AI Which Is Seen, Crypto That Is Unseen

Bastiat's "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen" drew the line between what we see and what we miss in economics, and it applies to the technologies that power the economies of tomorrow.

The first effect shows up immediately (it is seen).

The second-order effects come later (they are not seen).

Today, the seen is AI and the unseen is cryptography.

Everyone sees ChatGPT's interface. Nobody sees the blockchains that may eventually need to verify its outputs hallucinations. 

AI is probabilistic: it generates infinite possibilities, infinite fakes, infinite versions of truth.

As it floods the world with outputs, it creates a need for validation of what’s real at superhuman speed and accuracy. 

When every voice can be cloned and every video deepfaked, every document forged, we need proof of origin, permission, and personhood, proof of what’s real. 

Enter crypto. 

Crypto is deterministic: it creates singular truth, immutable records, unchangeable proof where AI might assure us an astrology reading is gospel.

Said differently, we need crypto to stop that manifester instagram influencer you went to highschool with being told “You’re absolutely right!” by AltmanGPT-5 about how breathwork cures cancer and surgically aligns chakras.

So before AI dissolves interfaces (or Neuralink dissolves the screen), AI (and its offspring of agents) will need to eventually smuggle proofs into everything: payments to identity, reputation, and access. 

Think of the innovation of double-entry bookkeeping in Renaissance Venice.

Customers didn't parse debits and credits. They trusted that ledgers balanced and their gold was safe.

Swap customers for agents, double-entry for cryptography, and gold for bitcoin. 

Same invisible trust layer, different Renaissance.

Cryptocurrencies breakthrough app may have been hard money, but its next may be hard proof.

The internet enabled low-cognition labor arbitrage across markets.

AI enables high-cognition labor to arbitrage across markets.

While models float across borders, thinking machines don’t.

They bolt to soil and drink from power grids like vampires from veins. Where machines meet asphalt, economic density steepens.

The world flattens for intelligence, and steepens for its infrastructure.

Moravec’s paradox still holds: chess is easy for machines, walking remains hard (for now).

AI creates infinite code and writes perfect contracts but can't turn a wrench or pour concrete (yet).

As AI eats further up towards the neckline of white collar work, it leaves hands untouched.

AI commoditizes thinking minds, but valorizes calloused hands.

Creativity was always theft. Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Now AI steals everything at once:

every text becomes context, every image becomes training data, and every idea becomes promptable.

The old copyright wars dissolve into universal remix where everything is both remains original and derivative.

People argue AI worsens this, but attribution was always contested (at best), and authorship was always an unknowable percentage.

But that is until (see above) the unseen of crypto restores what was always missing: proof of who made what, when.

Stay unseen,

Daniel

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