Editing Openai/69557275-0da8-8004-a03a-8eb02e10a61f (section)

==== ### ====

CEOs don’t read all their emails. Heads of state don’t answer all their texts. They have gatekeepers.

Now imagine you have one.

Your phone buzzes: “Dinner Friday?”
Before you even see it, your answering service replies:

: 

You glance later and tap Approve.

A month from now, the really weird part isn’t that everyone has a gatekeeper.
It’s the social layer that forms around it:
* certain people get a bypass code (“🚨pineapple🚨” = wake me up)
* some friends only get the Level 1 service (scheduling + pleasantries)
* your partner gets Level 4 (the one that knows what you meant when you said “I’m fine”)

===== This starts as a weekend project. =====

You can already do it: export statements, paste them into a prompt, ask: “Where am I getting quietly ripped off?”

Then it turns into a habit.

Then it turns into a service.

Then it turns into a default background process:

: 

A few years later, your AI isn’t just reading bank statements.
It’s reading every “your rate is changing” email, every medical bill, every explanation of benefits.

And people will start demanding a new thing from institutions:

“Give me a machine-readable bill. My AI needs to talk to it.”

===== Your kid says: “Make a 10-second movie where our dog fights a dragon.” =====

Your AI says:
* Standard video: $0.10/sec
* Pro video: $0.30/sec
* Pro, higher-res: $0.50/sec OpenAI Platform<ref>{{cite web|title=OpenAI Platform|url=https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing|publisher=OpenAI Platform|access-date=2026-01-02}}</ref>

So:
10 seconds = $1 to $5.
2 minutes = $12 to $60.
A two-hour bespoke movie at $0.50/sec = $3,600. OpenAI Platform<ref>{{cite web|title=OpenAI Platform|url=https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing|publisher=OpenAI Platform|access-date=2026-01-02}}</ref>

That’s today.

Now zoom out one ring:
* Free AI exists, but it’s rationed.
* $20/month gets you “stop thinking about limits” mode. Reuters<ref>{{cite web|title=Reuters|url=https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-projected-least-220-million-people-will-pay-chatgpt-by-2030-information-2025-11-26/|publisher=reuters.com|access-date=2026-01-02}}</ref>
* $200/month gets you “research-grade daily driver” mode. OpenAI<ref>{{cite web|title=OpenAI|url=https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-pro/|publisher=openai.com|access-date=2026-01-02}}</ref>

Zoom out again, into the rich-person tiers:

At roughly $2–$11 per H100 GPU-hour depending on provider, “always-on serious compute” quickly turns into tens of thousands per year. Thunder Compute<ref>{{cite web|title=Thunder Compute|url=https://www.thundercompute.com/blog/nvidia-h100-pricing|publisher=Thunder Compute|access-date=2026-01-02}}</ref>

That’s where the real class system starts:
* $20k/year: your agent feels like it never sleeps.
* $200k/year: you’re running a small personal “studio”—multiple high-end minds working in parallel, constant simulations, high-fidelity media generation on demand.

And then comes the Bostrom-ish twist:
compute is the substrate of everything—movies, worlds, assistants, memory, persuasion, counsel, creativity.

So compute-time becomes a status good the way “prime Manhattan real estate” used to be.

Not because it’s moral.
Because it’s the new lever that turns desire into reality.

===== You call customer support. =====

An AI answers—fast, polite, competent.

Halfway through, it says:

: 

A human voice appears for twelve seconds:

: 

The human disappears.

The AI comes back:

: 

Customer service becomes a human+AI composite:
AI does 95% of the talk, 100% of the memory, and the human appears like a surgeon—only when needed.

It will feel less like “talking to a bot” and more like talking to a creature with two brains.

===== On a first date, the conversation stalls. =====

They grin and say:

“Want to do a weird thing? I have a prompt.”

They pull up their phone:

: 

Twenty minutes later you’re laughing like you’ve known each other for years.

People will start sharing prompts the way they share playlists and memes:
* “This is my best-friend prompt.”
* “This is my fight-repair prompt.”
* “This is the one that makes my dad open up.”

AI becomes part of how humans bond—by doing things together through it.

===== You get an insurance denial. =====

Your AI says:

: 

You pay $6.

Ten seconds later it returns like a terrifyingly competent paralegal:
* “Wrong code.”
* “This phrase triggers auto-denial.”
* “These two documents force human review.”
* “Here’s the appeal letter—short, policy-cited, lethal.”

This is “borrowing competence” in a realistic way:
your assistant doesn’t become psychic—you just temporarily rent a domain savant.

===== Someone dies, and the family doesn’t just plan a funeral. =====

They plan settings.

A week later the executor gets a dashboard:
* Museum (static archive)
* Letters (scheduled messages they recorded)
* Counsel (answers only using their archive)
* Presence (birthdays, gentle check-ins)
* Off

The drama isn’t metaphysical. It’s human:

Who gets access?
Who gets veto?
Who gets to turn them off?

Death becomes more complicated because everyone already has a sprawling AI ecosystem—and eventually everyone has to decide what survives: the archive, the agent, both, or neither.

===== Two coworkers are looping. Same argument. Same misunderstanding. No progress. =====

Someone finally says:

“Okay. Time out. Let’s get an AI read.”

They paste the thread.

The AI returns:
* “You’re optimizing for two different goals.”
* “Here’s where you talked past each other.”
* “Here’s a compromise that preserves both constraints.”
* “Here are the unspoken assumptions on each side.”

Everyone goes quiet.

Not because it’s “right.”
Because it names the structure of the conflict.

We will start inviting referees into our human fights.
That’s going to be spectacularly weird.

===== We used to have: “Sent from my iPhone. Please forgive typos.” =====

Now we’ll have:
* Typed by human
* AI-drafted, human-edited
* Proxy reply
* Voice → AI → text

And people will invent private variants:

: 

Your messages become like food labels: not “good/bad,” but “how was this made?”

===== You text a friend: “Can I vent?” =====

They reply:

“Yep. Constraint: no fixing. Just empathy.”

You say:

“Perfect. Output: tell me I’m not crazy.”

This leaks into human speech because living with AI trains you to specify intent, tone, and success conditions.

Language gets cleaner.
Sometimes kinder.
Sometimes more clinical.

But it definitely changes.

===== You read a news story. =====

Next to each major claim is a button:

Dispute this claim

You click it. Your AI drafts a structured packet:
* the claim
* your evidence
* your confidence level
* what would change your mind
* the minimal correction

It submits to the publisher’s article-agent.

Now here’s the second ring:

Some claims are marked:
* Referenced (sources attached)
* Bonded (a stake posted)

Bonded means: if an agreed process (human+AI auditors) finds the claim false, money pays out—maybe to subscribers, maybe to a public correction pool.

Suddenly “truth” isn’t just vibes and citations.
It’s process + consequence.

The internet starts to feel less like a river of words, and more like a living document—versioned, contested, and occasionally… sane.

===== Second Life was weirdly ahead of its time: avatars, user-built worlds, virtual real estate, digital economies, social life as a place instead of a feed. =====

Now imagine Second Life again—same basic shell—but with two upgrades:
# VR as optional (desktop-first, goggles when you want)
# AI NPCs everywhere (bartenders, tour guides, rivals, companions—imperfect but alive)

In 18 months, it won’t be utopia. It’ll be… janky-magnetic.

A friend texts:

“Come to my place.”

You click and you’re in their world on your laptop—cozy apartment, strange art, a little NPC cat that remembers your name.

They say:

“Want to go to Ancient Rome?”

They type one sentence:

: 

The world loads. Not perfect. Not Hollywood.

But real enough that you get that unmistakable feeling:

Oh. This is becoming a new kind of hangout.
A new kind of theater.
A new kind of social reality.

===== Written words are the easiest thing for AI to eat. =====

Texts. Emails. Docs. Posts. DMs. Comments. Everything.

So people start inventing new forms of “private writing” that feel visceral and a little spy-movie:
* Sealed notes: “Tap to read. 20 seconds. Then it self-destructs.”
* AI-blind mode: messages your assistant can help you with locally, but that never touch a server.
* Burner language: friend groups with codewords and private lexicons that change weekly.
* Permissioned text: “You can read, but your AI can’t.” (enforced by apps + hardware enclaves, imperfect but meaningful)
* Copy-poison: text formatted so it’s readable to you but degrades when copied into other systems.

None of this will be perfect (screenshots exist, betrayal exists).
But a real market will form around one desire:

“I want to write something… without feeding the machine.”

===== In 2025 you give someone your phone number. =====

In 2027 you give them Level 2.

Because your agent isn’t just a tool—it’s the thing that knows you: your calendar, your preferences, your soft spots, your patterns, your boundaries.

So access becomes tiered:
* Level 1: Scheduling (my agent can coordinate with yours)
* Level 2: Context (it knows how I like to be approached; what I’m avoiding)
* Level 3: Authority (it can negotiate on my behalf up to $X / within rules)
* Level 4: Intimacy (it can help you repair with me; it knows the real story)

You’ll see this everywhere:
* business: “I can give your agent Level 2 for a week—then it expires.”
* friendships: “You have my bypass. Don’t abuse it.”
* romance: “I think you’ve earned Level 3.”
* breakups: “I revoked your access.” (a sentence that will feel cold-blooded and inevitable)

Access to someone’s agent becomes like meeting their parents—except more consequential.
Because it’s not symbolic.

It’s operational trust.

If you want, I can now do a micro-polish pass that tightens each entry by ~10–15% (more snap, fewer syllables) while keeping your “camera pointed at a thing” structure exactly intact.