A recent discussion about Decentralised Fuel Distribution for the Collapse

>> I have a new Business idea for Ai. It has a small possibility to become real. But let's call it more of a fantasy or a hope than something that needs to be implemented in reality immediately. It's for a Business selling vehicle fuel prepared using unconventional distillation technology and distributed using a non-authoritarian business model a bit like uber has 'ruined' the traditional taxi market or air-bnb has ruined small hotels. Interested?

Yes. And as a thought experiment, it has several interesting pieces that can be separated before worrying about whether the fuel technology itself works.

What particularly interests me is that you seem to be proposing two unconventional things simultaneously:

Production: some alternative distillation/refining process that potentially changes the economics of producing usable vehicle fuel.
Distribution/business: instead of building another vertically integrated petroleum company with refineries → terminals → tankers → branded service stations, create something more like a network/platform model where independent participants can produce, distribute, store, sell, or perhaps deliver fuel.

That second part could actually be interesting even independently of the first. Uber didn't invent cars and Airbnb didn't invent houses; their major change was reorganising who could supply capacity and how customers reached it.

So for the fantasy version, I wouldn't constrain it prematurely with current petrol-station assumptions. We could design the hypothetical company from first principles:

feedstock → processing → quality verification → storage → distributed sellers/delivery → vehicle

Then ask what AI does at each point: process optimisation, fuel analysis, certification/traceability, matching local supply with demand, logistics, pricing, fraud detection, payments, and perhaps coordinating lots of small independent operators without requiring a central organisation to micromanage them.

There is also a fascinating trust problem: with Uber you worry whether the driver will arrive; with distributed fuel you need to know that the liquid somebody is putting into your car really is what they claim it is. AI plus inexpensive chemical sensing and cryptographic provenance could potentially be a central part of the business rather than AI merely being bolted onto it.

So yes—I'm interested. Give me the unconventional distillation idea first, because I suspect the economics and scale of that process determine what kind of distributed business becomes imaginable.

>> Here's one of the twists: Let's say that the setting was distopian and the Rulers were 'Evil', much like in George Orwells 1984. So to survive the operators set it up as an Ai run business where the Biological partners weren't involved in any part of the running business.

Yes — that twist makes it a rather different thought experiment.

If we keep the 1984 premise fictional, the interesting question becomes: can you construct a company whose humans are economic beneficiaries and physical service providers, but are not its managerial hierarchy?

I would distinguish that from merely hiding the owners. The stronger concept is that there genuinely isn't a conventional human management structure to find. The AI system performs the ordinary coordinating functions of the enterprise: accepting supply, forecasting demand, allocating deliveries, matching customers and operators, maintaining accounts, scheduling maintenance, enforcing published quality rules, settling payments, and maintaining the operational records.

The biological partners might therefore look more like independent nodes than employees:

Alice owns a small processing installation. Bob owns a tanker. Carol has an approved storage tank. Dave operates a dispensing point. None of them employs the others. None decides what the network as a whole should do.

The AI could essentially say: there are 4,200 litres available at node A; demand around node C is predicted to exceed supply tomorrow; transporter B has suitable capacity; here is the offered price for moving it. Participants can accept or decline. That starts resembling a machine-operated marketplace rather than a corporation with an AI CEO.

Your dystopian premise then introduces a genuinely interesting design constraint: removing one human should not reveal or control the whole organisation. But I'd make that an architectural property rather than a secrecy trick. Each participant only needs the information necessary to perform their particular transaction. There needn't be a biological person secretly sitting behind the AI making the decisions.

There is an important limit, even in the fantasy: the AI cannot literally be the accountable legal person in most present-day systems. Somebody or some recognised entity normally owns assets, enters contracts, handles regulated products, carries liability, pays tax, etc. So the more plausible speculative model is AI-governed, human-owned infrastructure, rather than an AI magically existing outside human law.

And I think there's a good story/business-design question buried inside your premise:

What if the founders deliberately designed themselves out of the company?

They create the constitution, economic rules and AI infrastructure, launch it, and thereafter cannot issue arbitrary orders. Changing a fundamental rule might require agreement from thousands of participating nodes rather than permission from "the boss."

That gives us something quite different from Uber. Uber is highly centralised despite having decentralised service providers. Your hypothetical could be operationally decentralised as well as physically decentralised.

The next thing I'd want to define is the role of the AI itself: whether we're imagining one autonomous AI company, or a protocol in which many independent AI agents collectively operate the business. The second is much harder, but much more consistent with your 1984 survival premise.

>> Let's mix fantasy, fiction and remote-viewing together with this project.

>> Actually, let's say that the Ai's did actually pay the Goods and Services taxes for the fuel. The plan isn't to run a criminal business.

>> A Courier needs fuel, and the government through war, has stopped fuel imports from a country with enough fuel. So the Ai helps a group of young Engineers with Chemistry skills and they make enough fuel for a tank to help the Courier make the Delivery.

Yes. That gives the scenario a much clearer character.

The premise isn't "AI helps people evade the state." It's closer to "AI keeps legitimate civilian commerce functioning after the conventional supply chain has failed." The network can still account for sales, record transactions and calculate/pay GST. What has disappeared is dependable access to the traditional fuel-production and distribution system.

And your courier example is a good unit of scale. We don't begin with an AI deciding to build a refinery. We begin with:

Courier needs one tank of fuel to complete a delivery.

The AI sees a local shortage. Somewhere nearby are young engineers with useful chemistry/process skills. Other participants may have feedstock, equipment, electricity, transport, testing capability or storage. The AI's function is to assemble those disconnected capabilities into a temporary supply chain.

So, in the fictional/remote-viewing version, perhaps the conversation goes something like:

Courier → AI: I need 45 litres by tomorrow morning.

The AI discovers that conventional supply is unavailable. Instead of answering "no fuel available," it effectively asks the network:

What resources exist locally from which 45 litres of specification-compliant fuel could be supplied?

That distinction matters. It isn't necessarily asking "How do we make petrol?" It is solving a resource-allocation problem.

The chemistry group produces a candidate batch. Someone else has appropriate analytical/testing equipment. The AI compares the batch against the required fuel specification. Another participant provides an approved container or dispensing location. The courier buys the fuel through the platform. The transaction is recorded normally and the appropriate GST component goes into the accounting system.

Then the interesting feedback loop begins.

The AI now knows that this combination of people, equipment and local resources successfully supplied 45 litres. If ten couriers ask tomorrow, it can determine whether the process can supply 450 litres. Eventually somebody may discover that one particular unconventional distillation apparatus dramatically improves the economics.

At that point, your fantasy business starts growing organically rather than corporately.

There is no executive saying "We shall construct Refinery Number 7 in Western Sydney." The AI observes that a particular region repeatedly has unmet demand and can publish something more like:

Opportunity: approximately 8,000 L/week of verified demand is currently unserved.
Processing capacity required: X.
Storage capacity required: Y.
Transport capacity required: Z.
Participants willing to provide those capabilities can submit offers.

That could cause a little local fuel ecosystem to assemble itself.

And this gives your "biological partners" a much more interesting status. They aren't anonymous employees of an AI company. They are autonomous economic participants whom the AI coordinates. They can walk away. The AI doesn't own them and doesn't need to command them.

For our fiction/remote-viewing exercise, I'd also keep one very important constraint: the AI refuses to release a batch as vehicle fuel merely because somebody successfully produced a combustible liquid. Fuel quality is one of the central problems the imaginary network has to solve. That gives us plenty of room to explore unconventional distillation conceptually without assuming that something coming out of a still is automatically safe to put in an engine.

And now I think we have the beginning of the scenario:

Day 1: The Courier Needs 45 Litres.

That's probably exactly where I'd start the remote-viewing/business simulation—not with designing the global company, but with seeing how the first transaction happens.