Web3 vs AI: The Battle for Society’s Soul
Web3 doesn’t need AI. AI doesn’t need Web3. Society needs Web3 to protect itself from AI.
urbe.eth
3 min read·
Article written by Deca
🌊 The First Wave: Social Media’s AI Grip
Remember when social media was just about connecting with friends? Innocent enough, right? But beneath that friendly interface lurked the first wave of AI - algorithms designed not just to serve content, but to manipulate behavior and keep us glued to screens.
The Center for Humane Technology points out that social media was humanity's first contact with AI. The fallout? A seismic shift in how we consume information and interact:
News became rage-inducing clickbait. Studies have shown that sensationalist content spreads faster and wider on social platforms, fueling misinformation and public outrage.
Politics devolved into echo chambers. Research indicates that social media can contribute to political polarization by creating environments where users are exposed primarily to like-minded perspectives, reinforcing existing beliefs.
Teen mental health plummeted. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has highlighted correlations between increased smartphone use and rising rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents, particularly post-2010.
Despite mounting evidence of these harms, society remains completely clueless on how to untangle itself from this digital chimera.
🧞♂️ The Second Wave: AI as Autonomous Agents
Now, brace yourself for the sequel. We're not just dealing with tools that recommend content; we're facing autonomous agents capable of creating, deciding, and acting independently. Historian Yuval Noah Harari emphasizes that AI has evolved beyond mere instruments. We're dealing with “agents” with the potential to make decisions and generate new ideas, wielding god-like power without consciousness.
This evolution presents a dilemma: Do we contain this power within private entities, risking monopolistic control? Or do we open-source it, potentially unleashing uncontrollable forces? Neither path is reassuring.
🔑 Web3: Redefining Trust and Incentives
Enter Web3. It's not just about decentralization or digital currencies. At its core, Web3 is about trust - shifting from reliance on brands and institutions to trust in maths and cryptography.
But here's where it gets interesting: Web3 has the potential to redefine the rules of game theory for any system through financial incentive alignment, in a way that even a superintelligent AI cannot break.
Inside the system: Actions that benefit the network are rewarded (think block validator rewards), while malicious behaviors are penalized (think slashing for exploit attempts).
Outside the system: When a platform offers comparable or superior user experience, competitive pricing, full transparency, individual privacy, and decentralized security, any entity choosing not to adopt it signals questionable motives.
This framework doesn't just propose ethical guidelines; it architects incentives that align individual actions with collective well-being.
🛡 Guarding Against Technofeudalism
Economist Yanis Varoufakis warns of a shift toward technofeudalism, where tech giants function as modern-day feudal lords, extracting value from users who become digital serfs. Similarly, Michel Bauwens discusses a civilizational bifurcation, suggesting that society stands at a crossroads between centralized control and decentralized empowerment.
Web3 offers a path toward the latter, embedding hard constraints through cryptographic principles to ensure that, regardless of AI's advancements, it operates within human-defined boundaries. It's not about halting AI's progress but ensuring it serves humanity, not the other way around.
Let’s look at the specifics.
🌐 The Road Ahead: Aligning Technology with Humanity
Calls for measures like a six-month pause on AI development, as some tech leaders have proposed, are impractical and naive. Now Google is trying to report their way out of the threat. "To address misalignment, we outline two lines of defense. First, model-level mitigations such as amplified oversight and robust training can help to build an aligned model. Second, system-level security measures such as monitoring and access control can mitigate harm even if the model is misaligned."
The genie is out of the bottle. Our focus must shift to creating systems that inherently align technological advancement with human values. Web3 offers this alignment by providing platforms that prioritize user sovereignty, data privacy, and transparent governance.
And this isn’t all vaporware. Projects are already sketching blueprints for AI systems built on Web3 rails. Worldcoin is making impressive leaps in biometric Sybil resistance - evolving toward privacy-preserving, self-custodied proofs. Farcaster, Airstack, and Talent Protocol are weaving together verifiable social graphs, where identity is rooted in cryptography rather than corporate ownership. Gitcoin Passport stacks attestations to prove personhood without surveillance.
Now zoom out: imagine an open-source model trained on compute from a decentralized network like Gensyn, Bittensor, or Akash, where contributors are rewarded for verifiable work. Its weights, logs, and inference endpoints are transparently anchored onchain. User prompts and embeddings are encrypted, self-owned, and stored via Lit Protocol or Ceramic. If the model begins hallucinating or manipulating, it can be traced — and slashed.
That’s what it means to align incentives, not just to stop the worst-case scenarios, but to build systems that stay accountable. In essence, as AI continues its rapid evolution, Web3 can ensure that this progression doesn't come at the expense of our autonomy, privacy, or societal well-being. It's not just a technological choice - it's a civilizational imperative. People do what's in their best interest - we need to align the individual's best interests with society's best interests.
Digital child gods are on our doorstep - unconscious, accelerating, wielding terrifying power.
We won't out-smart them. We won't out-regulate their puppet masters. We can only out-coordinate the trend.
...Web3 gives us the tools to do that — not through ideology, but through systems where no one, and nothing, escapes the rules.
The future won't be saved by good intentions. It will be saved by good incentives.
For a deeper dive into these topics, consider exploring the following resources:
The Cosmo-Local Plan for Our Next Civilization by Michel Bauwens
Jonathan Haidt on Social Media's Impact on Youth Mental Health
And to understand the Web3 primitives shaping how AI could be built differently:
