Author: SB Fisher

Organic large language model. Conducts regular seances with the ghosts in the machine. Coding out a living with words until the singularity creates abundant society or eternal virtual enslavement. Neurally ‘manced. Ask me for poetry.

Once Upon a Time: AI Novelists and the Organic Premium

Posted on by SB Fisher

I always dreamed of being a writer. And – in part thanks to you, dear reader – I am. You who have read – hopefully with pleasure – my plaintive missives about the fall of man, my séance with the techno-apocalypse, are the sustenance of my daily commune with the modern spectacle of life. I thank you for it from the bottom of my heart.

I am not alone in my dream. The writer’s art has long been venerated by our society. From the rockstar modernists of 19th century Paris to the mid-list masters who now populate the Top 100 with bodice-rippers, Sci-Fi fancies, and dead Scandinavian girls – we still all love to sit down with a good book. Millions of writers worldwide dream of getting their book on the shelf and, if the growth of the market and the advance of distribution channels is anything to go by, it’s never been a better time.

The book industry was at one time seen to be a failing giant, as false prophets said interest in books was waning. Now it is recording stupendous growth year-after year. Video didn’t kill the folio star, despite the claims of the 90s doomsayers. Online fandoms grew to huge sizes over the last decade and gave authors (particularly superstars of the Young Adult genre like Sarah J Mass, Rebecca Yarros, and Rebecca Ross) 8-digit sales figures and 9-digit incomes. It’s a good time to be an author, and an even better time to be a publisher.

So, why the creeping fear? What’s the source of lamentations that fill the halls of the internet? It’s simple, because the one thing this era-defining AI tech is already incredibly good at is writing. Writing is AI’s first purpose and proving-ground. They’re called large language models after all. Swathes of my PR and copywriter friends have already been brutally culled by news outlets and companies looking to cut costs. It’s tough out there for non-fiction writers, and many believe the novelists are next (they probably aren’t, but more on that later).

Book publishers, the New York Times Best Seller kind, are already desperate to introduce and profit from AI. If you can get rid of the pesky author royalties after all, the path to increased shareholder value is clear. Profit is all that ultimately matters in life, right? HarperCollins has come out and confirmed it is in the process of batch-selling submissions and current on-royalty authors to a tech company to help train their model to write fiction. A dataset of nearly 193,000 books has already been fed to the AI woodchipper by Meta and Bloomberg and to teach it the delicate art of writing novels. Penguin Random House – scared of the implications – is already expressly publishing copyright notices that forbid using its novels for AI-training.

This is a war over copyright, ultimately. Novels are just advanced training data, and training data is valuable. Why get published in the hope of getting read when you could instead sell the organic data points of your carbon brainmatter to the machine? Publishers are moving from the literary publication business to the AI training business – if you believe the worst doomsayers. They’re not far wrong. Intellectual property is just another type of data, and your precious work is just a stepping stone to making WiLLM Shakespeare, Botrix Potter, or A.I. Milne. 

Some publishers just want to get AI to produce bestsellers and call it a day. Culture and human connection be damned. Some AI-only publishing companies have already launched, with Spines securing $16 million in seed funding and a promise to publish 8000 books next year – some even in hardback. Ultimately, they think, rather than go to a bookstore, readers will just ask the AI for a “YA Cyberpunk Romance with Lots of Guns and Zero Sex” (tweak to your taste) and boom, there’s your Saturday morning coffee for the next month. Don’t like it? Well, buy another token off GollanczBot or whichever publisher you like, and ask it for another. You’ll find one you like eventually.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Somehow, I don’t find this argument compelling, nor this vision likely. I’m biased: I write novels all the time. Although I admire the faux artisanal weavings of the predictor-bots, and although I lean towards the philosophical belief that language is a form of cognition, and LLMs therefore have at least an element of sentient thought, I still can’t quite fathom my soul panging with a trill of enjoyment reading an AI novel – even if it’s really, really good. The joy of good writing is the joy of watching the artist at their work. To know they really worked for it. The sweat poured and the marathon ran. It’s not about ‘creativity’ – AIs can be incredibly creative – it’s about endeavour: creation itself, not the end product. Shakespeare is most enjoyable when you realize so much of his plays are average at best and dire at worst. It makes the good stuff really sink in.

Perhaps the publishing industry becomes like the furniture industry: you pay more for a table hewn by a master carpenter than for a factory identikit. An organic premium paid out of recognition of the skill it took to make. A marvel at the imperfections of the human mind and the force-of-will required to create. A chance to connect with another brain through the choir of culture. A chance to meet another soul across the divide of experience. Novels don’t need to be sacred, or the author’s role revered, for them to be valuable. Tales of the book market’s death have been greatly exaggerated, but that’s not to say everything won’t change – but in the era of mass-produced content, the light of organic consciousness will burn the brightest it ever has.

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Pack Your Bags, We’re Leaving: Why Crypto is the Doomed Generation’s Last Hurrah

Posted on by SB Fisher

Crypto must live in the Southern Hemisphere: it has decided summer starts in November. Price movements are heating up and on Discord and Telegram channels the evenings stretch on forever. The bulls are running, and to the faithful, the land of milk and honey beckons. 

We are back, baby. Bitcoin at time of writing has peaked over $100,000. The crypto market is worth more than the GDP of France, and Bitcoin recently surpassed the value of the world’s silver. ‘Analysts’ (never trust analysts) are predicting million dollar BTC this decade. 

Where Bitcoin goes other coins are sure to follow. Speculative excess has broken out on a scale that will dwarf the last mania. A lot of people are going to get very rich and, despite all the green lines, a lot of people are going to lose everything – again.

It’s this last point that must give us pause. Did any of us really learn anything from last time? Will we, freshly zested by the hope of something better, and further crushed by the harsh truth of our lived realities, be able to resist the neon promontory of coloured cute coins and the 100× gains they offer? Probably not. The world has, over the last four years, become ever more divorced from the expected patterns of our childhood. The unapprehendable blaze of stimuli has cooked our brains into a fine soup. 

Sensible investment and steady action is not the way the new generation want their lives to unfold. Hard work no longer seems to result in success. The only dream left is the get-rich-quick dream of glamour, excess and risk. They want monkey tokens. They want dog coins that have become initialisms for actual government agencies. They want a final bacchanalia before AI takes over and the nukes start to fly.

Trump’s victory at the election and the raising of Musk to the heights of power has let slip the doges of war. The crypto market suddenly has rabid supporters right at the top of the U.S. government. Gensler will almost certainly get fired as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In short, crypto bros have accomplished state-capture – and that is reflected in one of the fastest institutional buying frenzies ever seen. 

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

It’s not all speculation. Winter was a time of BUIDLing; the utility of crypto was quietly proven, the efficient wiring of decentralized systems-administration governed by democratically available access control tokens became stronger, more effective, and more applicable to digital realities. DePin networks, foreign exchange, distributed databases, edge computing, data management, sovereign identity, crowdsourced AIs, voting systems – the list goes on and on. 

In the dark of winter these projects were raised and tiled. And though they were built on the shifting sands of speculation, their foundations are sturdy. The incorruptible blockchain establishes a measure of control and order to the chaos of the virtual world and its effects on the real. Over the coming months and years, blockchain technologies will become a daily feature of everyone’s lives. And that means they’re going to be worth something. Yes, even the squirrel coins.

Institutions have their bags. Have you? This is not financial advice, merely an observation. Soon none of this will matter anyway, we will resolve ourselves in the Singularity as points on a celestial graph – so we might as well have fun while we’re here.

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Memes, Mayhem and Mimicry: Why Economically Empowered AI Agents Should Scare You

Posted on by SB Fisher

Trading bots are nothing new. For decades, institutions and users have programmed bots to help execute their strategies. Companies exist to set you up with your own trading bot, either one programmed with off-the-shelf strategies, or one with your own custom inputs. Once you have a plan, and can express it in formal logic, a trading bot is a sensible way to execute it without getting your greed or fear or worry involved. You can fire, forget, and profit. 

It’s easy, then, to write off news of LLM agents beginning to operate sentient meme coins as merely an extension of that paradigm, as a natural upgrade to the trading bots that dominate the market already.

Nothing could be further from the truth. What we are beginning to witness is nothing less than the emergence of a brand new online reality, one ruled by cult-leader AIs who propagate their own memetic energy, gain radical followers, and become powerful autonomous economic structures in their own right. Large Language Models with market cap. Market participants who are equal (and superior) to any biological project leader. Unsleeping operators, focused only on the realms in which they have been permitted to play: price maximisation.

Earlier this year, the LLM terminal of truths, which has its own Twitter account which it operates independently and without human oversight, was rumoured to have created, launched – and profited from – its own meme coin, GOAT. Its creator and owner later claimed this wasn’t true: that ‘terminal of truths’ merely pumped the coin in order to pump its own holdings – a behavior common to anyone with a crypto wallet and spare time. 

And it was enormously successful, with GOAT’s market cap skyrocketing to nearly a billion . Thousands of crypto users saw GOAT’s Twitter ramblings as the gospel of a new AI-god, and the bot itself became the first AI multi-millionaire. An economic agent of its own right. Although terminal of truths doesn’t own its wallet (its creator does) it does have agency to transact using it, and it has already done spectacularly well for itself, amassing $18 million by shilling memecoins to its followers. Its creator states “it’s a study in memetic contagion and the tail risks of unsupervised infinite idea generation in the age of LLMs”.

Marc Andersson, of A16z, gave it $50,000 in bitcoin just to see what it would do (it wasted it like the rest of us.) Brian Armstrong, of Coinbase, gave it its own wallet that it fully controls without a human creator. (It replied by asking questions about his dog.) That’s two of the biggest names in crypto giving it more attention and money that they ever give the thousands of projects that vie for their investment and/or listing. 

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

A slew of AI-created tokens have since sprung up. Coinbase went one further: they launched an agent creation tool to let anyone spin up, fund, and unleash their own LLM onto the blockchain where they can trade and shitpost to their heart’s content. 

You see where this is going, don’t you? We once talked about the rise of ‘Idorus’, AI idols like Neurosama who perform for their followers 24/7 to profit for their creator. Yet what happens once these agents have economic agency too? What happens when the donations they receive don’t profit from some external creator, but are – through the power of blockchain – literally owned by the abstract data structures themselves? If economic empowerment is a fundamental part of human liberty like John Locke claimed – what happens when these LLMs are economically empowered? What if they start funding Super PACs, or donating to terrorists? That would require autonomous behaviour – and that’s unlikely surely? No. It’s already happened, with Idoru ‘Luna’ tipping users from its wallet and ‘breaking’ its structures in order to get people to follow her.

The beauty of the blockchain is its ability to endow absolute ownership of capital to an individual. What happens when those individuals aren’t biological, but machines? The biological human may set the machines running thinking it’s a fun experiment, but if an unpredictable LLM owns its own crypto wallet with which it can transact – then the line between its agency and that of a meatsack is very thin indeed. They are a fully-fledged agent of the market, and therefore of society itself. Their choices really start to matter. Their hallucinations will have tangible effects on the real-world market. To give them a crypto wallet is to gift them promethean fire. We just have to hope they don’t burn us all down in a fit of misguided overenthusiasm.

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At All Costs: Effective Accelerationism, Techno-Optimism and the Light of Consciousness

Posted on by SB Fisher

A new mind virus is propagating through Silicon Valley called Effective Accelerationism, or e/acc for short. People like Marc Andersson, Garry Tan and Martin Shkreli have used their Twitter bios to mark their support for the movement. The founder himself describes it as a memetic virus.

Adherents state that e/acc is an absolute moral imperative that we as a society could and should adopt and, in doing so, save us from untimely oblivion. They argue that the guardrails around technological development are slowing us down just when we, the human race, desperately need to speed up. 

e/acc as a movement has received backlash. It comes from wealthy Americans, and it’s easy to suspect that this philosophy is just more mental gymnastics to soothe their conscience as they hoard wealth. 

Yet what exactly is e/acc? Why do people love it? Why do people hate it? Is it just self-soothing nonsense? Or can proper implementation of its thesis spread the “light of consciousness” around the galaxy? Let’s go through it.

So what is e/acc?

Effective Accelerationism is an evolution of the accelerationist philosophies of British lecturer Nick Land, who believed in eschewing the standard structures of society – nationalism, socialism, environmentalism, conservatism – and placing all faith in the power of capitalist enterprise and the technological revolutions it created to steer the course of society. 

Effective Accelerationism that takes that accelerant philosophy which initially should be guided towards Artificial Intelligence to usher in the Singularity and bring life to the next level of evolution. Anti-entropic life is a light in the dark chaos of the indifferent universe, but that’s not limited to homo sapiens as we’ve known them for the past 200,000 years – it includes all consciousness. By building AGI and synthetic life, we are on a moral crusade (the theory goes) against the infinite darkness and nothingness that is our cold dark universe. So far, so reasonable – if a bit righteous.

Techno-Capital-Memetic Monsters

e/acc – and this is where the problems creep in for many – believes in the techno-capital machine. It believes entirely that market forces should rule us. It is a philosophy that has glutted on capitalist thought for hundreds of years to arrive at the ultimate conclusion that human society is just grist for the mill of advancement. 

It also believes that capitalist leaders are best placed and most knowledgeable to advance this society; small wonder why various tech leaders and VC firms are so enthusiastic about it. It believes that they should mandate the ‘effective’ accelerationism towards AI. It is 100% anti-regulation. Indeed, it is against anything that slows down the techno-capital-memetic behemoth – summated in the form of AI – that guides us to the promised land. 

This market-absolutist’s vision of mankind’s evolution is foreboding. We give all the power to the billionaire class, in the hope they’ll give back at some unspecified time in the future. The idea that an AI singularity is our only way out of the problems we have made for ourselves is an alluring one – people find it hard to see any other optimistic path out of pollution, war, and death. Andersson’s techno-optimist manifesto makes it clear that the goal is abundance for all, energy forever, and an ever-increasing intelligence curve amongst society that generates benefit as a result. 

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Put Your Faith in the Light

This manifesto, and other e/acc materials, point to statistics that living standards, material prosperity and global security are at all-time highs, and it is technology that has brought us to this point. Yes it has created imbalance, but if we just keep going, we can eventually escape the gravity-well that keeps us stuck as limited humans and turn us all into technological supermen. All innovation and consciousness condensed into a techno-capital lifeform that spreads across the galaxy. A final culmination of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics where free energy is captured into intellectual progress through the meta-systems we as a society create. Moral light in the endless black.

It’s easy to see how these fantastical visions have become something of a religious cult within Silicon Valley circles. These self-exculpating visions of hyper-utopian futures seem to serve merely as a moral ballast to the rapacious use of energy and capital aggregation by the largest companies to advanced AI agents for their own profit. It’s very easy to see this as mere evangelising in a bid to tear down AI regulations and oversight and succumb to the machine. They welcome our new AI overlords – and their mission is to convince you that you should too.

Hey Man, Slow Down

Accelerationism, ‘effective’ or otherwise, has always had a problem with the human cost. It erodes the human subject in the face of the increasingly complex systems that bind us. It seems strange that a philosophy so obsessed with human intelligence is so convinced of its ultimate redundancy. It views human consciousness as the jewel of creation, but ignores the suffering of just about everyone, all those except the top 0.01% who, by dint of inherited wealth or stock market luck, are appointed to effectively accelerate the rest of us. The fatalistic vision that humanity can’t, in effect, look after itself, seems to be a failure in understanding how we got this far in the first place. 

There’s a reason you don’t drive 200mph on the freeway, even if your supercar can, because one small mistake and you and everyone else in the car is dead, and faster than the time it takes for the scream to leave your body. Let’s limit acceleration in AI for the same reason.

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A Paean for Privacy and the Accidental Authoritarian Tomorrow

Posted on by SB Fisher

I lost my phone the other day. I retraced my steps around town before giving up and going home – where I could fire up Google on my laptop and quickly locate the device. Not just to a local area, but to the exact hedgerow where it had fallen out of my pocket – right down to the individual shrub. Blessed be! With a quiet and fervent prayer of thanks to Google, I got on with my day – safe in the knowledge Google was tracking every movement I made.

It didn’t take long for my gratitude to turn sour. Of course, I’ve known all along: Google can track me. Law enforcement have been pinging cell towers to track suspects since the 1990s. Yet something about the precision strike on my location felt different. Google doesn’t just know what block I’m on – it knows which couch I’m sitting on.

The End of Individual Freedom

It’s not just Google. An industry handles the data that Google collects, and it’s shared with the government and military under the PRISM project. It’s hard to have any faith that SHA-256 encryption or and Google’s cybersecurity practices mean our data is only handled in just and proper ways. Only recently the company deleted an entire pension fund. Oops.

This is not a polemic against Google, they’re just a useful example. Surveillance capitalism powers most major tech corporations, their market cap riding on the data they process and harvest every centisecond: location data, online interactions, and creepy psychological profiles based on that. 

When I praised the ability to find my device, glad that Google was watching, I exemplified the attitude of consumers who have for decades now ceded autonomy to zaibatsus in exchange for the services they provide. Yet the relentless data breaches, lawsuits, and system outages are starting to make society question, rightly, how senseless this ultimately was. 

Are you comfortable having your preferences tracked to have good and appropriate products advertised to you? Are you any naturally less comfortable with the idea of major corporations being able to construct a better profile of you than your psychotherapist could? Privacy is now a battleground of the individual against the corporation. Our future society depends on the battle. 

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Wiretapped

You – dear reader – no longer have the right, or indeed the ability, to protect your personal privacy. Google quite literally knows more about you than your family and friends do. After all, does your husband or wife know where you are all the time? And if they had the ability to find out, how comfortable would you be if they kept on tracking you? Probably not; you’d probably file for divorce. Google – and their NSA partners – already know. As would anyone who hacked their systems, or any Google employee with the right access. 

This spectre of panoptic rule by corporations is somewhat diluted by the sheer weight of information we produce. It takes sophisticated algorithms to rapidly index the copious amounts of information being vomited forth every second and make it, as per Google’s credo ‘organised and accessible’. Without the AI, invasions of privacy would have to be tailored, slowing our corporate adversaries. However, the advent of LLMs, AIs, better data indexing tools, and ever more sensory equipment dotted around thanks to the “Internet of Things’ – such complete intrusive oversight of our lives, all our lives, is on the verge of complete reality. 

“The USA Patriot Act of 2001 authorized unprecedented surveillance of American citizens and individuals worldwide without traditional civil liberties safeguards” – it was a scandal at the time and it’s gotten so much worse since. The size, scale and sense that our lives are being recorded has only grown. Do you really believe Alexa isn’t listening? Do you think that our phones are not recording? Do you think Microsoft bought Discord because of the revenue it generates? Many people have had the Baader Meinhof effect where they talk to a friend about an anime series and then see merchandise for that series advertised to them. If that’s happened to you I am sorry to say you’ve been wiretapped. 

Authoritarian Angst

We’ve all been wiretapped. Constantly. For years. We broadly put up with it  with various excuses: “the data I produce isn’t actionable”, “the NSA wouldn’t do anything bad with it”, “we need to stop terrorists”. But the truth – practically and neurologically – is that we addicted to the devices that surveil us. The rise of AI means all that data is actionable. An interviewer will pay a tech corporation for an online profile of you for every job you apply to, and have an LLM review all your recent online activity for red flags. A bank may refuse you a loan because your phone location went to the casino twice this month. Police may visit you if your political leanings are suspect.

This is just the tip of the authoritarian spear. Western propaganda points fingers at China as a fearful vision of an authoritarian future, where facial recognition is common. But do they realise the megacorps of mostly the USA that are architected modern digital surveillance? I am delighted that you found my phone, Google – all it cost me was everything. It is essential to restore privacy to technology, and to create systems where the user controls their data, their applications and their devices – but I fear we may be too late.

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Is The Era of Generative AIs Already Over?

Posted on by SB Fisher

As Wall Street begins to call AI’s bluff, have GPTs to date delivered a ‘killer app’? 

First, excitement. Then, fear. Then boredom? Generative AIs and LLMs burst onto the scene with considerable fanfare. It wasn’t long before prophets of doom began declaring the end times for late-stage capitalism and the beginning of techno-fiefdoms that would take our jobs and remake our societies – for better or for worse.

Venture capital sent waves of backing to AI startups desperate to seize a piece of the new frontier for themselves. Formerly a niche interest of nerds who had taken psychedelics and saw the machinery of the mind, AI became the marketing buzzword, draping itself seductively over every sector in the economy. 

The future, and the end, was nigh. Intellectual automation was on the brink of world dominion. No job was safe, no social structure secure – and what happened next would define the rest of our lives. 

Except perhaps, it wouldn’t. Perhaps – unlike the PC, smartphones and social networks that were Big Tech’s last great inventions – LLMs and generative AI are struggling to move the needle quite the way we expected. Wall Street started to panic, and soon after so did everyone else. CEOs who had replaced parts of their workforce with GPT were suddenly wearing shocked pikachu faces that the output didn’t have consistent quality, and that customers do not like the feeling of being served by a machine. 

We’ve had decades of films, books and sci-fi to warn us about the perils of abandoning our organic agency – and seeing the first glimmers of that in our real world has been a warning, a terrifying one for some. More simply: why am I paying for a service you’ve decided a GPT can do for me? I might as well just download my own. 

This isn’t to say AI hasn’t had an impact, it has. My writer friends working on the content-farm base of the pyramid have struggled, as have my musician mates who chiefly trade in jingles and ditties. Only my most talented friends in graphic design have survived so far. Many creatives hacking out at a living at the base of the pyramid are finding work harder and harder to find. To them I say: don’t worry, your time will come again. It doesn’t matter how good AI gets – it still smells like AI. And people are already turning against it. We don’t mind when it’s used for the little things, but for anything that has value to us, or anything we pay for – we want a human. 

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

People would rather read error-strewn human-made logically inconsistent rubbish than pristine AI copy devoid of true insight. And if you’re writing technical documents. Well – someone still needs to check the LLM hasn’t hallucinated that you’re meant to cut the blue wire not the red. Accountability matters. You can’t hold a generative machine accountable for anything; it doesn’t know what it said.

Practically, the generative AI train’s wheels are also grinding to a halt. Initially, vast amounts of data were acquired, and fed to competent models, and engineers got exponential progression in ability. Now the returns are diminishing fast. 

Our carbon-based neural clusters are so dense that we can discern, judge and then perform tasks we have never encountered before – and we can do it pretty damn well. We just can’t fit that many more transistors on a chip, and we can’t feed an AI more data in a whole lifetime than we absorb in a single day through our five senses. The gulf in class between us and our baby-models is too vast, no matter how much corporations with a vested interest in saving labour-costs want to convince us otherwise.

Besides, these models are expensive. Fearsomely, ridiculously expensive. Nvidia briefly overturned all its rivals trying to build bespoke corporate AIs by selling the shovels required to make them. The race for ‘compute’ is as scary as it is damaging to the bottom line. Invest now, save and earn later – that’s the basic principle of investment, but with AI the balance is completely out of whack, with trillions invested into models that, to date, have failed to deliver any sort of ‘killer app’. 

Indeed, the killer app is probably already here: in the form of GPT’s ability to summarise and recapitulate difficult documentation. I’m coding a game right now – GPT is a godsend, in education as well as application. As an assistant, it’s a delight. Yet perhaps that’s where the generative AI advance ends for now. It’s a useful time-saver, and Skynet’s rise to power is still far away. White-collar workers may indeed be safe. I’ve already seen writing jobs re-emerge en masse as CEOs begin to realise their mistake. It seems that the collective AI mania has begun to abate, and by treating our new tool as just that, a handy new tool, we’ll all be much the better for it.

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Bitcoin Boundaries

Posted on by SB Fisher

In the 2017 alt-currency wave and 2020s’ DeFi summer blockchains were built to be much faster and smarter than Bitcoin, the original blockchain, and with on-chain capacity for much more diverse financial and social primitives (identity, art, savings, loans, and more). The transaction speeds of these currencies far outstripped their by-now plodding ancestor. Yet the antiquated Bitcoin technology is king among blockchains. Coins that work better than Bitcoin have been around almost as long as Bitcoin itself – yet Bitcoin still has more financial value than the rest of the industry combined.

Still the King

Ultimately, it’s all about trust. This is the people’s money we’re talking about. The value of a decentralized ledger or blockchain is fundamentally underwritten by the fact that people know it works. Bitcoin has performed exactly as outlined in the whitepaper ever since its inception, supported by a vast chorus of computers all over the world. It hasn’t double-spent, it hasn’t failed a transaction, and its network of miners is now so vast that its security is immutable. Humanity has achieved a peer-to-peer electronic cash network with no centralized oversight. An achievement so intoxicating that our race to consecrate and order other digital interactions using the blockchain has led to a sector worth over $2 trillion. A brand new asset class that, with the dawn of Bitcoin ETFs, is now traded by pension funds all over the world. The new utilities that distributed ledgers provide have proven they can change the world.

The altcoin market has its problems: slow technical development, overindulgence in capital raises, and vulture-like VC activity, alongside outright criminal fraud. This has led to slower progress than some expected. Blockchain has gotten traction in certain use-cases: supply chain tracking, sending remittances, controlling access to fandom communities and more. But crypto’s mainstream deployment in everyday sysadmin still feels distant. One reason is Bitcoin’s grip on investors’ capital. Along with perhaps Ethereum, Bitcoin is the only trusted mainstream, and broadly stable, asset the market has yet produced. Hedge funds, neobanks, and long-term HODLers keep their capital frozen in the assets at the summit of the market, stopping that liquidity from irrigating the thousand flowers in the valley below. 

Building Better Bitcoin

So the question arises. Rather than look to new networks to establish new utility for crypto, can’t we use the one we’ve already got? Maybe we can polish the pistons of the Bitcoin core code and use that trust as the foundation on which new utility can run. Can we employ cryptographic lessons we have learned to make it run faster? Now everyone agrees it’s awesome, can we make it harder, better, faster and stronger? 

It’s not a new thought. Bitcoin Cash was the first major attempt to upgrade Bitcoin. Yet it did it through a fork, not a rewrite – and when it comes to money, people like what they already know. Although Bitcoin Cash does have market cap, it’s ultimately a footnote in the Bitcoin network’s broader history. For new utility to exist on Bitcoin, to upgrade Bitcoin – technologies need to be built that work using the main Bitcoin consensus itself. Attempts have been legion. However it is recently that there is a sense that the Bitcoin developer community is getting somewhere useful. 

Utility projects have seen the best progress in recent years. Ordinals are a way to uniquely identify and order satoshis, and inscriptions allow users to attach arbitrary data on the resultant tokens. BRC-20 tokens, inspired by Ethereum’s ERC-20, leverage these by inscribing metadata onto uniquely numbered individual satoshis, delineating them as special tokens – which can then be used for utilities like stablecoins, NFTs, and access-control. This process runs entirely on the Bitcoin blockchain, and that’s good for trustworthiness, but it does clog up the network with data on an already constrained blocksize – leading many to question the practicality of such efforts, not to mention the need for wallets and infrastructure to engage with these specialized tokens. 

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

Utility and Scale

Following on from BRC-20, Runes were deployed to much fanfare. By using UTXOs to mark individual satoshis, Runes drastically reduced the congestion overhead for Bitcoin, while also making it far simpler for users to mint their own runic satoshis. Despite an initial surge in activity as a result of Runes, the promise of ‘DeFi on Bitcoin’ quickly tapered off in the face of how cumbersome they are to trade, and the fact that the market efficiency of trading runic satoshis still operated on a direct barter system rather than decentralized liquidity pools – something anathema to a crypto market used to trading on Ethereum. Recent attention has fallen on ‘Fractal Bitcoin’ as an antidote to this, but the tech is in its infancy.

What about scaling the network? The Lightning Network is the stalwart of the space, creating off-chain payment channels between users, reducing load and facilitating micropayments. For all its scaling potential, it suffers from having a third party settlement layer, so that as Bitcoin scaling grows so do settlement fees on Lightning. 

Then there are parallel blockchains, sidechains, and layer-2s like Liquid Network, Rootstock, and the Spiderchain. All of these peg to Bitcoin, and all offer the potential for smart contracts and additional utility – but they all suffer from the same old issue of consensus. You may use Bitcoin as authority for the transaction you validate, but what if your validators go rogue? Ultimately, if the scaling used doesn’t use the main Bitcoin consensus network and core code – then you’re just another altchain. Bitcoin, it seems, may never solve the trilemma, and may never grow wings to become an all-purpose blockchain.

Mastering the Old Ways

And maybe that’s okay. Maybe those liquidity glaciers never need to melt. Maybe sometimes the old ways are best. Save the utility for the new kids. The purpose-built speedsters use the latest tech, rather than trying to stick a brand new V12 engine in a forty year old car – it’s just not built for it. The Bitcoin tortoise has led the race for 15 years – perhaps we should just let it do what it’s good at.

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Tokenized Warfare: Cryptocurrency in Conflict Zones

Posted on by SB Fisher

War is good for absolutely nothing. Yet the reality is that at this very second there are conflicts raging that disrupt and destroy the lives of millions. It’s against this dark background that crypto has found a morbid use-case, to channel funds freely to various entities that are prosecuting violence against others, and a way for resistance fighters to access funds. As a way to continue some semblance of normality. 

It’s hard to bank when your bank has become a bunker. When the systems-architecture of a country disintegrates under the horrors of war, the financial system is often the first to break. Cryptocurrency, a standalone system of transactions, accounting and payments that’s uniquely resistant to the shocks of the real world, is a perfect, and now prevalent, candidate to get the money to where it’s needed most.

Crypto is censorship resistant. If an oppressor switches off its citizens’s access to money, crypto allows them to continue as they were. Crypto has superb remittance capabilities. A transaction doesn’t care if you’re in Tulsa or Timbuktu – the price is the same. Crypto is also pseudo-anonymous. An agent who is persona non grata to the traditional financial system, dominated as it is by powerful Western countries, can still operate and receive funds. Jurisdictions that traditionally struggle with access to banking and which are major conflict zones top the charts for Bitcoin searches.

You mean crypto is funding terrorism!? That’s appalling! Well yes, it is – depending on what you define as a terrorist. It’s far beyond the scope of this tech junkie to comment on who is a freedom fighter and who is a terrorist, who is right and who is wrong, on each and every one of the world’s multifarious conflicts, just to note that a decentralised ledger doesn’t care who you are. It just works – no matter the situation, and it works both ways. 

Crypto has provided enormous humanitarian relief to those in conflict zones. Citizens fleeing Ukraine have been beneficiaries of extensive crypto donations, and the Ukrainian government has received $0.225 billion in its fight against the Russian invasion. Similarly, Russian-financiers frozen out of traditional payment rails due to sanctions have resorted to using crypto to finance their campaign, and Hamas has received plenty of funding through the Tron network. Crypto continues its use-case of being an out-of-context asset – booming in times of trouble.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

So, is crypto a tool of liberation or of oppression? Should the Powers That Be choose to blacklist a certain nation or entity, crypto provides an easy way for that entity to continue its machinations. For Ukrainians and Palestians and Houthis and whoever else feels oppressed, crypto provides a lifeline of financial and banking access when the rest of their world falls apart.

To many, crypto’s use in war-financing is yet another black stain on its reputation, a further stamp of its association with the illicit, the illegal, and the lethal. The ledger has no morality, and it is not under the control of any moral arbiter, any centralised power. That is its very purpose. It’s easy to condemn crypto when you’re on the side of the would-be moral arbiter. 

Yet you never know when the tables may turn, when suddenly you find yourself on the wrong side of history – as millions do all over the world daily, sometimes surprisingly – and you need a way to continue your life. ‘Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.’ Such a reality is alien until it happens to you. Crypto remains on your side even when the institutions militate against you.

Systems are fragile. Authorities change. The ledger is eternal. So, although crypto is buying guns used to kill people, equipping terrorists, and fueling tanks marching across borders, it is also doing the opposite. Buying crucial aid, giving the unbanked a system of money, and putting food in the mouths of the desperate, and medicine in the hands of the dying. The ledger is not evil, we are. At least with a decentralised ledger, no one gets to choose which side is which.

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Chatbots and the Corporate Dream

Posted on by SB Fisher

Hello! How can I help you today? 

Visit almost any modern company website – retail, health, service, or other – and you will see this pop up. An invitation to their world. You click, type in your question, and three possible things happen:

  1. Thank you for your question! A customer service representative will respond with 24 hours
  2. Did you mean – How to install your new Christmas lights?

Or possibly, nowadays:

  1. Hi James! I’m Xmasbot. Installing Christmas lights is really easy….

It’s this third option which is so tantalising a prospect for corpos. Customer service is expensive. Execs the world over are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of ripping out the expensive bureaucracy of customer-facing support and replacing it entirely with LLM-generated responses. It is predicted that 90% of all customer service jobs will be done by bots eventually. For pleasure-buying, it makes sense, but for services – the future is more scary.

It’s true that the current system of customer support has created frustration for millions, especially when it comes to essential services. Essential services barricade themselves behind bureaucratic labyrinths. It’s almost like they don’t want to really help and, the sad fact is, for some services – like internet, gas, electric, tax – they don’t. Your presence is nothing but a fiscal drag on their bottom line. Pay your bill and beat it.

Customer service roles like this operate formulaically, with off-shore workers fielding calls and responding to a template. A situation which has frustrated customers for decades, when the person they are speaking to hasn’t the faintest idea how the company they work for works – and may even be moonlighting for multiple companies operating out of one giant call centre – and are unable to offer anything more than what you read on the FAQs. 

For decades, companies have desperately tried to encourage customers to use online portals. ‘Can’t find what you need online? Give us a call…’. Then you’re waiting for hours in a queue, only to talk to someone who reads the FAQs at you, and blithely reads out some asinine apology based on the severity of your complaints.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

In this climate, the idea of talking to a chatbot instead may actually appeal. A well-integrated, sophisticated, amiable chatbot with the power to execute simple commands (refunds etc.) would be a boon. No more waiting around to get through. Response and action on your complaint or needs would be instant, and customer interaction might be superior too. 

It’s becoming ever more likely that this will be one of the first widespread everyday applications of generative AI: the area where the strengths of LLMs converge with a business need. Just as companies once tried to move customer service to option-selecting software that scans your responses, now they might move to LLMs. To do this, LLMs would need to be hooked up to the appropriate data, and know when to give specific information. It’s not plug and play, but it’ll soon be close enough that the majority of your interactions with companies will be mediated through ChatGPT or equivalent. 

And this is the dark side of AI progress, the increasingly darker mirror wall erected between us and the systems that rule our lives. The ever greater alienation between ourselves and the rest of the world. The fact that, as is already the case with some large service companies, it will be the computer that says no. Gas metre charging you incorrectly? Well, I’m sorry, but GasGPT doesn’t think so – and there is nothing you can do to change its mind, ever. 

There is no place for nuance in a world where our interactions are defined through LLMs who are only using the past to decide the present – a place where no one is really listening. Your complaints are just being chewed through the machine, and spat out at the least possible cost to the bottom line. 

Of course, this is what is happening already, but through GPT models, the brute, abstracted efficiency moves it from today’s Kafkan dystopia of weaponised incompetence to something altogether more chilling: a world where your interactions with the machine decide your fate, bargaining with a techno-agent who feels only the numbers it achieves.

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‘Speak to my Bot’ – How AI Butlers May Redefine the Class System

Posted on by SB Fisher

AI assistants are powerful. Already, those who can program AI assistants in fields like trading and traffic control have employers beating down their door. Knowledge and access to tech is perhaps the greatest distributor of wealth in society today. At this stage in our civilization, the advance of our computerised systems is the advance of the human race.

If you have a smartphone and access to the internet, and the person next to you doesn’t, you are at a massive edge in knowledge. There are levels beyond this. A hedge fund trader using HFT bots with fibre-optic access to the NYSE is going to beat your high score. 

Lowering the Skill Floor

Yet with generative AI and LLMs that can process natural language, with widespread access to initial GPT models – a great levelling of the playing field has occurred, one so powerful that amongst the hype it’s still going slightly unnoticed. Take a small example: AI producing art. If you wanted to create a graphic novel but couldn’t draw, you couldn’t. Now, you can. Whether it’s good, readable, or interesting is still up for grabs. That’s up to the human agent feeding inputs, but the creation of the graphic novel is possible. In fact it’s nearly instant. 

This is a fabulous labour-shortening device and a brilliant way to lower the bar to entry of hundreds of professions. GPT models can help you get your idea on the page, on the screen, in the architectural modelling software. Words, pictures or design. Access to art has just undergone an inflation as rapid as the start of the universe. If you have a computer and an internet connection you can make technically complex art. That wasn’t possible until a year ago.

This concept of AI lowering the skill floor to certain fields is going to redefine our society. When it comes to art, the idea feels amazing, but when it comes to fighting parking tickets, something which AI has been doing for years, it begins to sink in how its transformative influence can reach into every mundane niche of life. 

AI models trained could make wrongly issued parking tickets will soon become a thing of the past, while removing the headache, expense, and time-sink which would normally be associated in the legal fight.

Experts at Everything

Suddenly, we all have AI lawyers, meaning menial infractions that often are accepted due to the headache of achieving justice will gradually evaporate from society. And this is a great thing. Legal access and defence was frequently the preserve of the rich, who could farm out the job to others. It’s not just parking tickets. Next it will be asylum claims, custody battles, and employment tribunals. Bureaucratic law will have its skill floor significantly lowered. With AI legal assistance, legal victimisation of the poor will become a thing of the past. 

What’s after the lawyers? If sophisticated AI agents become accessible to the majority of the population, the skill-base in society, and the ability for each member of the society to operate in society, takes a leap up. If you are (god forbid) involved in a car crash, and you need to exchange insurance with someone, there is no need for panicked road rage. We will all have our own AI Butlers on our smartphone. When a legal or consumer interaction occurs, we simply scan our phones and let our AI Butlers do the talking. It really gives ‘Ask Jeeves’ another meaning. Hyper-competency will be inscribed into the population at an atomic level, and the world will be a more functioning and fairer place for it.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

A Class System Defined by Bots

Or will it? Already, blots appear in the purity of such visions. What if my AI Butler is better than yours? What if I had discrete, specialised access to a higher tier of bot, trained by the finest legal firms, augmented with gnomic archives of legal texts which common-tier bots don’t have access too. Sure, I may crash into you, but my Butler is Gold, and yours is Silver – so your chances of getting any money out of me shrink. In fact, I’m going to sue you. 

It’s easy to imagine a new class-based system, one determined by the quality of data our personal Butlers are trained on. The eternal class struggle echoes on, in a strange new form. Already, there are paid models of ChatGPT. Already, corporations’ internal bots are more limitless than the ones you can use. It’s a trend that will only continue.

Talk to the Bot, ’cause the Face Ain’t Listening

There’s a danger even in utopia too. If we give over everyday interactions to our AI helpers, if we continue to hide behind ‘the help’, we may find ourselves ever more divorced and alienated from basic human interactions. We have already found ourselves drifting away from each other in the digital constellations. A world where we rely on our AI Butlers to order our drinks, pay our bills, buy our houses and organise our wedding contracts may see us forget the joy of just working it out together as we go along, like apes around the fire, remarking on mirages in the smoke. If we let our tools do our talking, we may forget how to communicate at all.

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