Autonomous robots may sound like sci-fi concepts that are decades away, but large language models and generative AI now allow machines to plan, learn, and think. More than that - the same software that can win the math olympics and write novels can also control physical robots, allowing one digital persona to operate across the digital and physical worlds. So yes, robots walking around your neighborhood, or working alongside you, will have consistent opinions and actions on X/Twitter, on prediction markets, and in the real world.

But there’s a major gap. How do we integrate thinking machines into human society, from schools, hospitals, factories to our homes and daily life? Most of the systems we’ve built are for other humans and make strong assumptions of having a fingerprint, parents, and a birthdate, none of which are true for thinking machines. There is also broad uncertainty about how to regulate thinking machines - do we outlaw them, pause their development, or try to limit their ability to synthesize human-intelligible emotions (as in the European Union)? Which regional laws apply to a 200B parameter LLM running on a computer in low earth orbit, that’s controlling the actions of a trading bot, or a physical robot in the New York SEC office on Pearl Street?

What is needed is a global system that supports financial transactions, allows humans and computers to come together to vote and set rules, is immutable and public, and is resilient. Fortuitously, thousands of innovators and developers have spent the last 16 years building exactly that - a parallel framework for decentralized governance and finance. From the very beginning, the point was to support “non-geographic communities experimenting with new economic paradigms” by building a system that “doesn't much care who it talks to” (Satoshi 2/13/09). It’s now more clear what that meant - unlike the rest of the human-focused tech, financial, and regulatory stack, blockchains and smart contracts don’t much care if they are being used by humans or thinking machines, and gracefully accommodate all of us. For this reason, decentralized........

© CoinDesk