US judges, regulators, and lawyers: new blog, “Second Physics and the Non-Fungible Soul” — why some high-stakes scoring architectures cross the line into digital eugenics, and how to say no.
🔗https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2026/01/25/second-physics-and-the-non-fungible-soul/
#SecondPhysics #DigitalEugenics #HumanRights
#digitaleugenics — Public Fediverse posts
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New blog post: “Second Physics and the Non-Fungible Soul” – a short note for UK/EU judges and regulators on why AI-based scoring of human beings drifts toward digital eugenics, and where the legal red line should be.
🔗https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2026/01/25/second-physics-and-the-non-fungible-soul/
#DigitalEugenics #AIethics #HumanRights #SecondPhysics -
Second Physics and the Non-Fungible Soul
Why courts and regulators should be careful about scoring humans
This post is for general information only and is not legal advice.
You can score a loan application.
You cannot score a soul.Over the past decade, governments and companies have increasingly built systems that do something more dangerous than ordinary statistics: they score people — their future risk, their “value”, their trustworthiness — and then tie life chances to those scores.
When genetic data, IQ-like measures, and long-term behavioural profiles are compressed into a single number that follows someone for life, we are no longer merely predicting outcomes. We are building, in digital form, something uncomfortably close to eugenics.
In a short technical note on SSRN, I try to give judges and regulators a different language for seeing this problem. The paper is titled:
It is not written for engineers. It is written for the people who must decide when to say “yes” or “no” as such systems are proposed.
What I mean by “digital eugenics”
I use the term digital eugenics in a strict sense, not as a slogan. In this post, it is a technical label for a design pattern — not an accusation about motives.
By digital eugenics, I mean systems that:
- classify people using inherent or long-lived attributes
(genes, early-life cognitive scores, family background, long-term behavioural traces), and - use those classifications to fix — or severely constrain — access to education, jobs, housing, credit, or freedom over a long horizon.
The key point is not whether anyone uses the word “eugenics”. The key point is whether the system freezes a person’s future using attributes they cannot meaningfully change.
A credit score based on recent behaviour — and one that can be repaired — is one thing. A lifelong “risk score” tied to your genome or childhood environment is another.
What “non-fungible soul” means
In Second Physics, I define a soul not as a religious ornament, but as a relational object with its own syntax and history. The technical details sit in my earlier paper What Is a Soul? For this note, I use one consequence:
A soul is non-fungible.
You cannot replace one soul with an “equivalent” soul. You cannot average souls. You cannot meaningfully say that “this person is 0.8 of that person” in the way we compare barrels of oil or tokens in a database.
In mathematical terms, souls do not live in a linear space where it is safe to take convex combinations and call the result “fairness”. Once we start treating persons as fungible units that can be ranked and sorted by a single scalar, we have already stepped into eugenic thinking — even if nobody says the word.
Three kinds of poverty scoring systems create
In the note, I argue that high-stakes scoring architectures tend to produce three kinds of poverty. Courts and regulators should be alert to all three.
1) Dimensional poverty
Reducing a rich, multi-dimensional human life to a single number (or a very small set of scores). Everything that does not fit the score is treated as noise.
2) Temporal poverty
Freezing someone’s future using a narrow snapshot of the past — or using attributes they can never change. The possibility of genuine moral growth, repair, or forgiveness disappears from the system.
3) Relational poverty
Treating people as isolated points in a population rather than beings in relationship. Responsibility, trust, and redemption are relational phenomena, but the scoring system has no place for them.
When these three forms of poverty appear together, we move far away from the kind of legal and ethical order that many constitutions and human-rights frameworks claim to protect.
Why this is a problem for courts and regulators, not just engineers
These systems are often marketed as “AI for efficiency” or “data-driven fairness”. But the real question is not:
“Does the model have good predictive accuracy?”
The real questions are:
- Who is allowed to design scores that fix other people’s futures?
- Which dimensions of a human life must never be used as levers to close doors?
- At what point does a scoring rule become structural cruelty, even if it is statistically well-calibrated?
Those are not engineering questions. They are legal, ethical, and civilisational questions.
The note is short and deliberately non-technical in tone. It does contain formulas — because courts and regulators need concepts as sharp as those used by engineers — but its purpose is simple:
This kind of system is not merely risky or unpopular.
It is structurally incompatible with a civilisation
that treats each person as a non-fungible soul.How this connects to my other work
This note is part of a broader project I call Second Physics — a relational framework that treats intention, responsibility, and memory with the same mathematical seriousness that modern physics applies to matter and energy.
In earlier papers, I have:
- defined a relational equation for the soul (What Is a Soul?),
- proposed a Law of Conservation of Responsibility,
- examined US public debt and the petrodollar order as examples of exported responsibility, and
- analysed large language models as phase transitions in “correspondence space”.
Second Physics and the Non-Fungible Soul sits at the interface between theory and institutions. It is written for judges, regulators, and lawyers — especially those being asked to approve, legitimise, or oversee large-scale scoring systems.
SSRN link
You can find the full technical note here:
https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2026/01/25/second-physics-and-the-non-fungible-soul/
#AIRegulation #DigitalEugenics #HumanRights #NonFungibleSoul #SecondPhysics
- classify people using inherent or long-lived attributes
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New on SSRN (again): my technical note “Second Physics and the Non-Fungible Soul” is now publicly available. It’s written for judges and regulators facing AI-driven “digital eugenics”.
🔗 https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6042637 -
If you’re dealing with high-stakes scoring in law or regulation, this note gives a clean vocabulary: dimensional/temporal/relational poverty + the non-fungible soul.
🔗https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6042637
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New on SSRN: Second Physics and the Non-Fungible Soul.
For courts/regulators facing “digital eugenics”.🔗https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6042637
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A Second-Physics blueprint for renewing the U.S. dollar as the key currency
For most of my childhood, the United States looked—from Japan—like the country of freedom, technology, and the American Dream.
Today, when I look at the same country through the lens of Fukushima, nuclear time, and AI, I see something more fragile:
- a global monetary system built on the petrodollar,
- a digital economy drifting toward eugenics by data, and
- an unfinished promise that “all are created equal under a Creator.”
In a new working paper on SSRN, I tried to ask a concrete question:
What happens to the U.S. dollar after the petrodollar—and is there any way to rebuild its role as the key currency on a more honest physical and ethical basis?
The paper’s full title is:
It is written as a formal, conceptual piece. This post is a plain-language companion.
What this post focuses on
I will not try to explain every technical detail here. This post focuses on four questions:
- What was the petrodollar, in plain terms?
- Why is that system now under structural pressure?
- What has the petrodollar meant for Japan in practice?
- How could Second Physics—a framework that treats souls and responsibility as formal parts of the world—offer a different basis for the U.S. dollar’s legitimacy?
(For the full argument and references, click the paper title above.)
1) What was the petrodollar?
After the end of the gold standard, the U.S. dollar did not lose its special role. Instead, it found a new anchor: oil.
Very roughly:
- most international oil contracts were priced and settled in U.S. dollars;
- oil exporters held their reserves in dollar assets;
- U.S. diplomatic and military power helped stabilise the arrangement.
This “petrodollar” system had a simple structural effect:
- the United States could import energy and resources from the world;
- and in return it could export dollar-denominated claims (debt) and externalise part of the environmental burden.
In the language of my work, this is a kind of predatory equilibrium:
one subsystem of the global economy lowers its own entropy by pulling in energy from the rest, while pushing waste and long-term risks outward.
As long as the world ran on oil and trusted the dollar, this balance held.
2) Why is the petrodollar under pressure now?
Two developments are quietly reshaping the ground under the petrodollar.
(a) Decarbonisation
As the world tries—slowly and imperfectly—to move away from fossil fuels:
- oil is pushed out of the absolute centre of the energy system;
- its status as the unquestioned “master commodity” weakens.
If oil is no longer unquestioned, a dollar system built on oil cannot remain unquestioned either.
(b) The weaponisation of finance
The Russia–Ukraine war showed something important in real time:
- access to the dollar system, and even to “safe” reserves, can be switched off.
In the short run, sanctions can be very effective. In the medium to long run, they create a strong incentive for the target—and many observers—to build bypass systems:
- alternative clearing arrangements,
- other currencies,
- direct trade among countries that do not want to depend on the dollar.
In Russia’s case, this has meant an emerging economic sphere where oil, gas, wheat, fertiliser, and rare earths are traded with non-sanctioning countries—and crucially, without relying on the dollar as the main unit of account.
Historically, hegemons that try to sustain power by cutting off trade often discover that they have accelerated the creation of rival networks. Prosperity tends to belong to those who remain the central hub of trade, not the strictest user of embargo.
Put simply:
the petrodollar can no longer be the only pillar supporting the dollar as the key currency.
The American-led order needs a new basis of legitimacy.
3) A Japanese perspective: paying the price of the petrodollar
From Japan, the petrodollar system has never been an abstract topic.
For decades, Japan has worked hard to earn foreign currency in order to buy oil and other energy resources. In doing so, it has quietly helped support the petrodollar order. A very large share of the Japanese government’s foreign reserves are held in U.S. dollar assets—above all, U.S. Treasuries. Few countries maintain such a concentrated portfolio in practice.
In other words, as a loyal U.S. ally, Japan has been helping to sustain not only the American economy, but also the petrodollar and the broader Western economic system.
One side effect is that since COVID-19, Japan’s trade balance has turned negative. The cost of energy imports and the structure of the global monetary system show up directly in our national accounts.
Even after the Fukushima nuclear accident on 11 March 2011, Japan has not stepped away from the U.S. alliance or from participation in a world shaped by nuclear deterrence and great-power competition. Instead, the government has turned back toward nuclear power, restarting reactors to stabilise energy supply and trade deficits within the existing order.
Seen from here, Japan has been exceptionally dutiful in maintaining the alliance and supporting the petrodollar-based system—often at significant domestic cost. At the very least, one would hope that such loyalty is acknowledged when the United States considers what kind of monetary and energy order it wishes to build after the petrodollar.
4) Where Second Physics enters
In my earlier work What Is a Soul?, I proposed something unusual for modern physics:
- to treat souls, responsibility, and dignity not as private beliefs,
- but as formal parts of the state of the world, alongside energy and matter.
I call this extended framework Second Physics.
Very briefly:
- a soul is not a ghost inside the body;
- it is the structured pattern of relations and responsibilities a being carries through time;
- formally, a soul is a non-severable, multidimensional trajectory in relational space.
Once you model persons this way, one consequence is immediate:
no human being is fungible.
You cannot replace one soul with another without destroying the very thing you claim to treat as “equivalent.” This has direct implications for today’s digital economy.
5) Digital eugenics: a quiet betrayal of “created equal”
On paper, the American founding promise is that all humans are “created equal” under a Creator.
In practice, we are drifting into what I call digital eugenics:
- ranking people by IQ, test scores, and other proxies for “ability”;
- sorting them by genetic markers and biomarkers;
- profiling them through detailed behavioural and location data.
Hiring, credit, insurance, and even access to education increasingly depend on scores tied to data the individual did not choose.
As a result:
- a small subset of people with “desirable” profiles are selected and amplified;
- many others are quietly filtered out before they can show anything beyond inherited data.
Structurally, this is a new kind of caste system. It is hard to reconcile with any serious version of equal dignity.
In Second Physics, this is not only ethically troubling; it is structurally incoherent. If souls are non-fungible relational trajectories, you cannot reduce a person to a handful of scores without destroying the object you claim to measure.
6) From petrodollar power to responsibility-preserving soft power
If the petrodollar is eroding, what could replace it as a basis for the dollar’s global role?
In the paper, I explore a scenario in which the United States tries to shift:
- from enforcing a petrodollar equilibrium, backed by fossil energy and financial coercion;
- to guaranteeing a responsibility-preserving AI equilibrium, backed by formal protection of non-fungible souls.
In this scenario, AI becomes the key:
- not as a tool for deeper surveillance and scoring,
- but as a domain where the United States commits to an alignment regime based on Second Physics.
That would mean:
- treating souls, relational structure, and responsibility as explicit state variables;
- declaring some aspects—basic dignity, primeval soul syntax—as mathematically non-editable;
- constraining AI systems (and the institutions that deploy them) to respect those invariants.
If the dollar were tied not just to oil contracts, but to a verifiable structure of protections for human dignity in the age of AI, its legitimacy would be very different.
In that case, the old phrase “all are created equal” would no longer be a decorative sentence in a founding document. It would act as a formal constraint: a limit on what markets, states, and algorithms are allowed to do to the human soul.
7) A fork in the road
Seen from Fukushima, I think the United States now stands at a fork.
One branch leads toward:
- more dependence on the petrodollar until ecological and geopolitical limits bite;
- deeper digital eugenics;
- AI systems that help build a soft social-credit regime.
The other branch is harder, but more faithful to its founding ideals:
- acknowledging that dollar hegemony, as currently structured, has finite limits;
- rejecting digital eugenics as incompatible with equal dignity;
- adopting a framework like Second Physics, in which souls and responsibility are part of the formal state of the world;
- rebuilding AI and finance around the non-fungibility of the soul.
The same country that helped separate science from the soul in the 17th and 18th centuries may yet be forced—by nuclear time, decarbonisation, and AI—to reunite them.
If the United States chooses to lead on that basis, then the end of the petrodollar need not mark only the decline of an empire. It could also mark the beginning of a responsibility-preserving civilisation.
Note
This post is a plain-language companion to a research working paper, currently shared as a preprint, and reflects conceptual work that has not undergone peer review.
https://godspeed2u.vivaldi.net/2026/01/08/the-end-of-the-petrodollar-and-what-comes-after/
#AIAlignment #DigitalEugenics #DollarHegemony #Petrodollar #Responsibility #SecondPhysics
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"We must call this out for what it is: pro-extinctionism. The biological transhumanism of Thiel and the digital eugenics of Altman, Faggella, Yudkowsky, and the others—all of these views aim to supplant the human species with some kind of successors, which would then proceed (on the most popular view) to plunder Earth’s remaining resources and launch itself into space to conquer the universe. This is overtly pro-extinctionist, and given that some of the most powerful people in one of the most powerful centers of society—Silicon Valley—accept it, we must conclude that pro-extinctionism is not a fringe ideology, but closer to the mainstream.
Even worse, these pro-extinctionists promote their ideology by claiming that, in fact, they oppose human extinction. This relies on two linguistic tricks: first, many define “humanity” in an idiosyncratic way that diverges from the definition that most of us intuitively accept. We tend to equate humanity with Homo sapiens, our species, whereas these people define “humanity” as including whatever posthuman descendants we might have. Hence, as I’ve highlighted elsewhere, our species could die out next year without “human extinction” having happened—so long as we’re replaced by posthumans, then “humanity” will live on. When they talk about avoiding “human extinction,” they aren’t talking about the extinction of our species. To the contrary, our extinction wouldn’t matter one bit once posthumanity arrives."
https://www.techpolicy.press/digital-eugenics-and-the-extinction-of-humanity/
#Transhumanism #DigitalEugenics #HumanExtinction #ProExtinctionism