Humanity Spring 2026
The two most significant technological advancements1 of our modern existence, in order, are AI and crypto2.
This schematic identifies the direction + magnitude of the effect of AI and crypto on six types of people, in terms of high-low skill vs agency.
躺平 ("permanent underclass"): AI + crypto make things worse. Stupider, more slop, more opportunities for vice and degradation
"wagies" benefit from AI on net, but become worse in terms of agency. Crypto won't change their existence in any meaningful way, as crypto will become just another kind of credit card or ETF
"nepo babies" are not affected by AI, except inasmuch as AI impacts the world writ large. But brypto, the financialized-gamified version of cryptocurrencies, boosts the have-vs-have-nots nature of asset accumulation, tax avoidance3, and leverage
the other person types in my schematic (grindset Founder, Man in the Arena, cracked devs) are more unique, and only relevant to the daily life of most people inasmuch as the average 19th century human being was touched by Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or John Rockefeller. There's going to be fewer than 5000 people globally4, who truly master AI enough to extract outsized value, as opposed to being mild beneficiaries in a competitive landscape, or paying consumers
the third most significant technology is the Green Revolution, which led to both 1) the American grocery store supply chain, which led to the fall of the Iron Curtain; 2) quality of life miracles in China (100s of millions of people lifted out of subsistence farming), India, Southeast Asia, parts of Latin America and Africa; and 3) the crowding and global inter-connectedness that produced the Covid-19 global pandemic. Note that investment theses based on the Green Revolution thesis would likely have been wildly misleading↩
I mean the freedom empowered by cryptography (private knowledge), combined with social consensus empowering value storage and transfer across time and space↩
society redistributes wealth via taxes, counteracting inequality↩
as a numerical comparison, there were <50 Gilded Age robber barons, <100 post-CIS oligarchs, and maybe 1000 富一代 (fuyidai) worth 8 figures US↩