When Bitcoin meets Ai
When Bitcoin meets Ai
A (seemingly) unstoppable force meets with an immovable object.
Re-publishing this from Bitcoin magazine, so you’ve something to read for the week.
I have a far more important piece drafted up and ready to go, but this one will set the stage.
I know , I know. Your twitter feed has probably been drowning in threads and tips from Ai bros who have discovered 99 ways for you to save 99 hours every week using chatGPT or some other list of 99 Ai apps.
I’m sick of it too. Trust me, especially considering most of these Ai “experts” were “web3 experts” last year, “NFT experts” the year before and “DeFi or Crypto” experts before that. Trend hopping at it’s finest.
That’s not to say there’s no value here to be found here. Somewhere beneath or behind the almost-deafening noise coming from these infloooncoors there is a possible paradigm shift, and a genuine set of use cases. We’ve seen some already of course.
You can chat with these models to reason out a problem, you can summarise thoughts and ideas, find correlations between ideas, search for *some* information better than you could with google, and of course built more linguistically functional chatbots. Perhaps the best use-case thus far is the dev-assistant tool, but I get the sense that we’ve not yet seen the Uber-moment.
There is also, somewhere beneath and behind all the scary of talk of AGI, and the idiocy being proposed by bureaucrats and would-be-regulators, a more human-centric, human-enhancing use for these tools.
The idea of a language user interface as the next step from the thumb tapping we’ve become used to over the past decade is fascinating, and what we should be thinking about is how to make these tools new “bicycles for the mind,” as Steve Jobs said about computers. It’s very important we push back against doomer narratives that lean the world toward “approved Ai” in order to avoid such tools becoming yet another appendage of the state.
In this short article I’d like to explore the ideological Ai battlefield and the relationship to Bitcoin. Some pretty important battle lines have been drawn, and we must all be aware of them.
Bitcoin remains the most important thing in the world
Energy is still the currency of the universe. That’s not changing, and will never change. At the risk of sounding like too much of a hippie; “it’s all energy.”
People often forget that, and this recent Ai hype-cycle is a clear example. Most people you talk with, even otherwise smart people, think that Ai is the biggest thing happening in the world today, and that it’s mankind’s most important innovation.
I think they’re wrong, in a big way. They’re missing something more foundational.
Ai is a tool. When applied well, it’s a very effective tool. But however effective a tool it may be, it needs energy to run. Yes, it can and will enhance how we use and allocate energy, but ultimately, it is an amplifier. A tool. An “engine” so to speak.
What is Bitcoin?
Well - Bitcoin is like energy. Before the Saylor-haters out there screech about that not being literally accurate: I know! It’s a metaphor, and imo, a useful one. It’s useful because in the same way can essentially use energy to measure everything else; money is a measure that helps us account for (implicitly) energy, time and material resources.
If we understand that Bitcoin, on a long enough time scale (generationally speaking, not civlisationally) becomes money, then here’s the truth that Ai people are missing:
Bitcoin benefits from all of it, because Bitcoin is the foundation. Everything that happens, every technology every tool, every innovation, enlarges the total bitcoin pie
So don’t get it twisted. Ai is big, but Bitcoin remains king.
Of course, in terms of financial returns, VC money and the like, Ai companies will probably outpace both Bitcoin returns (in the short term), and also Bitcoin company returns, but that’s to be expected in a fiat world where hype prevails over sanity, and we experience abnormal cyclicality.
Ai is also undergoing a sort of renaissance so there is lots of buzz. This will in time stabilise and as Bitcoin becomes the unit of account, lo-and-behold, all of the real value generated from Ai will ultimately accrue to Bitcoin, and Bitcoin holders.
So don’t stress if you’re feeling FOMO on Ai. Don’t worry about changing your entire life around because some ex-crypto-guy-turned-ai-expert got a viral tweet telling you about some new generative Ai tool that will obsolete some and make others mega rich.
Slow and steady continues to win the race.
Bitcoin continues to be King.
Ai is an amplifier
The second thing we need to realise is this.
Ai is like the computer or any other technology for that matter.
It’s an engine. It’s an amplifier.
It will amplify madness, stupidity and lies, or it will amplify soundness, sanity and truth.
It can be used as a tool of control and stupidification, or it can be used as a tool for liberating oneself from minutia and for enhancing one’s intelligence.
The direction we wind up ultimately depends on you.
Which tools are you using? Which do you demand? Which are you building? Which are you supporting?
Companies like SnapChat are building Ai tools to infect your mind with nonsense:
Open Ai is busy guard-railing ChatGPT to such a degree that it spends more time apologising and moralising than it does answering actual questions.
Bard, is likewise is regurgitating the same kind of garbage because it’s been neutered by “bias-removal” tools and toxicity filters.
These stupidities only serve to constrain people’s accepted thinking and speech which results in a homogenisation of thought. This can have two effects. In the worst case, so-called “safety concerns” lead to “approved Ai” which ultimately leads to an internet that is accessed through chat filters with approved speech conditions. The alternative is if we push back and build alternative. Their ignorance becomes our opportunity. While they focus on wokeness, we can build utility and authenticity.
Which brings me to my final point:
We’re in a global Ai arms race
The race is between two versions of the world.
On the one hand we have woke generalist Ai’s that everyone is forced to use because newly formed regulatory bodies deem them “safe” (see below the ridiculously moronic work being done by Gary Marcus to set up such a global committee).
On the other we have a future of distributed, more sovereign tools that people can choose from, that the user evaluates on merits they deem important.
I know which future I want to see, and instead of sitting on the sidelines complaining, I’m working towards building alternative or parallel solutions.
In my next post, I’ll lay out what myself and a few really talented individuals been working on. A beautiful marriage of Bitcoin as the focal point and Ai as the engine.
Article by Gary Marcus, calling for a sort of UN for Ai. Just what we need. Another bureaucracy designed to fleece the public under the guise of an imaginary existential threat.
In the meantime, know this. The battle lines have been drawn.
It’s Iris-scanning CBDCs like World Coin on one end, conveniently run by the same team or leadership from Open AI, versus Bitcoin and smaller, more accurate, specialised and open source language models on the other.
We all have to make a choice about the kind of world we want to live in.
Woke madness, or awakened sanity?
Mainstream & generalised, or local and specialised?
In my next piece, I will present a potential solution or at least a way forward.
Until then, think deeply about what I have said. Don’t get flustered by all the hype. Remain steady in your conviction, remain vigilant with the narratives being pushed, and be ready for the next battle - because it’s coming.
See you on the next post,
Svetski
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Finally a good piece in a pile of ai hype peddlars. Kudos brother!
Frederick Douglas in his autobiography says that, when he first heard the word “abolition” he didn't even understand the concept. It had never occurred to him that there could be a life for him beyond that of a slave; only learning the magic word unlocked the insight for him.
I think this article of yours, as well as your recent article in BTC Magazine about homogenization, really nails the emerging threat of AI. It's obviously not the superstition of “AGI,” but the control of information to a degree historically unparalleled. Denying future generations access to words like “abolition” is now a real possibility.
To couch it in an economic metaphor, whoever controls AI, controls the “mint” of information itself. They control its authorization and dissemination, which means they can control the range of thought — history itself is up for grabs when records can be altered simultaneously and at scale.
It seems a mechanism for decentralizing, immutably preserving, and cryptographically securing information would be our best defense in such a scenario… 🤔