AI’s heretical question

Cryptocurrencies go back to the digital-gold, sovereign-individual era of the nineties. People like Nick Szabo and subcultures like the cypherpunks asked a simple, heretical question: “What actually is money, and why can’t it be this?” That question didn’t need 2008 to exist. There was already a minority coalescing around it. But the financial crash of 2008 made it a mainstream concern.

The events of 2008 provided the counter-positioning of Bitcoin and empowered Ethereum, the extensible world computer. The heretical question plus the crisis event generated swarms of missionaries and mercenaries, coupling the dynamics of unregulated finance with the rollout of novel, globally distributed cryptographic infrastructure.

The same pattern is playing out in computing and intelligence right now.

The capital behind AI isn’t cute SaaS cheques. It’s government-balance-sheet money. Trillions are on the line. And for good reason; the capabilities (realised and latent) are astounding. So states are starting to treat compute the way they used to treat oil: a strategic asset to subsidise, hoard, and secure the supply chains for. Their defence budgets are really a bet on autonomous systems. Autonomous systems are themselves a bet on AI. And AI, right now, runs on exactly one computing paradigm. A foundation from the fifties.

That paradigm is young. Silicon, transistors, the von Neumann architecture; the whole engineered stack is eighty-ish years old. It is not physical law.

Young means revisable. Open to change. Quantum, analog, thermodynamic, biophysical; these alternative paradigms aren’t sci-fi, or cope. They have heritage. They’re evolutionary branches that got KO’d early and are now being reevaluated because the stakes are colossal.

Whether scaling does in fact hit a wall or not is irrelevant. This much money and this much power riding on one bet practically guarantees that someone, somewhere, will go back and double-check the foundations, and discover alternatives with surer routes to victory. Which is what this is ultimately about. Victory.

Cryptocurrencies blew up because an explosive, heretical question boomed off the back of world economic pressure. Entire non-Von-Neumann computing and intelligence stacks, from base hardware to edge applications, are under arguably greater pressure today. But unlike crypto, which didn’t manage to unseat the Goliath of fiat with a parallel buildout, alternative computing and intelligence paradigms might have the power to catalyse a straight and irreversible cutover.