Notes from the Future

Possibly even more ridiculous than writing a single post about the future of the environment is trying to cram all the interesting things happening in the technology space into a single week.

Artificial Intelligence

Definitely the shiny object at the moment. The world has been fretting over the direction and near future of AI for several months. Practically this means that the futures cone has gotten squashed and expectations are easily shifted. The hot story this week is that a scenario written by a market research firm—talking about how AI could hollow out the economy over the next two years as companies race to adopt the technology faster than rivals to stay ahead as prices plummet—caused the valuations of the specific companies mentioned to drop precipitously

Blockchain

Don’t laugh. It is true that this technology has been used since its beginning mostly to grift people by finding greater fools, from the Long Island Blockchains of the world to the NFT era where COVID brain fog and government stimulus checks combined so that people were using their million-dollar jpgs to get into exclusive New York parties, and Jimmy Fallon was flaunting his ape on late-night TV.

But! Though the underlying technology is basically transforming the internet into the world’s worst computer2, it comes with upsides: it creates an immutable, easily-verifiable record that doesn’t require any trust in humans or institutions (just algorithms). It looks like the Walmart supply chain example I’ve pointed to over the years was, in fact, shuttered three years ago, but I thought it sounded promising, tracking every head of lettuce all the way back to the farms. However, AI might be exactly the boost this technology needs to break out: the Citrini report I referenced earlier imagines stablecoins being used to disintermediate payment and cut out credit card companies via AI agents.