2026-07-09 –, Forest Pavillion
We will examine the function of money in human society from first principles, with the thesis that money as it exists today is primarily a paper-and-pen technology that does not make good use of new computational primitives such as programmable cryptography and AI. We will then collaboratively generate ideas for new ways to coordinate humans that were previously infeasible, well suited to our current technological culture, and bring human dignity to the forefront.
A number of signals suggest money, as coordination technology, is nearing obsolescence. It had a great 4000 year run as scalable tech that works with stone or paper, and was ported to computers, but technological change means that completely new, non-skeuomorphic coordination solutions are just now possible. Money had some negative externalities, pathological behaviors, and transactional interaction doesn’t always feel great. In this workshop, we will take a Martian anthropologist view of the function of money and money-like things in human society, consider the advantages of coordination in small high-trust groups and contrast this “forager mode” that dominated human prehistory with the more recent “farmer mode” which money was developed to support and scale. We will open up the design space for coordination of capital and labor from first principles, using newly available technology such as AI and programmable cryptography to shift the Pareto frontier of trade-offs. We will, together, come up with speculative thought experiments about how whatever comes after money could work, with human dignity brought to the forefront in the objective function.
Jason Morton is founder and CEO of EZKL, a company that makes verifiable AI systems. He was previously a tenured professor of Mathematics at Penn State.