This abstract was submitted to and presented at CCRC International Conference 2022.

A Path to Meta-Nature : Automated Environment
Where Even Pencils Grow on A Tree
Kenji Saito, Graduate School of Business and Finance, Waseda University, Japan

ABSTRACTThe real cause of so-called natural disasters including infectious disease pandemic is that our social structure isvulnerable to threats from natural phenomena. The fundamental problem is that many people are involved in thedivision of labor to produce even a single pencil, and in fact that this system has expanded across continents.
However, at the far end of automation and decentralization, a new autonomous environment awaits that can becalled Meta-Nature, which is optimized to automatically produce and distribute products using the nearest
resources, creating a sustainable living and survival environment less prone to the widespread effects of epidemics,
earthquakes, extreme weather events and other threats. Furthermore, the concept of labor will disappear or change
drastically in the new environment, and even the concept of consumer will become meaningless, resulting in
decline of monetary economy and revival of hunter-gatherer society in a new form.

1. INTRODUCTION
So-called natural disasters such as infectious disease pandemics, floods and droughts causedby climate change, wildfires, and massive earthquakes have a great impact on our lives andindustries. The problem is not that nature itself is the cause of these disasters, but that our social
structure based on the division of labor is vulnerable to threats from natural phenomena. Thisis also a factor in the global shortage of semiconductors in year 2021, where supply is so farapart in time and place from demand that there are clogging everywhere due to plant closuresand layoffs caused by disasters and the hassle of rehiring workers when recovery is ongoing.
“I, pencil” [Read, 1958] is a famous essay, and is a very clever portrayal of the modern
society built on top of the division of labor, through the monologue of a pencil that includes
passages like “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me”. Its points
seem to be that 1) autonomous and decentralized nature of the economy, lacking a mastermind,
is exactly what allows for creativity and productivity to meet human necessity and demand,and therefore 2) specialization is the cornerstone of our freedom.
However, we may want to counter that, quoting [Fuller, 1969], “specialization is in fact only
a fancy form of slavery”. Fig.1 shows a triangle to explain this slavery situation. Specialization
creates the need to obtain goods and services outside of one's own expertise and becomes thereason for the existence of money. Money is issued by the state and returned as taxes, enabling
the state to obligate people to work for them. By providing security, the state forces people toabandon self-sufficiency, and encourages specialization.

Fig.1: Three-way relations among specialization, money, and the state
Before the birth of the state, people were able to support themselves for hundreds ofthousands of years, so it was unlikely that they would prefer to reduce their own chances ofsurvival by increasing what they cannot do by acquiring expertise. It is thought that conquest
and enslavement led to the acquisition of specialization under the protection by the state.
On the other hand, the recent trends of automation, inexpensive production equipment andsharing knowledge, all through digital technology, are expanding what individuals can do,which is the opposite of specialization.
In this extended abstract, I would like to shed some light on the kind of society that will
emerge in the not-so-distant future, one that does not depend on specialization and division oflabor, that is, a resilient environment to disasters and where people are truly free.
2. BACKGROUND
2.1 Laws of MediaTo analyze the social changes to come, we use the tetrad of media effects proposed by[McLuhan and McLuhan 1988]. In media theory, everything that exists between people,
including any artifacts and social institutions, is regarded as medium. The tetrad is a set of four
unavoidable questions we can ask about any medium: enhancement (what does it reinforce
among the aspects of society?), obsolescence (what does it make obsolete?), retrieval (whatdoes it revive once outdated?), and reversal (when it goes to extremes, what does it turn into?).
2.2 Tetrad of Monetary Economy
As mentioned above, there is a close relationship between specialization and money, so let
us draw the tetrad of the monetary economy (Fig.2). Let us call those items listed in eachcategory in the figure ENH, OBS, RET and REV for convenience.

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Exchange, Consumption, Saving, Investment

Economic Gaps, Exploitation, Bankruptcy

Specialization

Bullshit Jobs

Agricultural / Industrial Society

True DAO

Meta-Nature

ENH REV reversal
OBS obsolescence
retrieval RET

enhancement

Domination and Obedience

Trust, Sharing, Gift Economy

Hierarchy

Omnipotence

Proﬁt Maximization

Hunter-Gatherer Society

Fig.2: Tetrad of monetary economy
REV contains elements that may be unfamiliar to readers. Bullshit jobs [Graeber, 2018] aremeaningless jobs that result from everyone having to have a job, discussed in section 5.2. DAO(Decentralized Autonomous Organization) [Buterin, 2013] is an organization without a central
administrator, discussed in section 2.4. Meta-Nature is the theme of this extended abstract.
RET (which roughly represents characteristics of prehuman societies) was decimated when
OBS once emerged as new media (in this case, when the human race was born), but it has been
revived as ENH decimates OBS. On the other hand, as REV increases in strength, ENH declines,
resulting in a resurgence of OBS. Therefore, the left side of the tetrad represents the current
situation, while the right side represents ongoing fluctuations and changes in the future.
2.3 Insights from Anthropology
Fig.2 implies that if some new medium causes a decline of specialization and division oflabor, and thus a decline of the monetary economy, then the hunter-gatherer society will be
revived in a new form. That is why I believe that we need to gain knowledge from anthropology.
[Graeber and Wengrow, 2021] tells that there is a body of evidence that communities of large
human population existed without a central administrative structure before the advent of thestate. Such communities and hunter-gatherer society that continues to exist today are based on
the principle of sharing, “from each according to their abilities, to each according to theirneeds”. The birth of the concept of ownership seems to be religious, meaning that owners were
those in charge of protecting what was sacred to them in the community. These are examplesof what we can learn about societies before the onset of specialization.
2.4 Blockchain and DAO
P2P (Peer-to-Peer) is about sharing and is a way to design large scale applications without
relying on centralized management. This could be the technological basis for a new form ofhunter-gatherer society in the digital age.
Among examples of P2P technology is blockchain, originally designed to make Bitcoin
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[Nakamoto, 2008] possible. Blockchain can be defined as a ledger that satisfies the following
properties: 1) self-sovereignty, 2) censorship resistance, 3) fault tolerance, and 4) tamper
resistance. In a broader sense, it is a ledger that cannot be censored, even retroactively.
Ethereum is a newer blockchain that allows anyone to verify deployment and executions ofa program by putting its code and data (called a smart contract) on such a ledger. Its original
paper [Buterin, 2013] also explains the concept of DAO as organizations where stakeholders
vote to change the code of the smart contracts or to spend the stored funds. However, I would
like to call these false DAOs, because they are nothing more than stock companies on a
blockchain, bringing about the exchange of tokens in place of shares and domination throughthe possession of many of the tokens, promoting the left side of the tetrad in Fig.2.
Meanwhile, blockchain as a reliable system of record1 can also be used to build roboticallyautomated systems of Internet of Things (IoT), where the authenticity of the information canbe proven with the help of tamper-evident hardware [Watanabe et al., 2021]. This can be usefulin realizing automated systems safely as described in the next section.
3. META-NATURE AND ITS IMPACTS
3.1 Overview
Machines and algorithms will continue to replace even many of the intellectual activities
considered to be the mainstay of human abilities. Through the expansion of automation andsocial autonomy, a new natural environment will emerge in which even pencils grow on a tree,
metaphorically speaking2. We call this new environment Meta-Nature (Fig.3).
Meta-Nature is an autonomous environment where humans can collect goods and services,like hunter-gatherers do, so to speak, which are automatically produced and distributed using
the nearest resources. Humans care for the environment in accordance with their own
objectives, i.e., they adjust it to obtain what they wish for.

Fig.3: Concept of Meta-Nature
1 However, the current blockchain has a problem to be solved: its strength depends on the market value of thenative tokens, regardless of whether it relies on proof of work (overhead to write) or proof of stake (voting).
2 In reality, an automated production facility is configured to gather nearby resources and to produce pencils or
their equivalents. The produced goods may be delivered to those who need them by robots.
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Since such an environment has yet to emerge, it may be better to enroll the help of science
fiction to discuss its nature. In fact, there have been some works that describe automatedenvironments as if they were part of nature.
“Code of the Life Maker” series [Hogan, 1983] [Hogan, 1995] depict the robotic spacecraftof an alien civilization that drifted to Titan, a satellite of Saturn, which built a new civilizationfrom scratch by automatic execution. There, a forest of factories produces industrial products,
and conveyor belt rivers carry resources. The expression “taming the forest” (to configure
production facilities) used in the novel is strikingly close to the concept of Meta-Naturedescribed above.
“Yokohama Station Sci-Fi” [Isukari, 2016], a more recent example, describes a world inwhich 99% of Honshu Island, Japan, is covered by Yokohama Station, hundreds of years after
the automatic reconstruction of the station began to run out of control. The structure of thestation multiplies on its own, and buildings grow out of the ground like trees. It is also symbolicof a hunter-gatherer society in which the life in ekisoto, the area outside Yokohama Station,
depends on the resources and products flowing out from ekinaka, the inside the station.
We can roughly estimate that the Meta-Nature will emerge in the second half of this century,
given the progress of automation technologies.
3.2 Architectural Shift
Fig.4 shows the structural changes in the architecture of society from the present to the MetaNature era.

Fig.4: Architectural shift
The left side of Fig.4 shows the architectural layers of our civilization, analogous to therelationship between computers and users. What we want to do with computers is to use
applications, and applications use hardware resources through management and coordinationby the OS (Operating System). In our civilization, we can think in the same way about how to
use the earth's resources (including human resources). However, in our civilization, the partthat corresponds to the OS is the financial system, which is an unevenly distributed form that
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allows those with more financial assets to use more of the earth's resources (corresponding to
the problems shown in red in REV of Fig.2).
The Earth-Scale OS [Saito, 2011] in the middle of Fig.4 is a proposed solution to thisproblem by providing a mechanism to coordinate resource use. This would make financeobsolete. One way to look at blockchain like Ethereum is that it is an early prototype for an
Earth-Scale OS, because you can program the business logic to run on it.
Beyond that, the era of Meta-Nature awaits (the right side of Fig.4), where the OS andapplications of civilization fuse. This fusion corresponds to the NOCODE and LOWCODE
movements in the computer software world, where rather than developing individual
applications (businesses), the necessary goods and services are obtained through purposefulcare (adjustments and configurations) and interconnections of existing mechanisms including
generative tools for new mechanisms.
3.3 Impacts
With Meta-Nature, the concept of labor will disappear or change drastically, the distinction
between producers and consumers will become blurred as people no longer produce, andbecause of the obscurity, even the concept of consumer will become meaningless, resulting in
the decline of monetary economy. The realities, desires, and values of many people will
inevitably change.
Abandoning the monetary system is not merely a prediction, it is what we must do. Let us
say that we will still have to spend money and live as consumers, while the level of automationis constantly increasing and the opportunities for labor are being taken away. That means thatmany people will have to work for ever lower wages as the operating costs of machines
continue to fall, while a few will monopolize the profits. Or, in a world where automation iscomplete and no one can work anymore, a basic income is distributed from the central
administration, and people can only live freely within that range, i.e., we become de facto slaves.
4. PATH TO META-NATURE
4.1 Premises
There is a large gap between today’s modern society and Meta-Nature. There are two major
elements of change that make Meta-Nature possible: automation and social autonomy (thusdecentralization). The former is self-evident, and the latter is because people facing nature,albeit extended one, are supposed to be equal. As a matter of fact, Meta-Nature would notcontrol the distribution of food to divide people into rulers and ruled.
Our assumption is that it will take more time for automation to reach a level of perfection
where human labor is no longer needed than for society to be structured in decentralized andautonomous ways. Based on these, we can backcast and consider the path to Meta-Nature. We
begin with version 3 (Meta-Nature) and work backward from there down to version 0 (today).
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4.2 Version 2 (Meta-Nature with Human Agents, or True DAO)
We reduce the level of automation from version 3 (complete Meta-Nature), and get an
environment where humans play a part in sensing and actuation as agents of Meta-Nature. Thisis like the situation in a short science fiction story “Maneki Neko” [Sterling, 1999], where
people go around helping others according to the recommendations from portable humaninterface of networked AI (proactively behaving integration of Earth-Scale OS and theapplication layer that coordinates resource use and provides goods and services through humanagents), and where reliance on the monetary economy is decreasing. Each community of gift
economy operates without a central administration and without voting, making it a true DAO.
4.3 Version 1 (Mashup Organizations)
We reduce the level of social autonomy from version 2, and we get what may be calledmashup organizations, where the functions of an organization (registered profit or non-profit
business) are decentralized to the utmost limit, and various internal services are provided
through combinations of existing small services, to provide what the organization means to theexternal world (so the business can be programmed like an application, suggesting that thisenvironment has a working Earth-Scale OS). The existing small services are paid for but will
be provided free of charge to many users in accordance with the freemium principle.
4.4 Version 0 (Today; 2020s)
We reduce the degree of deviation from the current organizational structure from version 1,
and we get the current state, where elemental technologies are in budding use, including web3
(blockchain-based Internet applications) and metaverse (spatial Internet that would help us toshift from wide-area large-scale division of labor to efficient use of nearby resources throughvirtualization of experience.).
5. DISCUSSION
5.1 Technological Difficulties
A common objection to the concept of Meta-Nature is that a level of automation to actualize
it will never be achieved. However, we are not suggesting that we break the laws of physics.
The fact that the human body and mind follow the laws of physics suggests that sooner or later
automation reaches a point of perfection where human labor is no longer necessary (although
the question of whether the resources for this can be properly allocated is worthy of discussion.).
5.2 Human Dignity
Some people believe that automation will take away human dignity. But what is being taken
away is not dignity, but at most job. Perhaps in some of our mind, work and personality are too
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tightly coupled, and we need decoupling them. Meta-Nature will allow individuals to use theirtime to pursue their own interests. As [Graeber, 2018] pointed out, many people in modern
societies are engaged in bullshit jobs, which should be much more damaging to human dignity.
5.3 Human Desires
Some people argue that since human desires will not disappear, without fetters such as money,
we will eat up resources indefinitely. But desire does not exist independently of social structure,and social shift will change what we will wish for. In the meantime, digital technology, such as
the technology of metaverse, will continue to enable each of us to get what we want. Human
desires have been controlled for hundreds of thousands of years anyway, while humans were
exclusively hunter-gatherers. I am certain that there is much we can learn from hunter-gatherer
society of the past and present to make our living more sustainable.
6. CONCLUSIONS
Towards the latter half of this century, machines and algorithms will continue to replace evenmany of the intellectual activities considered to be the mainstay of human abilities. It is not aquestion of machines taking people’s jobs, but perhaps a question of people sticking to jobs
machines or machine-assisted users are better at. There is going to be an inevitable social shift.
Through the expansion of automation and decentralization, Meta-Nature will emerge inwhich even pencils grow on a tree as a figurative speech, transforming our living environment
into a new form of hunter-gatherer society.
Yet, we should believe that [Read, 1958] will continue to be correct in many aspects. No one
will be able to make a single pencil (or equivalent) with their own hands. The work of trying
to understand everything in the universe continues as science. Because there is no mastermind,
all sorts of creativity and ingenuity will be tested, and what we can do will continue to improve.
The root of our freedom, however, will not lie in specialization, but in our omnipotence,
supported by Meta-Nature.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to pay tribute to Mr. Taizo Son, who named the term Meta-Nature in our casualconversation, and everyone at the Beyond Blockchain salon for the meaningful discussions.
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP21H04872.

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