We’ve all heard the idea that there’s some cosmic “karma record” tracking our good and bad deeds — ready to reward us or punish us when the time is right. I’m sure that record runs on modern technology. Think of it as a huge data system logging our moral highs and lows in real time. It is like Google Analytics for our moral life.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
1. Estimating the Events and Choosing Client/Server Approaches
Karma as a Modern Data System
In regular analytics, we track events like clicks, pageviews, or purchases. For karma, we’d track important moral actions. But which ones?
- Option A: Only the Big Stuff
Maybe we record obviously good or bad deeds, like saving a life vs. serious harm. This keeps the data small but ignores subtle everyday acts. - Option B: Log Everything
If we include every passing thought or small action, the data size would explode — and raise questions about privacy, free will, and more.
For simplicity, let’s say we track 5 significant moral actions per person per day. Multiply that by roughly 8 billion people, and we get:
8 billion×5=40 billion events/day
That’s about 463,000 events each second. This number sounds huge, but today’s massive data systems handle similar rates — just usually for things like video views, not moral decisions.
Client-Side vs. Server-Side Logging
Client-Side Tracking
- Internal Tracker: Imagine a built-in sensor in each person that logs moral deeds automatically.
- Risk of Cheating: If this sensor is in your own body, maybe you can hack it — hiding your bad deeds or inflating your good ones. It’s like tricking your fitness tracker to show more steps than you really took.
- Security Gaps: If the internal tracker can be tampered with, the whole moral record becomes questionable unless there’s a strong anti-cheat system — but as we know very well, if it is client side tracking, it can definitely be fiddled with.
Server-Side Tracking
- All-Seeing System: A universal “server” logs everything the moment it happens, so you can’t fake or skip any deeds.
- Free Will Problem: If the server “sees” or even directs every choice, are we really making our own decisions? This raises deep questions about responsibility.
- Data Volume: Storing and processing 40 billion moral deeds a day is huge, but still within what massive server farms could handle — though it’s at the upper edge of typical capacities.
Client-side tracking is easier to imagine but can be rigged. Server-side is more reliable but puts free will under the microscope and demands giant infrastructure. My bet is that this system uses client side tracking.
2. Calculations, Tech Limits, and Comparing to Big Companies
Crunching the Numbers
- Daily Events: 40 billion
- Yearly Total: About 14.6 trillion
- Data Size per Event: 100 bytes (a simple record with user ID, time, good/bad label, and a brief note)
- Yearly Storage: ~1.46 petabytes (before backups).
Major tech companies already manage petabytes (millions of gigabytes) of data, so while that’s large, it’s not impossible.
Speed and Capacity
- Events per Second (EPS): ~463,000
- Modern data systems can process millions of events per second with enough machines. So, in raw data terms, this is challenging but doable with the right budget.
Using ChatGPT to Judge Good or Bad
Recording an event is one thing; deciding if it’s “good” or “bad” is tougher. Imagine we feed each action’s details to an AI like ChatGPT:
- Real-Time Judgments: 463k good-or-bad decisions every second.
- Cost Guess: If one AI check costs $0.0001, that’s about $46.3 per second, or $1.46 billion a year.
- Is That Really Too Much?
Big companies sometimes spend billions a year on data operations. If society decided a global “moral rating” was worth the price, it might be possible — especially with special hardware or volume discounts.
Comparing to Google or Meta
- Google: Handles billions of searches daily, each generating multiple logs.
- Meta: Processes billions of likes, comments, and messages per day.
- Similar Scale: Both already handle data flows in the same range. What’s new here is the moral twist, not the sheer size.
In short, the data load for a “Moral Analytics” system might not exceed the limits of modern tech. Its not even that expensive!
Final Thoughts
From a purely technical view, logging billions of moral actions per day is possible with the right servers, code, and AI classifiers. But if each person has a built-in moral sensor that can be hacked, then maybe our first mission is to figure out exactly how it works — and whether we can tweak it for a more “favorable” moral score. After all, why worry about your next life when you can boost your karma points right now?