Hello, internet friend! This week’s essay turned into an optimistic rallying cry for the future of technology. It’s the product of reflecting after a few interesting conversations (with impatient pessimists) over the past week.
PS; this was written in one session (while listening to Coheed and Cambria) without much editing, so I apologize for any grammatical errors. I’m officially back to a weekly newsletter cadence after summer. See you next week!
TL;DR:
The internet is evolving from information to value, with blockchain enabling this shift.
AI agents will become integral to our online experiences and interactions.
Technological progress often follows predictable adoption curves despite short-term skepticism.
The convergence of blockchain and AI will create new opportunities and reshape work.
Human attention may become increasingly valuable as AI capabilities expand.
First, the internet was a place for information, then for people. We brought things online. Now we’re working on the next steps of the curve.
From internet of things to internet of value, then internet of agents.
Blockchains and tokens enable the first step, generative AI (and eventually, AGI) enables the latter.
(You can collect this onchain here).
Zooming out, this is a logical trajectory. As we digitize more of our lives and spend more time online, it makes sense to bring online more of our surroundings.
The previous curve step facilitates the next.
Many still view crypto as “speculation and casino” (which is part of it, but hardly all). While that’s a problem, I believe time will solve it. Technology diffusion and maturation, you know.
Even the latest wave of AI is facing headwinds because the technology’s effects/unlocks haven’t been large enough fast enough. Notably, The Economist published an article titled “What happened to the artificial intelligence revolution?” this summer.
Spoiler alert: it’s evolving and diffusing along the same f*cking adoption curve as previous technological innovations.
We’re naturally impatient.
It’s helpful to bring up Amara’s Law occasionally:
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Speaking of laws, you’re familiar with Moore’s Law, right? The exponential curve explaining how computational capacity increases over time.
Well, there’s a new law in town. Huang’s law:
(That’s Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, if you didn’t catch the reference).
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You either understand and embrace that the above graph means we’re in for a wild ride, or ignore it and catch up later. Cat’s out of the bag.
Back to crypto and blockchains. It’s easy to get sidetracked by crypto prices. The financialization of everything and the frictionless alignment of your time/interest/passion/work with your financial outcomes is the beauty and the beast of crypto. At the same time.
The bigger picture is that we’re bringing value online. We’ve previously only done this by proxy. Adding a trustless value layer to the internet will unlock new experiences, business models, and companies. It will also require us to re-learn basic “being online” patterns due to the “rent only” internet mode we’re used to historically.
This change will permeate everything we do online eventually. It’s not everything, everywhere all at once.
As we bring value and AI agents online, the two will riff off each other to catapult us into an interesting future. AI agents collaborating, doing work for, and transacting value between each other will be the norm. This is the “obvious” connection.
There are other interesting connections, too:
AI agents will capture many human jobs, but fear not. The Lump of Labor fallacy is wrong. As old jobs disappear, new ones emerge. History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.
If you don’t have to work as much because you have an agentic enabler, does that reduce or increase your earnings? And if you don’t spend as many hours working, what’s the value of the hours you recoup?
As everything else is commoditized, the one scarce asset is attention, a.k.a. your time. So, is it a loss to get time back to reallocate to other activities?
What will people do with this time? What will generative AI enable them to do that they couldn’t before? How does doing that on crypto rails enable new monetization and value capture?
I don’t know, but these are some of the many questions that will emerge. Finding the right answers represent big opportunities.
You can approach technology, innovation, and the future as either an impatient pessimist or a patient optimist.
I know my choice.
