Crypto X AI BUCKLE UP The convergence of these two technologies, disciplines, fields, concepts, socio-technical forms of human praxis, whatever you want to call them. Is a big deal. The two most important frontiers of technology are about to collied. That’s my opinion by the way. As it always is. There are actually several maybe dozens of emerging technologies that could really “change the game”. These two are just the two we talk about the most. And like I said are about to CONVERGE. Let’s take them one at a time. Crypto If this is the first post of mine you see. I mainly talk about this. All day, every day. And have done for several years now. I fell in love with crypto in about 2016. On around my third touch point with it. The first was when I was teaching number theory and cryptography, and the second when buying “meds” for bitcoin online. On the third. I was IN. I came in through DAOs, went deep on protocol architecture, game theory, token economics, futarchy, decentralised governance, auction theory, the list goes on and on. Crypto. Is intellectual crack cocaine. It’s the most fascinating technological frontier. More so than even the early internet which was actually very dull and slow. This is FAST. Too fast actually, at times. We get sloppy. And you don’t want your crypto sloppy Crypto is weird because on one level it’s a group of online hypernerds arguing about the nuances of cybersecurity, but also an immensely hyper social phenomenon. Why? Because it’s a magic money spout powered by raw memetics. WITH A PRICE. All day, every day. NON STOP. It is truly the Wild West. Crypto takes the breaks off innovation. It’s messy ok. Now.. AI Ok, the breaks aren’t exactly on in AI at the moment. In fact we’re in the move fast break things, steal it all, ask forgiveness, regulatory capture form of negative loop accelerationism that screams incredibly late stage capitalism. Imagine what the fluffy haired altruist did, but much much bigger. We’re storming ahead in the wake of a few megacorps warring over the new oracles of truth. I’ve followed AI. Literally since I was a child. If you watched terminator as a kid you have too. The thing about AI, unlike crypto, is that it’s been coming for like a 100 years. Longer probably. Somewhere around when George Boole created Boolean logic and we started thinking in machine logic. Certainly since Turing and von Neumann. Crypto is new. It’s actually very unusual for something so significant and so new have so many people interested in it, normally takes a long time. Like it did with AI. But in the last year we’ve hit a take off point. Don’t worry it’s not THE takeoff point. But that’s probably coming soon. This is the era of brute force. BIGGER is better. More GPUs more scale, more burning money. The art hasn’t really started yet. As with most things, the devil is in the details. Generalists only get you so far. The next era is one of nuance. Fine-tuning. Thank god for Mistral and their magnet links because we already have our key building blocks. Foundations for what we can build. Sure there’s going to be better foundations, but now we’ve got the cement. Now it’s time for architects and building. The problem is, the foundations are centralised. Not everyone can build a house yet. If you break some list of opaque terms and conditions you are rugged, game over. Happened to me last week. I have been banned from using Claude. You will be too. Some kind of cursed speech, forbidden terms. The spectre of the faceless faceless beast perpetually hovers over your personal rug button. At the same time we’ve got king Sam building the ultimate shitcoin tap for humanity with worldcoin. He’s going to drop you UBI. Which he does currently for uploading your biometric data to his servers, or working as a modern slave labelling toxic AI generations for literally the lowest amount that any human on this planet will tolerate being paid. Nice. We need something better. Crypto X AI You see, the actually interesting bit about crypto, is the governance. The bit where humans govern code. This is how you control machines. With extremely high cryptographically validated fidelity. This is where the nuance comes in. The humanity. When we run the things, not the techno-capital machine. Frankly, I think we’ll do a more nuanced job. In fact we’ll have to because it will be a democracy. The nexus of these fields is interesting because: Execution: a new realm of digital automation awaits by taking the generations outputted from AIs and making them REAL. An immutable ledger does that. It’s a thing we all agree on. It is… done. Move on. Consensus: reaching radical agreement is what crypto is all about, it’s how bitcoin’s ledger stays real it’s how Tx logic is executed on ethereum. Many eyes, make more truth. AIs synthesise. They are synthesis engines. What we put in, we get out and we can say linguistically what it is that we want. This is the basis for a new form of human consensus. Or rather, it should do. Censorship Resistance: I’m not here to say what the line on censorship should be with these tools. It’s simply too big an issue for any one party to decide. Which is the current state of play. If I’m going to build material practices around a tool, I simply can’t be in a position where I am indiscriminately rugged for no apparent reason. I need a tool I can depend on, a tool that stops working is not a good one. Crypto provides redundancy. Socio-Technical Systems: In reality none of this stuff works without us. We are the humans in the loop. Without us, the miners run out of energy, the validators don’t upgrade and their machines go down, the blocks stay empty, the prompts stay unprompted. We are very much in control. And it should stay that way. And by we, I mean us, humanity. Not the clumsy regulations of the leviathans. They simply don’t have the contextual knowledge for... the nuance. The socio in the technical is neglected. We (us) get slammed in the face with a new tech on weekly basis now (welcome to fourth industrial revolution). You used to see them coming, but now BAM we can emulate reality with a prompt. deal with it. The two things should be working together synthetically, as in synthesis, as in syntharchy. Collective Intelligence: Are you ready to have your mind blown? ! No?? TOUGH. The world is about to change. We can now stick words into a magic box and get access to the whole history of human thought, beamed back at us with potentially laser like accuracy. It is a tool that uses our main tool. Language. It is in fact, us. Everything about us. All of it. Every gram, post, tweet, TikTok, video, blog post, book, transcript, journal, web site. Everything. It’s all been shovelled in. Including all the nasty stuff. Which is why you need to pay Kenyan’s less than 2 bucks and hour to sort through the worst animal rape fan fiction the furries can dream up. Who manually tell it “no, don’t say that to the humans, it's bad” over and over and over again. Now imagine the humans in the loop are having fun. They’re experts curating knowledge, whenever they want. And they’re getting paid for it. Do we think that might be a better outcome? Not hard is it. The real fun will begin when we can truly harness the minds of many. Crypto does the governance and AI does the synthesis. The outcome is collective intelligence, what I believe to be the biggest and more important untapped resource on this planet. And that’s why you should be excited about Crypto X AI.