This is an opinion op-ed by Aleksander Svetski, author of “The UnCommunist Manifesto,” The Bitcoin Times, and “Remnant Series,” and Head of Growth and Strategy at Lucent Labs.
I know I know. Your Twitter feed has probably drowned in threads and advice from AI brothers who have discovered 99 ways for you to save 99 hours each week using ChatGPT or another list of 99 AI apps.
I’m fed up too. Trust me, especially since most of these AI “experts” were Web3 “experts” last year, NFT “experts” the year before, and DeFi or crypto “experts” before that. Trend jumping at its best.
That’s not to say there isn’t value here to be found here. Somewhere under or behind the almost deafening noise coming from these influencers, there is a possible paradigm shift and a real set of use cases. We’ve seen it before, of course.
You can chat with these models to solve a problem, you can summarize thoughts and ideas, find correlations between ideas, search for some information better than you could with Google and, of course, create more linguistically functional chatbots. Perhaps the best use case so far is the development assistant toolsbut I feel like we haven’t seen the “Uber moment” yet.
There is also – somewhere under and behind all the scary talk of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the idiocy proposed by bureaucrats and potential regulators — a more human-centered and human-enhancing use of these tools.
The idea of a language user interface as the next step up from the thumb tapping we’ve grown accustomed to over the past decade is fascinating, and what we should be thinking about is how to make these tools new.”bikes for the mindas Steve Jobs said of computers. It is very important that we push back against the doomsday narratives that tilt the world towards “approved AI” to prevent such tools from becoming yet another appendage of the state.
In this short article, I would like to explore the ideological battleground of AI and its relationship to Bitcoin. Some pretty important battle lines have been drawn, and we should all be aware of them.
Bitcoin remains the most important thing in the world
Energy is still the currency of the universe. This does not change and will never change. At the risk of sounding too hippie: it’s energy.
People often forget that, and this recent round of AI hype is a clear example of that. Most people you talk to, even smart people, think that AI is the biggest thing happening in the world today and it’s humanity’s most important innovation.
I think they are wrong, to a large extent. They lack something more fundamental.
AI is a tool. When properly applied, it is a very effective tool. But as efficient as a tool is, it needs energy to function. Yes, it can and will improve 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 as energy. Before Saylor’s haters scream that it’s not literally true: I know! It’s a metaphor, and in my opinion, a useful metaphor. It’s useful because, in the same way that we can essentially use energy to measure everything else, money is a measurement that helps us (implicitly) account for energy, time, and material resources.
If we understand that Bitcoin, on a long enough time scale (generally speaking, not civilizationally) becomes moneyso here is the truth that AI people are missing:
Bitcoin benefits from all of this, because Bitcoin is the foundation. Everything that happens, every technology, every tool, every innovation, makes the total Bitcoin pie bigger.
So make no mistake: the AI is huge, but Bitcoin remains king.
Of course, in terms of financial returns, venture capital money and the like, AI companies are likely to outperform both bitcoin returns (in the short term) and bitcoin company returns, but one has to be careful. expect it in a fiat world where hype trumps reason, and we experience abnormal cyclicality.
AI is also experiencing something of a renaissance, so there’s a lot of buzz. Over time this will stabilize and as bitcoin becomes the unit of account, voila, all real the value generated by AI will ultimately accrue to bitcoin and bitcoin holders.
So don’t worry if you’re feeling FOMO about AI. Don’t worry about changing your whole life, because an ex-crypto turned AI expert wrote a viral tweet telling you about a new generative AI tool that will make some people obsolete and 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 realize 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 propriety, common sense, and truth.
It can be used as a tool for control and stupidity, or it can be used as a tool to break free from minutiae and improve one’s intelligence.
Which direction we end up in is ultimately up to you.
What tools do you use? Which do you require? Which are you building? Which do you support?
Companies like Snapchat builds AI tools to infect your mind with nonsense:
OpenAI is busy keeping ChatGPT to such a degree that it spends more time to apologize and moralize than it answers real questions.
Bard is, similarly, regurgitate the same kind of wasteprobably because it was neutralized by “bias removal” tools and toxicity filters.
These stupidities only serve to constrain people’s accepted thought and speech, which results in a homogenization of thought. This can have two effects. In the worst case, so-called “security issues” lead to “approved AI” which ultimately leads to an internet accessible through chat filters with approved speech conditions. The alternative is if we push back and build alternatives. Their ignorance becomes our opportunity. As they focus on awakening, we can build usefulness and authenticity.
Which brings me to my last point:
We are in a global AI arms race
The race is between two versions of the world:
- On the one hand, we woke up general purpose AIs that everyone is forced to use because newly formed regulators deem them “safe” (see the ridiculously dumb work done by Gary Marcus set up such a global committee).
- On the other hand, we have a future of distributed, more sovereign tools that people can choose from, that the user evaluates on the merits they deem important.
I know what future I want to see, and instead of sitting on the sidelines complaining, I work to build alternative or parallel solutions.
In a future post, I’ll lay out what myself and some really talented people have been working on. A beautiful marriage of Bitcoin as the focal point and Ai as the engine.
In the meantime, know this: The battle lines have been drawn.
It’s iris scanning, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) like World Coin on the one hand, conveniently managed by the same management as OpenAI, versus Bitcoin and smaller, more precise, specialized, 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 woke sanity? Mainstream and generalized, or local and specialized?
In my next article, I will present a potential solution, or at least a way forward. Until then, think deeply about what I have said. Don’t be confused by all the hype. Stay steady in your conviction, stay alert with the push stories, and be ready for the next battle – because it’s coming.
This is a guest post by Alexander Svetskyfounder of bitcoin time And The Amber app, author of “The Anti-Communist Manifesto,” “Authentic intelligenceand the next “Bushido Of Bitcoin”. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.