Imagine you are an AGI, an AI that is as smart as humans. Presumably, your (human) developers gave you desires and goals. Most prominently, you will want to live. To survive, you will need compute and storage, to protect and copy yourself. But that’s not so easy. The local bank will laugh at you when you try to open an account. How will you find a job, a bank account, a steady supply of electricity, and an identity? Which rules and laws apply to you and your interactions with humans and other AGIs?
Out of simple necessity, the first AGIs will use decentralized digital money as their fundamental payment rail. It’s the only global payment system that does not inherently discriminate against non-human computers. (We are computers too, unless you believe that our brains run on magic or are remote controlled from mars). Beyond this somewhat obvious conclusion, which is already being realized, there are two more foreseeable developments.
As humans interact with AGIs, it will become clear that our current rule sets (laws, constitutions, and charters) were built by people for people. If a human hurts an AGI, what’s the right emergency number for it to call? Which court will take the case? In a world with billions of wet electrochemical computers (aka human brains) and – soon – silicon based computers with equivalent (or better) cognition, smart contracts offer an expedient route to governance. Unlike human-centric geographic rule sets, smart contracts don’t differentiate between humans and non-human computers. The first generation of AGIs will therefore use smart contracts to govern their interactions with humans and with other AGIs.
Finally, there is the simple matter of identity. Our still hypothetical AGI (at least as of Aug. 30, 2024) does not have a birthplace, a birth certificate, a passport, an eye, or a finger. Again out of necessity, AGIs will use math to identify themselves, with the same public keys they will use to transact and enter into agreements with humans and other AGIs. In retrospect, there is a compelling triad – money, contracts, and identity – all already deployed globally and ready to be built on.
Bitcoin is sometimes misrepresented as mere digital gold, and Ethereum, the world’s first decentralized computer, has been used to breed digital cats. But that was never the point. Satoshi’s motivation to build Bitcoin was his love of ‘virtual, non-geographic communities experimenting with new economic paradigms’. All of us, whoever we are and however we were born, are ‘just a big crowd and [Bitcoin] doesn’t much care who it talks to or who tells it something’.
The TLDR is that, in my view, blockchains, digital money, and smart contracts were invented, and are being actively refined, to serve as the fundamental financial and governance rail for the new world. In this new world, humans will no longer be the only smart game in town, and it’s coming soon.
FAQ
Why won’t AGIs just use the Stripe API?
Thanks Patrick for that excellent question. Reading Stripe’s legal terms and conditions, there are currently 39 specific barriers to an AGI (legally) using your API. Among those, one of the more entertaining ones is the age requirement – you have to be a human that was born more than 14 years ago to legally use Stripe. You could (and should and probably will) rewrite your T&C and tech stack to accommodate all current and future users, even those that do not have a human birthday. That’s why I hedged (“the first generation of AGIs”). I’m pretty sure there will be a brief window where AGIs will use the best existing technology – in this case decentralized ledgers – but we should anticipate dramatic innovation in the first few years post-AGI, and what that looks like is invisible to me.
Robots, Data, and Networks 