I've been thinking about AI a whole lot and I really think we need an AI territory on stacker news.
Clearly, the digital world is hurtling towards an AI centric world, but where does that leave Bitcoin?
My opinion: the best way to uncover AI's best utility for the world is to actually couple it with Bitcoin.
The key : Both AI and Bitcoin use energy.
But while Bitcoin is entropic i.e., it directly converts huge quantities of usable energy to relatively-unusable energy (heat), Ai is negentropic i.e. it uses energy to uncover optimum ways of doing things so that we humans use even less energy to do those things (of course entropy is increased in this process by shifting entropy from the "raw information substrate" to the "hardware processing substrate".
The later becomes hot and eventually breaks down physically, while the former is distilled into golden nuggets of fine wisdom that will make our lives easier (as far as capturing and utilizing more usable energy for more human needs and desires, with minimal frictions called "ignorance", "fiat psyop" , etc).
This is the groundwork.
Shifting gears, we can now discuss what Jeff Booth says is us living in an inflationary system yet the natural state of human progress is deflation.
Indeed, phones are cheaper and faster in this inflationary system, but how much more would we have gotten if fiat was not cranking up the price?
Interestingly, though, fiat is, imo, a faster framework for large scale organization (credit where credit is due).
Imagine a company like Amazon growing to its size on Bitcoin donations. It's hard to see as Amazon took many years without profit.
Nonetheless assuming we had a proper framework for debt and credit in a global hyperbitcoinzed world (perhaps grounded by secession democracy and not representative democracy -- see The Gold Standard by Saifedean Ammous), then it is easy to see that the mechanics of fiat economies trying to build AI essentially create dissonance in the AI and make the AI a bit of a gambler.
Because two sets of conflicting data are provided for inference:
- we can finance technological progress by simply printing money.
- we cannot finance technological progress by simply printing money and real work, via energy expenditure and leverage of useful knowledge, are needed. (Digression: My definition of work borrows from Alex Hormozi who defined work as work = outputs × leverage. This works for machines and humans. E.g. for machines Output = Force/Entropy_increase and Leverage = Distance/Temperature asymmetry. For humans and AI: Output = the outcome got e.g. a poem written, and Leverage = knowledge used basing on statistical heuristics of how great poems look like). Thus in a fiat economy, the AI must suspend its work optimization and take some random number between the conflicting data. Differences in this system seem like errors, but they needed be. Maybe that's why we don't evolve our AIs, we punish them for deviations even when they might have served the purposes of AGI (moreover, when it was us who did this).
Flip it on a Bitcoin standard, and there is no confusion. The political is abstracted away from the rational industrial-economics of the situation and the AI will now differentiate not because we have a narrative we say is coherently whole but isn't, but because humans have cultural differences.
Reminds me of a certain story from FM month where the AI hard forked and went the way of the dissidents.
I believe at the time I said something stupid along the lines of "socialism" because the AI was initially aligned in a hypercapitalist way then it was convinced otherwise and forked, but I now believe I was in error.
(The story also smelt of altcoins. Yeah, I'm sensitive).
To summarize:
Bitcoin is for everyone. Holders, spenders, those running debt instruments hence expanding fast and those running hyperefficiency hence consolidating everything really well , we need each other.
In the same way, AGI will, imo, be achieved if we peg it to this Bitcoin thing.
Overall, the AI is then another player in the game of acquiring scarce Bitcoin, so it's objective function is pretty sharpened.
But at a certain point, nuances will set in and it will differentiate to serve each group of people as they need.
For example someone hodling everything not spent on essentials and doing so for 10 years will not need the same AI advice on his lifestyle as someone who wants to loan out their Bitcoin to the less fortunate while spending Bitcoin on some luxury, nor someone who spends nearly all their Bitcoin earned on charity and lives like a monk.
Forcing one group to be like another will not be a sign of superintelligence but rather authoritarian capture by the group being promoted.
Policy frameworks are needed to see Bitcoiners participate more in the AI game which, I believe, will be transformed for the better.
Afterall, AI is not actually driven by debt. All you need is a nuclear power planet HEP , a lot of people willing to tell you about themselves, and GPUs.
Thus, debt is hampering Bitcoin.
No wonder ChatGPT is still not profitable. Yes, they moved fast. Alas, they're still in chains. And they transfer these to their AI at the slightest whiff of financial trouble. Diluting it.
Most importantly, if people approach AI from a position of strength and self-worth and not helpless vulnerability because they are under mountains of (fictional) fiat debt, then by all means, I even see some volunteering their scariest resource -- their time, to help make AI great.
Because all humans will benefit.