{"id":133911,"date":"2026-02-10T07:44:59","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T07:44:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=133911"},"modified":"2026-02-10T07:44:59","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T07:44:59","slug":"the-intelligence-we-rent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/?p=133911","title":{"rendered":"The Intelligence We Rent"},"content":{"rendered":"

How borrowed AI becomes leverage over the people who use\u00a0it.<\/em><\/p>\n

With new capabilities come new responsibilities, and AI is a capability that spreads fast because it fits inside everything we already do. We can\u2019t view it as a single invention. It\u2019s a total disruptor of the way we\u2019re doing things, already integrated in search, customer support, design, trading, education, hiring, and governance. Each of these individual integrations are small enough to accept without debate, and together large enough to change how society makes decisions and, ultimately, how society\u00a0works.<\/p>\n

With new knowledge come new forms of authority, because whoever controls the production of knowledge eventually controls the terms of reality. AI compresses expertise into a tool that can be used by anyone. At the same time, it also concentrates leverage in whoever owns the training system behind it, the distribution channels, and the permissions that decide how the tool can be used by the public but, more importantly, by the owners to affect the\u00a0public.<\/p>\n

These are some of the various layers and some of the tension at the center of AI\u2019s rapid expansion: it democratizes capability while centralizing control. And most of us experience only the first half\u200a\u2014\u200athe convenience, the speed, the usefulness\u200a\u2014\u200awhile losing sight of the second\u00a0half.<\/p>\n

Researchers have been documenting and debating these layers for some years now. Shoshana Zuboff\u2019s work on surveillance capitalism traces how platforms turned human behavior into raw material for prediction\u200a\u2014\u200aextracting data far beyond what\u2019s needed to provide a service, then selling those predictions to advertisers, insurers, employers, and governments.<\/p>\n

Kate Crawford\u2019s Atlas of AI<\/em> follows the supply chains behind the clean interfaces: the mines, the data centers, the underpaid workers labeling images so the systems appear to run themselves. Stuart Russell, one of the field\u2019s most respected voices, warns that the standard approach to AI development\u200a\u2014\u200adefine an objective, optimize for it\u200a\u2014\u200abreaks down when the objective doesn\u2019t actually align with human preferences, which are uncertain, contextual, and often contradictory.<\/p>\n

What connects these different critiques is a shared observation: the way AI is currently being built serves particular interests, and those interests are not primarily yours. The convenience is real, but it\u2019s not the point. The point is the data, the predictions, the leverage. You get a better search result while they get a more accurate model of your behavior. When a service is free, the question to ask is what\u2019s being sold instead. In most cases, it\u2019s access to you: your attention, your patterns, your future decisions. The AI gets smarter with every interaction, and that intelligence becomes an asset owned by whoever controls the platform. You contribute to it constantly. You don\u2019t own any of\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

The concentration aspect deepens the problem. Right now, a handful of companies control the foundational models that everyone else builds on. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta are not just tech companies anymore. They\u2019re becoming infrastructure providers, and the rest of the economy is starting to depend on them the way it depends on electricity or telecommunications. When OpenAI\u2019s API goes down, thousands of applications break. When a model gets updated and its behavior shifts, products built on top of it fail in ways their developers didn\u2019t anticipate. We\u2019re constructing dependencies on systems we don\u2019t control, maintained by companies whose priorities are not transparent and whose decisions are not accountable to the people affected by\u00a0them.<\/p>\n

This is simply a call for transparency about what\u2019s being built and who it serves. AI infrastructure is taking shape right now, and infrastructure is sticky and tricky. Once it\u2019s in place, everything else gets built on top of it. The assumptions encoded today become the defaults of tomorrow.<\/p>\n

This is the context in which SourceLess has been integrating AI in its web3 ecosystem that connects digital identity, communication and finance within an infrastructure that provides and protects ownership and\u00a0privacy.<\/p>\n

The problems that Crawford, Zuboff, and Russell describe are structural, and no single project resolves them. But we do think the design choices matter, and we\u2019ve tried to make different ones.<\/p>\n

ARES AI is built as an assistive layer, not a prediction engine. It connects to your STR Domain\u200a\u2014\u200ayour self-owned digital identity within the SourceLess ecosystem\u200a\u2014\u200awhich means it doesn\u2019t need to harvest behavioral data to function. It\u2019s not optimizing for engagement or time-on-platform. It\u2019s not selling predictions about you to third parties. The goal is to help you navigate complexity: answer questions, guide onboarding, automate repetitive tasks, support decision-making. Infrastructure that works for the user, not on the\u00a0user.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t make it neutral or perfect. Every system encodes choices, and those choices have consequences. But we believe there\u2019s a difference between AI designed around extraction and AI designed around assistance, and that difference matters more as these systems become foundational to how we live and\u00a0work.<\/p>\n

This article is the first in a series where we\u2019ll explore these questions in more\u00a0depth.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll look at what it means for intelligence to become infrastructure\u200a\u2014\u200awho controls it, what happens when it fails, what alternatives are possible. We\u2019ll draw on the work of researchers like Crawford, Zuboff, Russell, and Jaron Lanier, who has spent years arguing that \u201cfree\u201d AI services are never actually free. We\u2019ll examine the alignment problem, the concentration of power in a handful of companies, and the choices that are still available before the architecture locks\u00a0in.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019ll share more about how we\u2019re trying to build differently with ARES AI as a case study in what it looks like to take these questions seriously.<\/p>\n

More soon.<\/p>\n

Learn more about SourceLess and ARES AI: <\/em>sourceless.net<\/em><\/a> <\/em>and SourcelessAres ai<\/a><\/p>\n

The Intelligence We Rent<\/a> was originally published in Coinmonks<\/a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How borrowed AI becomes leverage over the people who use\u00a0it. With new capabilities come new responsibilities, and AI is a capability that spreads fast because it fits inside everything we already do. We can\u2019t view it as a single invention. It\u2019s a total disruptor of the way we\u2019re doing things, already integrated in search, customer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":133912,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133911"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=133911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/133912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=133911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=133911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=133911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}