Towards a New "Civilizational Operating System"

Automation + Blockchain will fundamentally reshape politics, economics, and geopolitics.

I’ve been reading like crazy, trying to fill my brain with enough ideas from technology, history, politics, economics, and society to really wrap my head around what is coming, and how it will play out.

“The first industrial revolutions made human strength irrelevant, the next one will make human intelligence irrelevant.” - Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of Deep Learning, Nobel Laureate

First of all, automation, or “advanced AI plus robotics”, will be a gamechanger. Skepticism about the imminence of AGI is waning, and with that, people are asking more important questions like “How will this change work and money?” and “What does it mean if we suddenly have a hyper-abundance of advanced cognitive labor?” But, for the sake of clarity and definitions, when I use the word “automation” from now on, I don’t mean “assembly lines” or “database scripts.” No, what I mean by automation is the one-two punch of AGI powering autonomous agents and autonomous robots. It’s only a matter of time now, possibly later this year (2025) or as late as 2027 (absolute latest).

An operating system (OS) is a system software layer that manages hardware resources and provides an interface for software applications, with the primary goal of maximizing the efficiency and utility of the computer's central processing unit (CPU). It orchestrates tasks such as process scheduling, memory management, input/output operations, and resource allocation, ensuring that the CPU—the most critical and costly computational resource—is utilized effectively and efficiently to perform concurrent tasks, respond to user demands, and maintain system stability.

Think of it this way, folks like Alan Turing and von Neumann invented what would come to be known as a “computer” as we understand it today. The CPU is the key innovation—a wafer of silicon that can perform millions of calculations per second. But on its own, that’s pretty useless, ain’t it? A CPU is little more than a piece of silicon foil unless it has the rest of the computer built around it—the motherboard, RAM, hard drive, BIOS, and then an OS running on top of it all. I was interviewing someone about a year ago and they said it quite simply:

An operating system exists to help you maximize the utility of the most essential resource, the CPU.

Right now, the economy is organized around business and labor. Politics and geopolitics and money—all of this exists because we humans built them. Corporations exist because they organize labor and capital to (ideally) maximally exploit both. The economy is structured in such a way as to optimize the flow of labor and capital for the sake of GDP growth. Governments, like wise, act as mediators in this arrangement. (Yes, governments do a lot else besides, but that falls outside the scope of this post)

To extend this metaphor, let’s consider automation as the new CPU. Those of us on the cutting edge of AI have likened LLMs as “the new CPU” for a few years now. Deep neural networks, with embedded knowledge, reasoning, and world models, serve as the new fundamental unit of compute. RAG and knowledge graphs serve as the new kind of RAM and hard drives. API calls and tool use serve as the new USB peripherals. Cognitive architectures and agent frameworks are the new programs.

But what happens when automation dislocates humans from the social contract of “you must exchange your labor for wages” as the basic socioeconomic and sociopolitical assumption? I asked on X “In your perfect world, would you still exchange your labor for wages?” I had to ask this question twice because the first time was ambiguous. People often conflate “work” to mean several things:

1. Money: Work is the practice of exchanging your labor for wages so that you can buy goods and services, otherwise you’d starve and be homeless.

2. Value: Work is a cooperative and collaborative behavior that generates value for the rest of society.

3. Purpose: Work is a way that people can derive meaning and purpose through the sacrifice and transformation of arduous, worthy tasks.

This was the second time I ran this poll because everyone had different definitions of “work”

In my metaphor, businesses are like the “computers” of the economy today, organizations that bring together disparate kinds of resources, while workers (humans) are like the CPU—the primary resource to be exploited. But therein lies the rub: humans don’t want to be exploited.

So we engage in wholesale labor substitution. Rip and replace. Yank all humans out of the workforce and replace them with emotionless automations. Now automation becomes the new prime resource to exploit. This, unfortunately, disrupts the whole social contract of “everyone must exchange their labor for wages.”

That means we need a fundamentally new Civilizational Operating System (COS). The current COS is comprised of a few institutions, like government, business, geopolitics, courts, and so on, and operate based on a few principles, namely capitalism and democracy.

Capitalism and democracy aren’t going anywhere. Capitalism says, in my own personal distillation, capital assets are valuable and should be treated as economically central. I know, big thoughts right? Valuable things are valuable, who’d have thunk?

Civilizational Operating System?

The primary principle that is going away in our new COS is the idea of work (exchanging labor for wages) but most everything else is staying. Capitalism, democracy, consumerism, money, property rights—all of these ingredients will more or less remain the same.

Technology, however, has always fundamentally reshaped society. I’m reading Why Nations Fail right now, which offers a compelling look at the centrality of institutions (like functioning courts and democracy, as well as the importance of property rights) in developing nations and prosperity. Many capitalists, economists, and historians have insisted that good institutions precede technology, and I’m starting to agree. First and foremost, you need a solid social operating system.

1. Rule of law. First and foremost, you need laws to create structure in society, rather than arbitrary justice or more primal forms of social norms. This not only includes concepts such as constitutions (not strictly required) but a level of transparency in courts.

2. Political inclusivity. Democracy is currently the “best in class” for inclusive politics, but it’s not the only option. This includes voting rights, notions of equality before the law, and functional courts.

3. Property rights. Without property rights, there are no incentives to innovate or invest. Communists figured this out and switched to brute force, hence why gulags and forced reeducation inevitably arise in communist regimes.

There are more, but these three artifacts of our current civilizational operating system are top of mind. Without these, innovation and investment simply don’t happen sustainably. The Soviet Union was able to brute force some innovation, but the primary incentive came from the barrel of a gun. That, along with many other reasons, is why it ultimately failed.

Enter Blockchain

When you say “blockchain” many people immediately think “Bitcoin” but they are not the same. I’ve written about this before, that I think that blockchain as an information technology, will ultimately radically reshape civilization. It is the most powerful democratic technology humanity has ever created. Let me explain:

With blockchain, you can create an immutable, distributed, uncensorable public ledger. That sounds very jargon-y and hand-wavy so let me unpack what I mean: the reason that many nations have failed to develop, Egypt for instance, is because of insecure property rights. Public records might not exist, or the authoritarian state simply usurps property. But what if public records can exist completely independently of any state? Furthermore, if those public records are consensus-based rather than court-based or violence-based?

Blockchain is the ultimate coordination and consensus technology that solve numerous problems at once—it makes the role of the state totally irrelevant in tracking property rights and ownership. In some respects, this represents “communism” made manifest, though it’s more “solarpunk” than “communist” because communism always ends up being an authoritarian elite managing society. And, by the way, this is just one of the functions that blockchain can offer us as part of a Civilizational Operating System.

Radical transparency and accountability are another component. Every time a judge makes a decision, or a politician receives a donation, it can go on the blockchain. Automatic transparency and accountability. The reason that this is critical is also illustrated by more authoritarian regimes, such as China, Russia, and North Korea. As they say “Democracy dies in darkness” and blockchain is crystal clear. It’s difficult to oversell how central blockchain will be to the future of human civilization, and we can already predict several first-order uses of blockchain, ranging from property records to political transparency to economic acceleration (getting rid of SWIFT and other rent-seekers), let alone predict second- and third- order consequences.

What has become painfully apparent, particularly as I read books like Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakely, Changing World Order by Ray Dalio, Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson, and Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous, is that the establishment (the status quo, the elite, the powers that be) will resist these changes tooth and nail. Even the Russian aristocracy resisted industrialization, as did the Austro-Hungarian empire, because there was no immediate, obvious way for them to win or exploit the innovations. Meanwhile, American tycoons became the richest on the planet. Entrenched power structures will slow down progress, but the elegant simplicity of technologies like blockchain make them irrepressible. We will see an inexorable shift of power moving forward, and it could be quite messy as we reconstitute the world around a new paradigm.

TLDR

The imminent automation revolution will fundamentally transform societal economic structures through advanced AI and autonomous agents. We’re approaching a technological inflection point where human labor becomes systematically replaceable, demanding a new Civilizational Operating System (COS). This emerging paradigm preserves core institutional frameworks like capitalism and democracy while radically reimagining work and economic participation.

Blockchain emerges as a critical technological infrastructure, offering unprecedented capabilities for decentralized record-keeping, property rights management, and institutional transparency. By creating consensus-based public ledgers independent of state control, blockchain can solve longstanding challenges in economic and political coordination. In other words, history will record blockchain as second only to the printing press in terms of importance to democracy.

The transition will be disruptive, with entrenched power structures resisting change. However, the technological momentum—AI and robotics—will likely overcome institutional inertia, reshaping how humans conceptualize labor, value, and societal contribution.

The core insight is that we’re not just experiencing a technological shift, but a fundamental reconstruction of our civilization’s operating system, where automation becomes the primary economic resource and blockchain provides the transparent, decentralized infrastructure for this transformation.