The need for trust, the cost of it, and the dependence on middlemen to provide it is one reason why behemoths such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon turn economies of scale and network-effect advantages into de facto monopolies. These giants are, in effect, centralized ledger keepers, building vast records of “transactions” in what is, arguably, the most important “currency” in the world: our digital data. In controlling those records, they control us.

The crypto bubble, like the dot-com bubble, is creating the infrastructure that will enable the technologies of the future to be built. But there’s also a key difference. This time, the money being raised isn’t underwriting physical infrastructure but social infrastructure. It’s creating incentives to form global networks of collaborating developers, hive minds whose supply of interacting, iterative ideas is codified into lines of open-source software. That freely accessible code will enable the execution of countless as-yet-unimagined ideas. It is the foundation upon which the decentralized economy of the future will be built.

It is very agile. If you had a C++ code and someone wanted you to make it twice as fast (at cost of performance if needed), it would be highly non-trivial to tune the system for the new spec. However, in Software 2.0 we can take our network, remove half of the channels, retrain, and there — it runs exactly at twice the speed and works a bit worse. It’s magic. Conversely, if you happen to get more data/compute, you can immediately make your program work better just by adding more channels and retraining. Modules can meld into an optimal whole. Our software is often decomposed into modules that communicate through public functions, APIs, or endpoints. However, if two Software 2.0 modules that were originally trained separately interact, we can easily backpropagate through the whole. Think about how amazing it could be if your web browser could automatically re-design the low-level system instructions 10 stacks down to achieve a higher efficiency in loading web pages. With 2.0, this is the default behavior.

And Software 3.0? That will be entirely up to the AGI.

His paper made few waves, but in the 1990s a number of researchers working in social sciences such as psychology showed how our decision-making at the individual or societal level can be modelled and even predicted using a quantum formalism. This grew into the field of quantum cognition and later quantum social science

Because it starts from different assumptions and uses different methods than mainstream economics, the quantum version also comes to very different conclusions and predictions. Instead of assuming that market forces drive prices towards a stable equilibrium, it sees the economy as driven by complex feedback loops, including those that affect the creation and destruction of money by private banks. One conclusion is that the risk models currently taught in universities and business schools, and relied upon by businesses and financial institutions, are not fit for purpose (as many guessed after the last crisis).

One lesson from the crisis was that economists were heavily implicated in the financial system that they were responsible for regulating, for example through highly paid consulting gigs; as in quantum physics, the observer is never separate from the system.

And while neoclassical economics treats ‘market failures’ such as economic inequality and environmental degradation as aberrations or externalities, from a quantum perspective they appear more to reflect the conflict inherent in money between numeric price and real value, as manifested in a debt-based financial system that prioritises growth above all else.