“The second timeline is the emergence of ultra-liberalism in the form of AI. So AI is maximally decontextualized. AI is maximally able to modulate human beings as individuals into increasingly fine-grained behaviors without any regard to their personhood.

So oddly enough, the Chinese are the furthest ahead in enacting ultra-liberalism in the social credit system. So it produces a very thin layer on top, which is extremely subtle in how it operates. It uses almost no tyranny or force in the gross sense.

It's pure tyranny in the most fundamental sense, but nothing in the gross sense, you can't really tell, and then it is able to modulate human behavior under an algorithmic structure, which makes them, in principle, by the way, highly useful.

Yes, and indispensable to that structure is the central bank digital currency, right? That subtle social engineering, instead of doing the force, bludgeoning over the head to get you to do what I want, they're just using incentives, basically.

Yeah, absolutely indispensable is a singleton, not just centralized, but a singleton, one that extinguishes all other competitors, completely ubiquitous, and it has to be digital so that it can have the combination of access to digital intelligence and access to the fine-grain movement in space and time. So I need to nudge you at the very, very tiny, tiny level. And by the way, it can add qualities to it.

And the programmability, yes.

Yeah, exactly, programmability. So that's scenario number two. Now scenario number two and scenario number one might connect.

It might be that you have a series of civilization states that are themselves governed by their own independent kind of AI systems. Or it might be that this collapses into a single global AI system.”

From The "What is Money?" Show: Our Civilization is Dying...Can Bitcoin Save It? w/ Jordan Hall (WiM584), May 16, 2025

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-what-is-money-show/id1541404400?i=1000708769366&r=4633

This material may be protected by copyright.