Technology certainly provides technical solutions and is generally directed towards computational products and services. But technology is fundamentally human.

Until we have civilization grade AGI, technology is:

1. Created by humans

2. Created for humans

3. Spread through humans

If your codebase does nothing, for no one, is it anything?

Automation is not really automation

Through crypto, many are afforded the opportunity of interfacing with artificial intelligence.

Whether experimenting with image models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, chat models like OpenAI, Claude, and Venice, or code assistants like Cursor and Windsurf - crypto professionals have been at the forefront of hockey-stick improvements in economic and computational automation.

A-grade practitioners of the arts, software development, and finance however, will have a similar version of the following:

This tech is not going to replace us. It's going to replace the worst of us.

Meaning those with the intangibles will be buttressed by the technology. While people below the skill-standards will be oppressed by it.

Administrative Intelligence

At the moment, automation is better thought of as administration.

Need to catch up on emails?

Gemini helps cut down the time-spend.

Need to hammer out a workable frontend?

Cursor speeds that up.

Need to brainstorm an image campaign?

A few sentences in Midjourney will get you going.

Literally speaking, it's still automation. We are highlighting nuances of the term due to faulty internalization. Particularly in crypto.

Tragedy of the common goal

One of the greatest value propositions of crypto is decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

In April 2024 I wrote an editorial updating DAO theory to a more literal definition. Instead of hard-coded organization (noun), we shifted focus to soft-coded organization (verb).

This can be examined further by reviewing Nouns DAO & Higher. Both decentralized. Both autonomous. Both organizing.

Nobody should do anything that way everything gets done

Speaking from personal experience founding Higher, there are intense coordination bottlenecks at large.

Incentives reign supreme, and few are more attractive than a 1000x return.

Making your competition for people's time, effort, and resources feel like Sisyphus rolling a boulder uphill.

Tokens create wealth routinely. New chains, protocols, apps, and in-crowds sprout just as regularly. All with an underlying message that you may get outsized pay.

Yet underneath the market realities, crypto has a surprising amount of optimistic and visionary members. As well as talented people with unique POVs.

Those who can see a world empowered by internet money, taste economics, and wealth creation regardless of geolocation.

This is why DAOs are so alluring.

People getting to work on things they find interesting with like-minded individuals. An opportunity to create a better lifestyle for themselves financially through that pursuit. All while building towards a future where platforms and governments cannot arbitrarily penalize you for terms and services protections.

Work begets more work

However, most, and I do believe it's fair to say most at time of writing, don't want to work as hard as the successful entrepreneurial, creative, developer, and media based professionals have in the past. They have mistaken automation for autopilot.

"Someone" should do x. "Someone" should do y. People say "someone should build" this or that idea so much I made a channel dedicated to it.

The someone, is us. All of us as an industry. But those tasty multiples trick so many into believing they aren't wasting time.

This is not a condemnation of trading either. It's an acknowledgment that we lack work ethic in crypto. Power laws are here, and they happen to be in an unfortunate dimension:

People's willingness to leverage better technology with better points of view and better contemporaries.

Empires like Rolex, Disney, Apple, IKEA, Costco, Vogue, Ford, and so many more were the byproduct of hard work. None of them had smartphones, wifi, blockchains, and artificial intelligence at their disposal. Let alone on day 1 of their business idea.

Crypto doesn't have a talent, resources, or technical problem. It has a lack of work ethic.