back room somewhere, a squad of medical personnel in the corner where it was emanating from; they looked intent, but she saw two of them laugh hard in a quick flash; surely the shouts must be fine. The whole scene was seriously intimidating, but there was an energy about it, a different kind of focus.

At first note, hanging from the rafters along the long wall on the rear side of the space was a set of large painter’s drop-cloths, stretched taught by some kettlebells and yellow Alaska Sand & Gravel sandbag pieces contributed to the computer. There were three projector pieces hanging from the rafters—likewise contributed—displaying three large projections onto the drop-cloths. On the center projection was a massive map of Anchorage on one sheet, its triangular shape in the inlet and mountains distinct; there were a few red and green blips blipping away at various locations on the map; one green blip was moving at high speed, south along the New Seward Highway, obviously in transport. The projection to the left looked sometime like an alarm system from a telecommunications network operations center—a long list, rows of entries, each with a corresponding set of colored lights, some flashing, most static—they appeared to be names—some pinned to the top in an obvious manner. The projection to the right displayed something like a profile, like literally-literally from a spy movie. It was a female, she had a smug grin and defiant glare with a list of stats below—current, past, and future. Her ID apparently corresponded to that particular fast traveling green blip on the center screen, and to th—

      "NO WAY!  Elizabeth!  You maaade it!"

The Individual swept out of the fray, clearly excited, exhilarated but cool, amplified.

      "How couldn’t I!"

—brimming smiles. Big hug. Nice.

She was pleasantly surprised; it was her first time experiencing a world piece computer, but this sort of thing was becoming more and more popular lately. Like, you wanna kick it? Yeah, let’s try this for first date: come check out this world piece computer I’ve been working on! Let’s see if we can be a part of making some novel good shit happen, impact! —Something much greater than the sum of the parts! More and more often it seemed, people were using world piece computers to connect with other likeminded souls for friendship, companionship, and intimacy—general love. She was a little skeptical at first, but so far the experience was energizing, clearly serious business. Clearly these people were committed and focused with a sound sense of collective purpose.

      "Let me give you a tour! ?"

      "Yeah!"

As she figured, the projection screens were as so. The list of entries as it turned out were all informants, agents, and vulnerable adults living within various homeless community camps, shelters too, and some of them were pure roamers. The woman pictured on the screen now was a deep cover agent, homeless, but employed by the Anchorage world homeless computer to roam the south side collecting intelligence and discovering new homeless community members in need of aid and registration. She was being driven to a stretch of railway behind a popular upper class restaurant where a known clique of homeless reside to interview residents. Her mission in the past few days has been to locate a missing local high schooler who had run away from home but family and law enforcement efforts so far had failed to locate. The agent’s name wa—

      "—Yeah, that’s Rayze, or MamaShug as she goes by on the streets. You know, like, sugar mama? Hah. Yeah she’s nice, but don’t give her nothing but real, otherwise she’ll put you in your fucking place real quick-like. —harmless though, really. ;)"

      "She sounds..um, spicy. How many agents does this world piece computer employ?"

      "Erm.. 78 at moment. But we could use a lot more. We could always use more. At least we have a never ending job source to provide to for those who would prefer to be homeless."

      "People prefer to be homeless here?"

      "Surprisingly, more than you would imagine. Be careful questioning somebody’s position as a homeless person. Telling the wrong person that they need to be saved and that they need a home will make them very very angry."

      "...noted...thank you."

      "The mission is only ever to minimize bad and maximize good. This is the essence of the underlying universal piece process...the same universal piece that underlies any world piece computer on this planet. We hold true to a core peace bias that favors tolerance and acceptance among many other values. Tolerance is what we need to show to those people who would rather say fuck your establishment than have a home. We are here to help them live more prosperous lives nonetheless...with or without a home...and when we do so effectively, our help is welcomed in fact!"

      "hmm. ok. Cool."

But that was just the projection screens. There was so much information on those screens that they could spend at least 10,000 words going over it. Suffice to say however, most everyone in this conference hall was constantly looking up to these screens here and there—it was part of their personal universal piece process in this space. Some however, still preferred to do things from their smart-phone electronic computers.

The content for these projector pieces came from electronic computer pieces on a row of desk pieces in the middle of the hall. These desks were stacked double wide, for about one third the length of the hall. In the middle of the desk row, there were a few large computer boxes, several being relatively old. These were the core electronic computer pieces. All of them were networked into a single distributed cloud compute local network, ultimately connected to the homeless world’s mainnet at large. One box housed the machinery to store vasts amounts of profile data, all the geographical tracking data over the past 5 years, all the data streams from external agencies’ databases. Another box was full of graphical processor unit pieces⁠(1), which took all the database data and crunched it through machine learning(⁠2) algorithm pieces to help the world homeless computer identify data patterns in real time. Fiber optics connected these central compute devices together, because lately they had been experimenting with creating a proper supercomputer⁠(3) out of these electronic computers. The supercomputer was for the experimental purpose of repurposing genetic protein-folding software(⁠4) from the field of biology to help compute optimized piece arrangement and configuration in a world piece system. That’s a different conversation though.

Along this entire row of desk pieces were a host of small conventional electronic desktop computer pieces. People were working on all of them. Instead of a traditional cloud however, all these computers were setup as validators for a much larger local world piece computer blockchain⁠(5) peer-to-peer network⁠(6) piece (spanning the city of Anchorage as a whole). All the global database information—the important stuff—was stored on a forked version of the Filecoin(⁠7) blockchain—integration with the interplanetary file system of course—and all database entries ineffable, an unalterable history of what had gone on with this particular homeless world piece computer. There is always a brain piece though to integrate the system with the piecebrain, and that was this one little integrating medium-sized box that took all the database, and machine learning, and blockchain data then consolidated it into displayable format (simultaneously relaying the data to the piecebrain center) to project to all the other devic—

      "—See, that’s what this iPad does. I can select different profiles, zoom into different parts of the map, isolate different alarm points, all from right here. And there are a few of these iPads floating around—those who hold the iPads form part of the overall piecebrain, like, individuals involved in piecebrain activities are the quote-on-quote leaders. In computer terms, they are the core logic that makes the central processor work right. Further, using the projectors here for example, anybody can pull this display up on their mobile app to see the same realtime data we a looking at. Likewise in any given moment, anybody can deviate from the realtime brain to access aspects of the database that they might need right then."

      "Tech savvy."

      "Always. Technologies are tools. Humans make tools, it’s what we’re good at, and it generally works out for the better."

      "So what happens when the brain people—’ ’—piecebrain—’ ’—sorry, piecebrain people can’t decide on what to project or do?"

      "Yeah! So, that is usually obvious when it happens because things start switching around erratically, and when it does we have a social protocol where we notice, then we convene to have a piecebrain-storming session to resolve the issue. So far it is super effective. All ad-hoc."

      "Nice."

Walking around the central row of desks with electronic computers toward the corner where the medics stood, it became hard not to wonder about the colored duct tape on the floor.

Except for the side of the hall with the painter’s drop cloth projection screens, spanning from each conventional electronic computer on the center aisle out to the hall’s walls on either side was a long strip of colored duct tape to the the wall. For each computer, there was a pair of duct tape strips spanning outward from it to the edges of a large 4’x8’ whiteboards on wheels. The room—besides the projection screen wall—was surrounded by whiteboards. (Well, there was a chalkboard, but that’s a different conversation.) On some dividing tape lines, there was a color on one side, and a different color on the other. These sections looked a lot like wedges. On the inner arc, always a computer, and on the outer arc, always a whiteboard. There were a couple wedges in the hall that had the same color, but those wer—

      "—What’s up with the colors?"

      "What do you mean?"

      "So, this computer whiteboard wedge is green, but to the left is blue and to the right is yellow. But, I notices walking in that another wedge on the other side of the room is also green."

      "Ah. So, each aspect of the universal piece—the peace process that this overall world piece computer maintains—has been assigned a color. Wedge pieces involved in direct outreach—the street team—are blue. Wedge pieces related to local government efforts are yellow. We use green for wedge pieces that represent the different shelters around Anchorage. Purple happens to be used for local social support agencies. White, religious organizations. Black, maker spaces and invention efforts. The colors are arbitrary, really...

      "...but they allow us to easily identify one another, and adhere to various social protocols in place. For example, if you do not wish to interface with people driven by faith in higher power, then you tend to avoid white. If you ask me who to talk to about the Community Safety patrol, I’ll tell you that I have no idea, but visit one of the purple or blue wedge pieces and somebody there will certainly be able to help you...

      "...We use color for everything. It ultimately helps us create our own little local universal language, enabling us to refer various pieces without actually needing to know all the details. Like, it’s pretty cold out lately so we need a whole lot more help from purple. White will also be of immediate help because they are usually really good at hosting clothing drives within their individual religious communities."

      "This is all very involved."

      "Yeah."

On occasion, a whiteboard was rolled to a different wedge for inspection. At the moment, two separated green wedges were actually in the process of trading whiteboards.

      "Those two greens are synchronizing resources, pieces between their respective shelters."

      "Hmm."

There was a certain chaos to the air, a bustle. The entire range of emotion was present. There were friendly people, and there were grumpy people, all sorts. In the corner with the medics, there was one of those stairs-on-wheels you might find a the hardware store. It was positioned with the tall end facing the room. Hanging from the rafters to the left was a bell.

      "Here, let’s give you the bird’s eye view. We use this staircase for making global announcements to the components of piece computer contained in this room. If anybody has something that they need or want to say to the entire anchorage homeless world piece computer, they climb up and ring the bell. This triggers a camera to turn on to record the announcement, and people are conditioned to temporarily save their process place and silence. The video of the announcement is then broadcasted to remote units, the piecebrain, and archived in our piecespace. We like to make announcements anytime something happens that affects the whole homeless world piece computer community—good and bad news. Climb on up with me! It’s the best view of the operation..."

      "...only if you promise not to ring the bell with me standing up there...!"

      "haha ok ok I promise."

They climbed up, and the fray as a whole was consistent, one singular motion, constant, continuous, people busy at work, conversation.

      "So, are you clear on what a world piece computer is in the first place? Like, at the local community scope in particular?"

      "Well, not entirely, like, I don’t fully understand how this is any different than what we already do.."

      "Yeah, totally understandable. That is a common sticking point in understanding. One thing that people get mistaken is they hear about the homeless world piece computer and think oh, well that’s just another nonprofit out trying to solve the homeless problem. Like, they often think oh solving homelessness is simple a matter of introducing more resources...if we only had more shelters and more social work nonprofits, more money, we’d solve it, we just need MORE! So, that is in part true, yes, but we are people who believe that throwing MORE at a hard problem will never be enough. We believe that something lacking at a more fundamental level must be introduced to solve the problem. That’s the role the world piece computer serves, and in particular the universal piece—the peace process—and the overarching global piece computer network that we know as the universal piece computer."

      "Ok...go on..."

      "So, in short, the homeless world piece computer is not a new thing, rather it is a new way. It takes all the things we already do—all the pieces—and systematically integrates them to optimize their configuration⁠(8) by treating peace as an explicit process, not a result. The process is the new thing—the way is the thing. A world piece computer is not something you just ’make’. A world piece computer is something that emerges when the right set of rules, mindsets, and pieces are adopted in a deliberate manner."

      "So the way is the thing that this project contributes to the preexisting efforts?"

      "Yeah. The premise is simple: When you put pieces together in just the right way, then the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. A world piece computer takes what already exists—all the pieces—and arranges them in a way that creates more than would otherwise exist. In many cases, this greater-than-the-sum—the difference—may be quite large indeed. So in this context, the homeless world piece computer is a construct—a way of doing things—that takes all the preexisting efforts and integrates them into a unified whole. Otherwise, things are too siloed and interpersonal social frictions impair individual organizations’ willingness to cooperate and join forces."

      "Ok, so it is more like a collective."

      "Yup, but one that approaches everything explicitly in terms of treating peace as a computational process. The process is engineered to optimize the arrangement of all the pieces involved. A world piece computer is a physical and social hybrid technology that makes it possible to say 1 + 1 = 3. The actual functionality is based on principles from something called Integrated Information Theory⁠(9), which is a scientific theory that seeks to describe consciousness in terms of how much information a system integrates within it."

      "So like, creating something out of nothing."

      "Maybe more like, creating some new extra thing out of something. The extra thing emerges as consequence for treating preexisting pieces in a computation manner according to the universal piece--the peace process."

      "So this piece computer, the Anchorage homeless world piece computer, what is the extra new something?"

      "Maybe we could call it glue, glue that globally increases the utility of our limited time, energy, and people. This computer is a physical and social space that adheres to a single language—that of the world piece computer and universal piece computer formalism. This is a community where all you need to be a member is a will to improve the state of homelessness in Anchorage, and a willingness to participate by becoming an aspect of The Individual and creating a world piece computer yourself. This is a space where we put the universal piece process first, the homeless world piece computer first, and everything else about our personal identities we shelve while we work. Like, here you can be whoever you are without worrying about how compatible you will be with somebody else’s personality. We have protocols and peace bias built into this aspect of the universal piece process that avoid and resolve conflicts. We welcome anybody here, and this is one of the core peace biases installed in our universal piece: individuals adhering to the universal peace are biased to favor inclusion, acceptance, tolerance, neutrality, compassion, commitment, nonviolence, and nondisruption...among other things."

      "What happens when somebody wants to be in the computer, but they don’t follow those peace biases?"

      "We accept their unwillingness to conform to our values, we include them wherever possible, we confront their tendency to disrupt things with neutrality and compassion. Ultimately, we use persistent operant conditioning⁠(10) to reinforce behavior that is aligned with the universal piece, and we ignore or disincentivize everything else. For situations where somebody gets aggressive or hostile or belligerent, we swarm them then engulf them, like white blood cells."

      "Engulf them??"

      "Yeah, in accordance with the inclusion peace bias, those of us who are experts at resolving hostility and physical confrontation surround any escalating conflict--literally and figuratively--to prevent things from escalating. There are a few men and women here who are experts at physical violence and are always on the ready and eager to respond to someone belligerent. There also happen to be a couple outlaws involved in the community, and their presence seems to do a pretty good job deterring any egregious behavior within our community so far. That shouting you heard earlier, that was one such example. He’s a homeless guy named Nate who’s on our street team, but he had too much to drink tonight, was getting angry and physically hostile toward somebody about something I don’t know what. Rob, Andrew, and Evelyn swarmed him and corralled him to the back room where they’re running a universal piece subprocess to understand why Nate is so upset. This is so that we can help him feel better and get back to the important work of improving the homelessness problem. Another peace bias we favor is respect. Although Nate is clearly out of line, we respect the fact that he has a grievance--a point of inner war--and we exercise the compassion peace bias to make the effort to help Nate find his inner peace. It sounds like he’s calmed down a lot. It was pretty ugly for a minute there before you arrived...glad that wasn’t your first impression haha."

They had been standing at the top of the staircase for a while. A few pieces on the main floor were wondering if they were going to make a big announcement, glancing frequently at the guest speaking with The Individual. Everybody loved a big announcement. Not now though.

      "So yeah, glue. Another aspect of the glue is that everybody can relate to the pursuit of peace and prosperity. Even people at war with each other are only doing so because they are fighting to achieve incompatible versions of peace. Like, war is the general pursuit of peace, at least peace in the sense that most people use the word, the result. We are at war with the homelessness problem. We will experience a deeper sense of inner peace the more we defeat the problem as we wage war. But what makes this situation unique is that everybody here thinks in explicit terms of peace as a process, not a result. There is one peace process, and this is the universal piece. Every little thing that somebody does within this homeless world piece computer is a single thread—or aspect—or facet—of this single peace process. Me talking to you now, is based off me thinking in terms the universal piece process, to maximize the goodness of fit that your world piece has within this greater whole. By how I define inner war, I would feel a sense of inner war if you walked away from this experience with a sour taste in your mouth. By how I define inner peace, I would feel a sense of inner peace if you walked away from this experience invigorated by having learned a new, powerful concept, with maybe even a willingness to participate."

The Individual walked down the stairs; she followed.

      "What makes this different. ? This is like any other organization, but the secret sauce is that everything we do here is deliberate, methodical, systematic, and framed explicitly in terms of peace, computers, and process. The masterminds among us take this one step further and frame everything explicitly in terms of time, which is our scarcest resource. A world piece computer in a general sense is part of what we call the time machine for peace"

      "Hah! time machine for peace ... that sounds pretty far out."

      "Well definitely not time travel to the past. Time machine for peace is just a collection of physical and social technologies forming a distributed machine of sorts—a system of technologies—that helps us manage our time better, so we get the shit we want done, and thus feel a deeper sense of inner peace. In a very literal sense, the time machine for peace empowers those people involved to travel forward in time more effectively to the future they prefer."

      "Time machine for peace."

      "hah yeah, time machine for peace."

She followed him back across the room to an empty wedge, and they sat down on some empty stools that were sitting there.

      "This seems super chaotic. How does anything get done?"

      "Oh! So, there are no bosses or leaders here. There are prominent pieces called The Individual—brains and minds such as myself that do a lot of thinking and directing, but there is no rigid governance, just the common will to improve the homeless problem."

      "Ok so again, how does anything get done?"

      "Right. So in general a world piece computer (well besides the universal piece process and core peace bias) has whatever rules are best suited for the community is represents. Are you clear on the difference between world rules and the universal piece?"

      "As I understand it, the universal peace is the how, which is simply to bias action and decisions in terms that are more peaceful, and treat peace as a process not a result."

      "Yeah, and rules are more the what. What do we do to inform our decisions? In any world piece computer, the explicit rules must allow for flexibility, sort of like how the constitution just defines the framework for government, and everything else is filled in as we go. For the overall universal piece computer, there are six rules that any given world piece computer must follow by definition: The first rule is to adopt and maintain the universal piece. The first rule is to adopt and internalize the common language. The second rule is to adopt and uphold the universal prosperity mission. The third rule is to never give up.  The fourth rule is interactions must be voluntary. The fifth rule is honor commitments. The sixth rule is to make your own moves. Sandwiching these rules are the rule zero and the end rule. Without getting into the details, those two rules ensure that The Individual operator cycles through applying the rules regularly. This is the basis of The Human Imperative"

      "Sounds like there’s a lot going on there, but is that it?"

      "Yeah. Rules four and five are actually borrowed from a company called Morning Star(⁠11), which is a tomato paste company that generates over a billion US dollars of revenue per year. The wild thing is that this company has no bosses, no titles, and they make all that product and money with those two rules alone, completely self-managed. They call this approach Mission Focused Self-Management. The piece computer invention project employs these two rules—interact voluntarily and honor commitments—to ’get stuff done’ aligned with upholding the universal prosperity mission—or rule number three. These rules apply to the world level too, because the world piece computer runs a part of the overarching universal piece. The rules are just contextualized in terms of that particular world. For example our Anchorage homeless world piece computer prosperity mission is to maximize the inner peace and minimize the inner war of homeless individuals and those people impacted by them. My personal world prosperity mission is to maximize my sense of inner peace and minimize my sense of inner war by inventing and distributing world piece computers, constantly building up my own to facilitate healthy physical, mental, and social living. The universal prosperity mission is to improve the state of global peace by maximizing the sense of inner peace, and minimizing the sense of inner war among the world’s inhabitants."

      "That’s pretty fucking massive...!"

      "Hahaha yeah, it is. But giant baby steps right? ..one at a time."

      "You sound like you have really put some thought into this."

      "I’ve been mulling this stuff over for the past twenty years, yeah."

      "What about rule six, make your own moves? Where does that come from?"

      "Oh. That came from this big-hearted redneck I met from Florida. Rob was my mentor for a while there."

      "What about rule three, never give up?"

      "Portugal. the man. Their song Modern Jesus. I would add have faith in self but that’s not universal enough to include in The Human Imperative I think. I dunno. Maybe it should be. I try not to overthink this stuff."

A goosebump wave washed by. The absurdity of it all. The gravity. Redneck from Florida. Grammy winning Alaskan rock band. Tomato paste company. War is the pursuit of peace. The Individual. Engulfing. Piecebrains. Global peace. The Human Imperative. Homeless world piece computer. Outlandish. A web of obscurity.

She spoke.

      "What compelled you to build the Anchorage homeless world piece computer?"

      "Around ten years ago I was writing my book where I first properly introduced the world/universal piece computer concept, thus forcing myself to actually figure out how the thing would work. I have always been emotionally invested in the homelessness problem, and I had spent a lot of time thinking about how a world piece computer could be used to gain real traction on it. I wrote this conversation and described the world piece computer that surrounded it. Since I published it, I kinda had to follow through with the vision."

      "This is so meta right now."

      "Thanks, Elizabeth. Also though, my motivations are selfish in part, I have been on the verge of homelessness a couple times in my life, and in a selfish sense it brings me a sense of inner peace—security—knowing that if I do ever hit the streets, it will be okay because there is a system in place that helps prevent people from slipping through the cracks."

      "Oh. Ok..."

Pause,

      "...May I ask you a personal question?"

      "Sure."

      "How do you support yourself, doing all this?"

      "Ah! Good question. Right now I work as a software engineer and make some royalties off my books. Because I work in a remote and flexible position, I can be here all the time, working in between things. Right now, besides the street teams who are mainly ex-homeless themselves, most of us are working on a purely volunteer basis. The exceptions would be the PhD students and UAA faculty who came up here just for this project. They get stipends and salaries, but there is still not yet an official affiliation with the university, so, different conversation. We are working on more high-level business ventures, deals, so we soon expect participation from employees of businesses who partner with us. Those people would in effect, be payed to contribute to the homeless computer. We are also in the process of brokering data-sale agreements with various interested institutions, as in they buy our Anchorage world homeless piece computer big-data streams and archives for their own special purposes."

      "Interesting. Thank you for sharing."

      "Of course!"

      "May I ask you another question?"

      "Shoot!"

      "How does somebody new get involved?"

      "Easy! You start by just showing up. Showing up is the hardest part. And when you’re here, you just kinda learn the rules and soak it all in. As you soak things in by listening and asking questions, you learn our universal language—our lingo, our jargon. Once somebody can converse with some fluency, I’ve found that people just naturally gravitate toward working on what they want to work on. By rule number four, there is no forced involvement. You do whatever you wanna do. If that means you take initiative and attempt to do something novel and new, hell yeah. If that means you wanna be on the street team, hell yeah (but do be careful). If that means you wanna just observe, hell yeah. We only ask that you do something. If you observe, then tell your version of our story, report, share, seek out pieces we may need. The more pieces the better. Something extra out of something. Ultimately though, the quickest way to immerse is by internalizing The Human Imperative as defined by this particular homeless world piece computer. You can find that on our website."

      "I’m in; sounds engaging. But one more question: why do you call this the warroom? Emphasizing war seems counterproductive, linguistically at least."

      "Oh, well, it’s because in a general sense as I mentioned, war is the pursuit of peace. In this room, we focus only on the process—the universal piece—that we’ve devoted to eliminating the inner war and conflict that people feel because of the homelessness problem. If your loved one is living on the streets, you are most likely in a state of perpetual inner war about the situation. If only there were something more you could do, but you’ve tried it all. This is that something more, the something extra, where you can come to wage your inner war against the homelessness problem. As we see things improve, you can feel more a sense of inner peace, knowing that you are doing everything in your power and then some to help both your loved one, and people like them. This is in effect war against war, and we prefer not to shy away from the fact."

      "That’s kinda heavy. That particular generalization of war is .. difficult to swallow. War is the pursuit of peace. If you say peace is more of a process than a result, that means you are saying that peace is war. To be more peaceful is to be more warlike."

      "Yeah. Hard to swallow in the grand scope. What makes it difficult for me is that it implies that if we want to be at peace with the world around us, then we need to be warlike about attacking our problems, and most people would rather not think of themselves as warlike. There are simply too many negative connotations."

      "I actually think being warlike is deeply engrained in our Human Nature."

      "In my world it is impossible to disagree with that. It’s just hard to find the right outlet for it, one that doesn’t involved self-destruction, destruction, or violence. How do we harness the warlike core of our Human Nature? We harness our tendency toward war to methodically increase the cumulative state of our peoples’ inner peace."

      "Oh. Oh!  When you put it that way it makes way more sense to me. Correct me if I’m wrong in this analogy: so, the universal piece—the process—is what we use to harness our warlike nature for generating good—say, energy in the form of our pursuit of peace—and a world piece computer is like the outlet that we plug the external world into to provide it with the juice and drive and impulse it needs to improve the arrangement of all the pieces out there thus change things for the better. ...?"

      "You know, I literally didn’t think of that analogy until you said it just now...and I think the outlet/plug works well at least as a high level analogy for how we should deal with Human Nature in the context of the universal piece and world piece computers. —especially in terms of how we power the computer and describing the computer’s core functionality—generating peace. Hmm.. Thanks for that!"

      "You’re being super meta again."

      "haha.. Maybe let’s take a break from heavy and go feed our bodies."

      "That sounds splendid."

And yet another instance of The Individual was instantiated, beginning the maturation phase. The two had a good night.

FOOTNOTES:

1 GPU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit

2 machine learning: https://www.ibm.com/topics/machine-learning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

3 supercomputer: https://www.ibm.com/topics/supercomputing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

4 protein structure prediction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_structure_prediction#Secondary_structure

5 blockchain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

6 peer-to-peer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer

7 Filecoin: https://filecoin.io

interplanetary file system: https://ipfs.tech

8 optimization problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimization_problem

9 integrated information theory: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_theory

10 operant conditioning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning

11 Morning Star: https://www.morningstarco.com