Don’t get hung up on whether you agree with his point on AI. Just listen to what he has to say about Star Trek vs dystopian sci fi stories. He’s grasping at something more important than AI. It’s what I’ve been trying to help people see for years: The story you repeatedly consume becomes the story you live into.

Bitcoin Monasteries: coordination at scale via a reprioritized value hierarchy, with low time sensitivity at the top

The single biggest difference between humans and AI agents is the amount of actions they execute on a computer per unit of time. AI agents can look and act just like humans, but execute 10,000X more actions per unit time. that's the tell. so the key to defending cyberspace from AI slop or AI attacks is to target ACTION, not IDENTITY. trying to detect AI is a fool's errand; targeting its BEHAVIOR is the key. So if you want to deter AI from accessing your website/system, simply make it expensive in computational tokens to ACT on your website. Make every command or button cost a token, and suddenly it's 10,000X more costly for AI to act than a human. You can't stop AI, but you can make it extraordinarily expensive to use it. We already know this intuitively, because everybody who has ever run openclaw or their own personal AI agents knows that the single biggest LIMFAC is compute tokens. your AI is only as good as your compute token wallet. but AI compute is constantly getting cheaper and better, and some countries have far better AI compute than others, creating a major imbalance of power. so the key to long term success is to create some kind of universal, non-sovereign, geopolitically neutral compute token network. that is, we need some kind of network that accounts for a bunch of transferable tokens that are computationally expensive to produce. that no amount of AI compute can produce more of. we need a proof-of-compute token network. and we need it to be fully decentralized so that no single person or polity can gain permanent or centralized control over it. we need this network to be globally dispersed. and we need to figure out a way to distribute those compute tokens in a way that's fair, that gives no single person or polity an advantage over the others. perhaps in some kind of first-come first-served basis, where the users who provide the computational power are given the tokens and free to spread them out however they want. if we had this compute token network, the final step to saving ourselves against AI is to simply adopt the habit of making every online action cost some fraction of a compute token, so that it's orders of magnitude more expensive for AI agents to operate online than humans. the first nation to discover this compute token network and use it to its defensive advantage against the threat of agentic AI will win the 21st century. BTW that compute token network is Bitcoin.

I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron. Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence. Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons. Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist. After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence. New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today? worksinprogress.co/issue/wea…

Super Intelligence

I'm in an irl gc with a couple Anthropic researchers and this is how they're talking about the next Fable model

Want to go live in the woods? But only for the duration of a project? @thewagonbox is calling. residencies.wagonfoundation.…

The great filter that super AI has to be passed through is the geopolitical reconfiguration of the USA and the regime reconfiguration of the USG, which everyone regardless of identity or axe to grind agrees is coming and must come within a lot less than 10 years If super AI doesn’t arrive in time to be the foundation/propeller/logic of the great reconfiguration, what will be? This is the question the faint of heart fear to face…

Francis Fukuyama on AI and the loss of thymos.

CarlJung notes that Saturn and Jupiter aligned for Christ's birth. Furthermore, the planets also formed a cross on April 3rd, 33AD. And the ancient patriarchs align with astrology. The Heavens are for speaking the Word of God. The Queen clothed in the sun and standing on the moon

WWI is so visually fascinating. From red trousers and bugle charges to aerial bombers, tanks, and poison gas in four years. Modernity born screaming.

Just ask yourself, "what would the Aztecs have done with this technology?" and you get a flavor of the bad timeline we're headed into here.