AI, Blockchain, and How Humans Make It to the Future
Hey Evolutionaries!
This week there is no livestream.
Instead, I am sharing a new article which kicks off a series of posts about the new world. And I am linking the recording for last week’s livestream.
I will be back LIVE next Sunday. Hope to see you then.
Cheers!
Misha
What’s in this email:
New article: AI, Blockchain, and How Humans Make it to the Future
Livestream recording: Big AI’s Plans to Control Everything, & How to Escape
AI, Blockchain, and How Humans Make It to the Future
Adapting is Capitulation
The prevailing belief is that we must swiftly and wholeheartedly adapt to AI. But what if adapting is not the answer? What if, instead of securing our future, this slowly diminishes us, as individuals and as a species, leading to our eventual enslavement?
Adapting means contorting ourselves to fit systems built and controlled by the tech giants. We’ve come to know them well—Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and now Nvidia and OpenAI. Their systems are optimized not for our well-being, but for their profit. It’s naive, even stupid, to think they exist to make our lives better. While they offer an ever-expanding range of seemingly magical services and conveniences, ultimately, they serve only the interests of their owners and investors. They are designed to maximize engagement, surveillance, and data extraction. As we adapt to them, we are trained to conform, behave, and unwittingly serve their purposes.
In the 21st century, the maxim “adapt or perish” needs a major rethink. In response to AI, if you adapt, you will perish.
We were never meant to be serfs for machines and their overlords. Humans are creative and ingenious creatures. We are built to imagine a better future, design new possibilities, and actualize a world where we can thrive.
Evolve or Perish
As exponentially powerful technological systems rise, expand around and under us, then quickly close in and take control of our lives, we stand at a precipice. To survive, a massive shift in human behavior is required. Our instinctive response is to adapt. But that doesn’t just put us on track for a dystopian future; it shoves us right into it.
No. We must turn the very notion of adapting on its head. The maxim needs to become evolve or perish.
Evolving is about becoming a new kind of human. A version of us that’s capable of meeting the 21st century head-on. Humans have the unique ability to think about thinking, to observe ourselves, and to consciously redesign our environments on purpose. This capacity to step outside of ourselves is at the core of human agency.
In the face of AI’s relentless advancing, it’s time we exercise that agency. Our survival depends on us leaving behind our eagerness to just react and replicate. We must create, innovate, and actively engage in shaping what comes next. Not just passively respond, not just conform to the technology systems that seek to consume us.
AI has already surpassed us in tasks like writing, coding, diagnosing, and designing. Many see this as a full-blown crisis. But it could well be a massive opportunity for humanity to step into higher roles, the ones we were always meant to fill.
It’s time to evolve from task-doers into delegators, from laborers into innovators, from cogs in a machine into the masterminds of a new world.
As we enter the future, we must become architects of intelligence.
We, not Big Tech, must become the deployers of AI.
It’s a comprehensive shift from the old ways of just going along with the system, the programming, the falling in line with the powers that be.
Architecture is Destiny
But we are not empty-handed.
Remarkable new technologies and tools are becoming available. New architecture for a new future.
AI itself is not our enemy. The real risk is not AI’s power, but the few entities who own this new intelligence that can access all human knowledge and move at the speed of light. Centralization, underpinned by the tech giants, is the true threat to human agency.
The key to moving forward lies not in resisting AI, but in rethinking how intelligence is built, governed, and owned. As visionary technologist and investor Chris Dixon writes in Read Write Own, “Network design is destiny.”
How a network (or AI system) is architected determines who controls it, who benefits from it, and who is left out in the cold.
Let’s step back for a moment and understand how we got here.
The internet revolutionized nearly every aspect of human industry and interaction, transferring it all to digital networks owned by a handful of tech giants.
Generative AI is a product of that internet. AI models owned by those tech giants are trained on data scraped from the five billion plus internet users. The models are then distributed via those same systems to those same users, who then pay for a product that continually harvests their input and data.
The Big Tech version of the internet was and is predatory. Now, AI is accelerating the capture and control of all human output—our knowledge, our creativity, our very identities.
We stand at the brink of a future where we, as humans, have neither ownership nor agency.
Some believe that the answer to AI is to ban or heavily regulate it.
But the last two decades have been proof enough that this is not the solution. The answer to predatory centralized technology is a new architecture, one that “can’t be evil.”
Tools, Protocols, and Human Rights
In late 2008, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin in direct response to the failures of the traditional financial system, laid bare by the global financial crisis. He envisioned money without middlemen—a peer‑to‑peer digital cash system free from banks and other third parties. Satoshi saw centralized institutions as corruptible, prone to censorship, debasement, and moral hazard. Bitcoin replaced trust in institutions with cryptographic proof, decentralization, and a fixed supply, giving people sovereignty over their money and shielding it from the control of any single entity.
Since the advent of Bitcoin, the blockchain ecosystem has grown and expanded into the technological solution for a wide range of challenges humans face due to existing centralized systems.
In 2014, Vitalik Buterin created Ethereum to take blockchain beyond money—using it to decentralize applications, agreements, and entire platforms. He designed it to replace corporate gatekeepers with smart contracts that enforce rules transparently and without permission.
Entirely new primitives emerged—NFTs, ERC‑20 tokens, stablecoins, DAOs, DeFi building blocks—and unlocked whole industries: decentralized finance, NFT marketplaces, play‑to‑earn gaming, on‑chain identity and reputation systems, tokenized real‑world assets, decentralized social platforms, and prediction markets.
Bitcoin sought to solve the problem of centralized control over money by replacing banks with a peer‑to‑peer digital currency. Ethereum tackled the deeper problem of centralized control over applications, platforms, and agreements.
By 2020, the blockchain ecosystem had solved money liberation, platform liberation, and was well on its way to being the foundation for an open, interoperable digital world where power flows back to users.
Blockchain is already being used to redesign social media, finance, investing, money & payments, messaging, and almost every aspect of digital life. The goal? To architect a future that belongs to everyday people.
In 2025, as we face the existential threat posed by centralized AI, blockchain provides infrastructure that allows us to reclaim our agency, our rights, and our ownership.
Blockchain can ensure that humans are compensated and credited for the data and content they provide. It can return control of knowledge and creativity to the hands of the people.
With AI architected on blockchain protocols we get the incredible benefits of AI without the predatory mechanisms of Big Tech.
And a new wave of blockchain protocols is emerging to decentralize the entire AI stack:
Gensyn is democratizing AI development, decentralizing access to machine learning compute, and removing Big Tech from its position as gatekeeper.
EigenCloud is shifting control of cloud infrastructure from centralized entities to crypto‑economically secured networks owned by users.
Story Protocol is building infrastructure for an open intellectual property economy, empowering creators to own, license, and monetize their work without the interference of middlemen or legal friction.
Poseidon is a protocol‑powered decentralized data layer that lets users own, protect, and profit from the real‑world data that powers next‑generation AI.
Yupp is creating an open, onchain feedback loop for AI by rewarding users for evaluating and improving models, turning human judgment into a transparent, auditable, and renewable economic resource.
NEAR AI is building user-owned AI and pioneering a future where individuals and communities govern the AI models that shape their digital lives.
World Network is building a privacy‑preserving proof‑of‑human protocol, using biometric verification to distinguish humans from AI at a global scale while keeping identities private.
Together, these protocols re‑architect AI so it’s open, verifiable, and user‑controlled. They break the monopoly grip of Big Tech and ensure that the intelligence of the future serves people, and not just the owners of a few mega‑platforms.
The Role We Play
But even the most elegant technology systems will fail us if we don’t change the way we approach them.
Blockchain offers ownership, autonomy, and privacy—the human rights of the digital age. But these rights are meaningless unless we, as users, change how we think about and use technology. Blockchain can provide powerful new possibilities, but we must evolve to meet its potential. We must step into our autonomy, our sovereignty, and our privacy. These are not just abstract ideals. They are the foundation of the future we must build.
The architecture of tomorrow’s intelligence is being determined right now.
Will it be closed or open?
Will it be owned by a few, or shared by many?
Will it extract value from us, or evolve with us?
Will AI work for us, or be used to dominate us?
It may seem, at times, that the forces against us are insurmountable; that the future is already written. It’s not.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Alan Kay, pioneering computer scientist.
The time to act is now. We must choose technology that serves all humans, not the interests of a tiny few and then create the future ourselves.
And to do that, we must evolve how we think, what we believe, and who we are.
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Very nice job connecting the dots. In many ways blockchain technology is needed to increase trust in AI. Authentication, chain of trust, non-repudiation. Decentralization is a welcome side-effect. Well done!