🗞️ (De)Coding the Future #10
The Meaning of Money in the Age of Exponential Intelligence
🇬🇧 English Edition — Portuguese version here.
“When labour learns to think, money must learn to make sense.”
Dario Rodrigues
The Meaning of Money in the Age of Intelligence
For centuries, the economy rested on the three production factors: Land, Labor, and Capital.
Everything humanity has built — from wheat to the Internet — emerged from this primordial trinity, which today survives mostly as a simplified pair: Labor + Capital.
Now, for the first time in history, one of these factors has learned to think.
Labor is no longer an exclusively human function.
Artificial intelligence systems now exist that not only execute tasks but also interpret, decide, and create.
They are not mere tools — they are AGENTS.
In Issue nº 9, we saw that employment becomes an automated cognitive function.
So if Labor changes in this way, what happens to the other factor of production?
What happens to Capital?
The answer emerges as the great civilizational question of our time:
Money must recover the sense it lost with the invention of coinage.
Author’s note: For those who still believe money was born with coinage, I recommend this 2024 video series (especially episodes 3 and 4). For further study, you may look at this scientific reference (2021).
🧩 When Money Lost Its Soul
Especially throughout the 20th century, the value of capital was reduced to three things:
Quantity
Accumulation
Profitability
Value became a number without memory: a balance revealing nothing about what it improves, transforms, or returns to society.
As exhaustively demonstrated, financial profit often does not mean creation but rather the extraction of value, generating clear harm to communities themselves — wars, after all, remain extraordinarily lucrative businesses for some.
Money lost its soul — all that remained was the vertigo of speed.
This moral concern would already be serious enough, but matters worsen when labor ceases to be a human effort, because value itself loses its ethical anchor.
The historical chain “labor → income → life” shows signs of collapse.
And this forces us to ask what we have never asked:
What justifies the value of money when it no longer represents human work?
🧠 The Silent Mutation of Capital
In the visual essay A Future We Can Trust, we glimpse the answer:
Capital can no longer be merely a measure of possession — it must become a measure of purpose.
Thus, money again (as in the small human groups of a pre-monetary era) begins to be assessed according to three criteria:
The good it produces
The impact it returns
The trust it generates
This transformation goes beyond theory — it is a return to value in its original form, when money was above all a moral bond, inseparable from the meaning it conveyed.
Mathematician and entrepreneur Emad Mostaque points in the same direction, foreseeing the end of the economy as we know it.
According to him, with the advent of exponential intelligence and the automation of cognitive labor, the capitalist system will only remain sustainable if capital becomes purpose-programmed and oriented toward genuinely human benefit. I would add that only the digital decentralization of such purposes can safeguard democracy.
His project puts into practice simple, reformative, and even revolutionary principles:
Value must be traceable, verifiable, and oriented toward benefits — not merely extractive profit.
In Mostaque’s vision, the money of the future will not only be digital but also intentional (programmable), through smart contracts in the new Intelligent Internet, expressing social, environmental, and human impact through transparent metrics and self-executing trust algorithms.
AI ceases to be the problem and becomes the solution — namely, by restoring soul to the trust-capital that money is meant to ethically represent (something it obviously does not do today).
🧭 The Necessary Remedy: Value as Purpose
If labor itself becomes an algorithmic function, then the economy needs a new organising principle that is not immediate profit.
If labor becomes an algorithmic function, then the economy needs a different organising principle than immediate profit. If Labor begins to dispense with human beings, then it is Capital that must once again incorporate human principles.
The principle underlying this requirement is clear:
Value should not be an expense or a revenue; it should be meaning and consequence.
This aim entails two essential transformations:
1. Money becomes transparent to purpose.
With AI, blockchain, and full traceability of financial flows, capital becomes morally verifiable.
More: thanks to blockchain’s very architecture, such verification can be carried out with robust guarantees of privacy and security.
Thus, money can become ethically clean: we can know where it goes, what it finances, and its moral impact.
2. Investment becomes curation of the future.
The voice of Capital’s owner stops answering the question “How much does it yield?” and begins to ask “What world does it create?”
That is when money regains its soul — when it becomes a vehicle of meaning, not merely of financial return.
🔥 Conclusion
The 21st century will not be defined by the technology we create, but by the meaning we give to the value that circulates in society.
With circulating capital entering AI-powered blockchains, money ceases to be just a number. It begins to carry what it represents — utility, impact, real benefit — all within the same monetary unit.
AI allows these impacts to be assessed sustainably, continuously, and objectively, enabling each token to unite and integrate exchange value (what money allows purchase) and use value (what money actually does or improves).
Capital thus will become transparent and aligned with truly human purposes.
The first factor of production — Labor — has learned to think.
The second — Capital — must now learn to return meaning to society.
This change is possible with programmable digital money, and everything depends on who programs it. Therefore, the great political divide of our time is no longer between left and right but between digital openness and digital opacity — between decentralization and centralization.
Dario Rodrigues