What the history of money - and its rise - could tell us about AI's future

I've been listening to a podcast this week featuring economist and historian David McWilliams on the history of money, and it got me thinking about the parallels we could draw between the rise of money and the potential impact of AI. Bear with me. We often don’t think of it this way, but McWilliams argues that money is fundamentally a technology - a clever piece of tech developed by humans that facilitates knowledge sharing, cooperation, and innovation. It's a mutual agreement between people that has arguably done a lot to replace war and conflict to capture value.

McWilliams argues that money reorganized human society by creating a shared system of trust that let strangers cooperate without violence. Before, if you wanted someone’s land or stuff, you had to take it by force. Money changed that. It separated work from family, enabled markets to function across distance, and ...