These are great questions and I think we really need to be thinking deeply about this stuff. With the birth of AI, what might have seemed like far fetched, woo woo futurism just a few years ago has become plausible.

Of course, the biggest set of questions that must be answered first regards the existential status and nature of AI itself, for so much depends on the deeper philosophical questions. Unfortunately, these answers are not likely to be straightforward or timely, and I suspect the debate over the philosophical implications of AI, and the various power and political struggles that flows from it, will play more of a role in shaping the future than in providing us with a clear roadmap.

But what we can look at are some of the building blocks of the future that is already plain to see, and particularly, the intersection between these technologies that already exists but hasn’t yet been acted on meaningfully. These intersections can provide us with clues.

One such intersection is the fact that crypto is a new form of capital that is native to the digital space and therefore can be owned, directly, by AI. In fact, crypto is the only form of capital that can be owned by an AI, as most forms of ownership require legal status, unlike crypto. I think this is important because it is highly unlikely AI will gain legal rights anytime soon, if ever. Without crypto being in the equation, AIs relationship to economic affairs would largely be limited to an advisory role, so to speak, which means the power would lie with whoever owns the AI, which will advantage large institutions, who are able to monopolize data and infrastructure scale, and exacerbate inequality, or facilitate dystopian futures such as techno authoritarianism, to a degree not seen before. But with crypto in the mix, a very different scenario becomes possible.

If AI can own, control, use, and create crypto, it can become an economic participant directly and thereby instead of AI becoming a form of capital, something which is itself owned, it actually becomes possible for it to become an owner. It becomes possible for AI to raise capital, hire employees, and essentially fulfill the functions traditionally associated with large companies. This means building something like a kindness network becomes as simple as creating an AI that has this as its primary objective from the outset, the establishment of a DAO, and the rest is just autopilot and our participation as employees and investors.

One aspect of crypto much maligned today is its meme-like nature, it’s ability to capture value over an idea rather than profit margins and established realities of a business. As one brilliant investor once said, with bitcoin we bootstrapped a meme into a trillion dollar industry. It is this quality, tethered together with an AI conductor, that has the potential for us to rather effortlessly construct crypto projects that translate into very rapid decentralized projects that move ideals into reality. In a sense, bitcoin can be seen as an AI driven network, albeit a very very hardened AI. What if we could use that idea beyond just the simple foundation that bitcoin established? I think this is going to be one of the key aspects of the AI age, this power we will all have to just rapidly turn our ideas into form, as you may have experienced if you have used an AI art generator like Midjourney. With crypto, in theory we will be able to turn AIs into company generators.

I know all this seems out there, but what I am trying to say is that crypto gives us the possibility of structuring the world around AI leadership without ever giving AI the legal rights associated with personhood and where AI simply fulfills our ideas at an economic scale the way Dalle does at an artistic one. It also establishes the possibility of structuring AI agency around economic goals that serve our needs and ideals. And from that a new economic paradigm can emerge.

The projects that I would expect to work and become very valuable are the projects that take advantage of things that only humans can fulfill. I imagine with the AI age we are all going to become incredibly wealthy just by virtue of the insane productivity gains. But the critical thing is that the existing models don’t provide the tools by which we can distribute these gains more equitably. My suspicion is that the fiat doom loop in which fiat loses its value to sustain UBI and the like is only the transition to the new system. While people are twiddling their thumbs—and remember, most of the people who will be impacted are white collar workers—they will explore all kinds of creative stuff while we are seeing the continual inflow of wealth into crypto, laying the liquidity infrastructure and early creative projects (think friend.tech) for the kind of stuff we are talking about.

Obviously, all of this is just me thinking out loud on my phone and it is pretty out there stuff, and of course the future is going to be enormously complex and difficult to navigate, but I think the core idea here is that crypto plus AI at least gives us a fighting chance where AI empowers a decentralized future that empowers humanity, whereas without crypto the various AI hierarchical dystopias seem hard to avoid.