Autopilot II
Part 2: The infrastructure being built
The logic described in part 1 might sound abstract. But it isn’t hypothetical. The infrastructure is being assembled now, and it has a name, a set of goals, and even an enforcement mechanism.
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The Adopted Framework
The ethics layer already exists. It's called the Earth Charter.
Launched in 2000 after a decade of drafting, the Earth Charter presents itself as a declaration of fundamental ethical principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society. It was initiated by Maurice Strong and Mikhail Gorbachev, drafted by a 23-member Commission chaired by Steven Rockefeller, and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and Dutch government. The final text was shaped by NGO and UN agency input, with minimal public ratification process. It covers ecological integrity, social and economic justice, democracy, nonviolence, and peace — framed not as policy proposals but as moral imperatives for the human species. It was designed to function as a global ethical constitution, the 'ought' layer for planetary governance.
The goals layer similarly already exists. It’s the Sustainable Development Goals.
Adopted by the United Nations in 2015, the SDGs are Results-Based Management at planetary scale — seventeen goals, 169 targets, over 230 indicators covering everything from poverty elimination to gender equality to sustainable consumption to resilient infrastructure. The goals aren't aspirations floating above policy — they're the parameters that finance, procurement, aid, and regulation increasingly align to. ESG reporting, green bonds, development aid conditionality, corporate sustainability standards — all reference the SDGs as the benchmark.
Implementation is portrayed as faltering: as of 2023, only 17% of targets are on track while 37% have regressed — hampered by data infrastructure gaps in developing nations, corporate lobbying for weak indicators, and underfunded statistical agencies. The system is being built but sputtering. This isn't evidence that the autopilot doesn't exist — it's evidence that the loop is incomplete, that surveillance data gaps still exist, and that it’s not yet too late to contest.
Beneath the goals sit the indicator frameworks that make measurement possible: the SDG indicators, the OECD's metrics, the Human Development Index, the Aichi biodiversity targets, and other indicator sets. These define what gets sensed, how it gets scored, and what counts as progress — the variables that convert the planet into comparable data. They rely on a steady stream of surveillance inputs: satellite imagery, mobile phone records, social media data, public health registries, internet-of-things sensors, all of which are sent to a Digital Twin for future prediction. Without harmonised indicators, the autopilot loop can't run. With them, every country, every firm, every project becomes a data point in a planetary dashboard.
This is what goal-setting looks like when it becomes operational. The values are declared in the Earth Charter. The targets are specified in the SDGs. Advanced AI and Digital Twins deliver the associated indicators, which are measured through a continuous flow of global surveillance data. And everything downstream — funding, certification, market access — flows toward alignment.
The question ‘who sets the parameters?’ already has an answer at the planetary level. The Earth Charter supplies the ethics, the moral ‘ought’ that makes coordination feel obligatory. The SDG targets supply the goals and thresholds we’re steering toward. The SDG indicators supply the measurements, the live data that gets compared against thresholds to determine compliance. And for those who need divine sanction, Laudato Si’ and similar texts translate the same frame into religious obligation. What remains is enforcement.
The Transaction as Governance
Enforcement is where programmable money enters the picture. In the old world, you buy a coffee. At the point of transaction, the bank checks one thing: do you have enough money? If yes, the transaction clears. In the world being built, however, when you attempt to buy a coffee, the system does an additional check: does this transaction meet the current policy parameters?
This is the shift from payment-as-transfer to payment-as-permission. And it’s already being designed into the next generation of financial infrastructure under names like Central Bank Digital Currencies, tokenised deposits, and ‘Purpose Bound Money’.
The architecture works like this. Before a transaction can settle, the system must sense the attributes of the participant and the context. Your digital identity wallet provides verified attributes — age, citizenship, credit score, health status, carbon allowance, compliance certifications. Contextual transaction data included with each CBDC transaction adds location, time, what you’re purchasing, and its associated carbon cost down to the item level. In cash systems, this information simply doesn’t exist — it’s private by default. In programmable systems, these attributes must be revealed to prove eligibility. Privacy inverts. Settlement becomes a hurdle you must clear, not something assumed as it is with cash.
That data feeds into a policy engine — the brain of the autopilot for money. The engine runs your transaction against the current rules: Has this user exceeded their monthly carbon threshold? Is the merchant on a sanctioned list? Is this stimulus payment being spent on approved categories within the permitted radius? The output is typically binary: pass or fail, though in some cases, a fail can be converted to a pass — exceed your carbon allowance, and the system might let the transaction through if you pay a surplus tax on the spot.
And then enforcement. Not a policeman, not a fine, not a court date. The currency itself is wrapped in logic. If the policy engine returns ‘fail’, the money doesn’t move. The payment and the compliance check happen in the same instant. You cannot execute a transaction that violates the rule because the transaction that violates the rule is technically impossible.
The same logic extends to movement. 15-minute city zones can use physical barriers — bollards for vehicles, turnstiles and checkpoints for people. Refuse a vaccine during a ‘black box’ modelled health emergency, and you’re kept within the zone. Programmable money adds a second layer — your compliance status travels with your wallet, and transactions can be denied based on location, score, or both. Social credit becomes literal: your score determines where you can go and where the money works.
The technical infrastructure for programmable money already exists. This is what the Bank for International Settlements has conceptualised as the ‘Unified Ledger’ and what Singapore’s Monetary Authority has prototyped as ‘Purpose Bound Money’. In pilots with companies like Grab, the architecture is already being tested: money that comes in two parts — the wrapper (governance) and the token (value). When you receive a welfare payment, a stimulus check, or a carbon credit, you effectively receive a voucher that can only be used to purchase certain items; wrapped value. You cannot strip the wrapper off. The governance travels with the money itself.
The Parameter Dashboard
The final layer is the update mechanism — where parameters are set or modified.
In this architecture, the central bank or government doesn’t need to pass a law through parliament, print it in a gazette, and wait for enforcement agencies to implement it. It simply pushes a code update to the ledger, and every wallet updates instantly.
Economy sluggish? Set an expiry date on welfare payments to force spending. Supply chain crisis? Toggle the fuel ration limit to fifty liters per week, and your wallet simply stops working at the pump after that threshold. Pandemic declared? Geofence all welfare payments to a two-kilometer radius. No police, no rationing cards, no arguments. The parameter changed, the money now behaves differently — and there’s no-one you can appeal to.
This is the autopilot loop made operational at the level of every transaction: sense the context, model against policy, enforce through code, update the parameters remotely. The cycle runs continuously, automatically, and invisibly.
The Emergency Override
In this system, a ‘black box’ modelled emergency functions as a global parameter override. That's the point of anticipatory governance — to intervene before the crisis arrives, based on predictions from a Digital Twin, typically built by organisations like the IIASA, the Vienna-based think tank that pioneered global systems modelling.
But consider what changes when the emergency switch flips. In the old world, a government announces fuel rationing; gas stations try to enforce it; black markets form; enforcement is messy, partial, and contestable. In the programmable world, a single, opaque parameter changes — and the physics of the market shift instantly. Your ability to purchase becomes the primary enforcement mechanism. There is no black market in the official currency because the official currency won’t execute the prohibited transaction. And should cash be eliminated, there’s no official alternative.
This is what it means for emergency to become a system output rather than a political event. The criteria are pre-set; the models assess continuously; when an indicator threshold is breached, the protocols activate automatically. The money itself becomes the instrument of emergency governance. 15-minute cities, vaccine schedules, carbon rations, dietary restrictions, energy quotas — these are merely different configurations of the same system.
And because the parameters can be updated at any time, the boundary between ‘normal’ and ‘emergency’ becomes a slider rather than a switch — adjustable, gradual, and customisable to the individual. Social credit is just this system with personal parameters. And the adjustments are invisible to anyone not watching.
Why This Matters for Everything Else
Programmable money is not a sideshow. It’s the enforcement layer that makes the rest of the architecture operational.
Every gate described in Part One — certification, procurement, platform access, eligibility — ultimately connects to payment. If Project Rosalind-style conditional payment becomes the norm, every other compliance requirement gains automatic enforcement. You don’t lose your certification and then face consequences; you lose your certification and your transactions stop clearing. The penalty isn't downstream from the system; it's inside the system — whether that's a revoked vaccine pass, a bollard that won't open, or a carbon quota that blocks your purchase.
This is why the implementation isn’t merely technical. It’s the moment when autopilot governance moves from ‘installed’ to ‘running’ — when the abstract logic becomes concrete infrastructure that touches every wallet, every transaction, every participant.
The system being built doesn’t need to control your thoughts directly. It only needs to make clearing conditional on compliance — and compliance even includes what you say. Express the wrong opinions online, and your reach disappears; persist, and perhaps your transactions eventually stop clearing. Free speech remains in theory, but without reach, no-one can hear what you say.
In part 3 we discuss where this all leads.
Thanks for your clear analysis. There is prima facie evidence that the individuals responsible are themselves non-compliant ie acting illegally. They are getting away with it by "pulling the wool over the eyes" of accountants, auditors and KYC systems which allow transactions to pass that ought to be refused since they breach the Companies Act 2006 and Monopoly legislation. The individuals are doing this by establishing multiple legal identities in Companies House, which conceals directorships from audit and KYC. This fundamentally breaches the systems in place to manage compliance and so their constructs are illegally established. I've been mounting a campaign to call this out, documenting some of it on my Substack. I've served The Lords' Commissioner for Standards with a claim for a Judicial Review of his failure to address my complaints about our Attorney General Hermer, who has registered two identities in Companies House and fails to declare his recent directorships of Matrix Chambers Limited and The Harbour Foundation. If I am successful, this will set a precedent that we can use to bring all the culprits to book, including Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, the Chair of HMRC (Jayne-Anne Gadhia), Lord Fink, half of the Judicial Appointments Commissioners, the Lords Conduct Committee, CEOs of AstraZeneca, Pfizer and the heads of all the regulatory authorities, that I have done Compliance Assessments on, including MHRA. My strategy is to use the law to end their progress. The Treasury Solicitor has responded to my application for Judicial Review by claiming parliamentary privilege. Presently, I am waiting for a Judge to review the papers and decide whether there is a case to answer and, if he agrees there is, give me "Permission" to proceed.
Within this world would be the perfect tattletale society where all the Karen's can't wait to overhear, snitch, and point at the non-compliant like in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Law enforcement would become the new social worker bees watching for anything that just might seem out of line. As the Grateful Dead sang so long ago, what a long strange trip it's been. If humans have ever reached a point of waking up to tyranny it is now and if the gadgets continue to make us all sleep, we will wind up only hearing the scream of the butterfly forevermore.