Fundamental Currencies

Published on: 2/8/2026

I've been thinking about what things are actually worth. Not in the way I explored in The Nature of Value — where I argued that nothing has value except what people collectively decide it has. That's still true. But I've been wondering: underneath that collective agreement, is there something more concrete? Some objective unit of worth that could be calculated?

It seems like the most common container of value in the world is money. So let's start there.

Money is a promise

Money, at its core, is a crystallized promise. That's it. It's a portable, universally accepted promise that someone will do some work for someone else.

Think about it. You go to a restaurant, you look at the menu, you order food. The prices on that menu represent promises you're making. You hand over money — a promise — and they hand you food. They've done work for you: sourcing ingredients, preparing the meal, serving it. In exchange, you've given them a promise they can pass along to someone else.

And that's exactly what they do. The restaurant gives some of that promise to their employees, who did the work of cooking and serving. The employees give their share to a landlord, who provides housing. The restaurant gives another portion to a farmer, who spent months growing crops. The farmer gives some to a mining company, because they needed equipment. The mining company gives some to an energy provider, because digging things out of the ground takes fuel.

Every transaction, if you trace it far enough, is just people exchanging promises to do work for each other. The money moves in circles, but what's actually flowing is work — transformed, redirected, and passed along.

But what is work?

If money is a promise to do work, then what is work exactly? What does it actually mean to do something for someone? Can we break it down further?

I think you can. And if you keep going down this path, you eventually reach three irreducible things. Three fundamental currencies that underlie all value in the world:

Energy. Time. Intelligence.

Everything that has value — every product, every service, every piece of infrastructure — is a condensed form of these three things. You need energy to do anything physical. You need intelligence to direct that energy usefully. And both of those take time.

Building a house requires energy to mine and refine materials, intelligence to design and construct it, and time for the whole process to unfold. Growing food requires the sun's energy captured by plants, the intelligence to farm efficiently, and the time for crops to grow. Even something as abstract as writing software requires the electrical energy powering the computer, the intelligence of the programmer, and the hours they spend working.

Money, then, is just a proxy for these three things. Every dollar you spend is really a claim on some combination of someone's energy, time, and intelligence.

How the three interact

What makes this interesting is that the three currencies aren't independent. They feed into each other in compounding ways.

We built tractors so that we could save time sowing and caring for crops. That allowed us to harvest more of the sun's energy in the form of food. More food meant we could sustain more people — which increased the total intelligence available in the system. More intelligence meant we could figure out how to gather even more energy, and the cycle continued.

From the very start of human experience, we've been trying to maximize our use of energy. To do that, we needed more intelligence — which for most of history meant more people. But then we discovered we could build machines to amplify our work. That freed up people to do things other than pure energy creation. Artists, scientists, philosophers — they exist because machines allowed some humans to step off the energy treadmill.

Every major leap in human civilization has been a breakthrough in one of these three currencies that unlocked the other two.

Most problems are energy problems in disguise

Look at the world's biggest problems, and you'll find that most of them aren't problems of knowledge or technology. They're problems of energy — which is really a problem of intelligence applied to energy.

We have the problem of human farming destroying natural ecosystems, pesticides wiping out entire species and their habitats. This is a solvable problem. We can create healthy, abundant food using less land and fewer chemicals. It might require more energy per unit of food, but if we had more energy available, it wouldn't matter.

We have the problem of plastic and contaminants littering the natural world. We could clean it up. We could send robots and drones into every forest, river, and ocean to collect waste. We have much of the technology to do this today. But it would take an enormous amount of energy and an enormous number of intelligent systems to direct and operate. Right now, that energy gets a better return doing other things — making smartphones, building infrastructure, powering homes. So the trash stays.

We could remove invasive species. We could restore degraded ecosystems. We could be genuine guardians of the natural world. It just takes a staggering amount of energy and intelligence to do it at scale.

We could house everyone in the world comfortably. Give them good food, time with their loved ones, space to do the things they enjoy. The reason we don't isn't that we lack the knowledge — it's that building houses, mining materials, manufacturing goods, and distributing them all cost enormous amounts of energy, time, and intelligence.

And here's a telling fact: if you look at the data, every place in the world where people are poor is also energy poor. There is no place on Earth that is energy rich but where people have a low standard of living. Poverty is, fundamentally, an energy problem.

The fundamental tension

There's a tension in what people want that I think is worth naming. People want things to be cheaper. We want cheaper food, cheaper housing, cheaper goods — so we have more resources left over to do the things we actually want to do, not just the things we need to do. People want more convenience, easier lives.

But people also want higher incomes.

These two desires are fundamentally opposed, at least under current conditions. Because it takes human intelligence and human time to create things. If you want to make things cheaper, you either make resource acquisition cheaper or you make labour cheaper. And making labour cheaper is, understandably, not something workers want.

This is the bind we've been stuck in. We haven't dramatically reduced the cost of acquiring materials or the cost of the intelligence needed to transform them. Industrial farming is a partial answer — it's extraordinarily cheap at scale, even if people have legitimate objections to it. But growing the same amount of food through non-industrial methods would be enormously more expensive in energy, time, and intelligence.

The real resolution to this tension isn't squeezing workers or degrading quality. It's reducing the cost of the inputs themselves. Make intelligence cheaper. Make energy cheaper. And then human time naturally becomes more valuable, because it's no longer consumed by tasks that machines can handle.

The cost of intelligence is the binding constraint

Of the three currencies, intelligence is currently the most expensive and the hardest to scale. Energy exists in abundance — the sun alone provides more than we could ever use. Time is fixed but can be multiplied through parallelism. But intelligence? Until recently, it required a human brain, which takes decades to develop and has hard limits on productivity.

That's why the cost of intelligence is the binding constraint. If intelligence were cheap enough, we could solve climate change. Not easily, but it wouldn't be the existential challenge it currently appears to be. We could solve environmental destruction, poverty, housing, food insecurity — all of it. These are engineering and coordination problems, and engineering and coordination are what intelligence does.

Intelligence is about to get very cheap

For most of history, the only way to scale intelligence was to create more humans. Or, in a more limited sense, to use animals — cattle to plough fields, dogs to pull sledges, donkeys to carry loads. These were lower forms of intelligence, but they were usable forms that helped us create and direct more energy.

Now, with artificial intelligence, intelligence itself becomes scalable in a way it never has been before.

Previously, if you wanted more intelligence applied to a problem, you needed to educate more people, hire more people, coordinate more people. That's slow, expensive, and limited. But AI changes the equation fundamentally. Intelligence can now be replicated, distributed, and scaled like energy or information.

Cheap intelligence makes energy cheap, because intelligent systems can build and optimize power generation at scale. Cheap energy makes time cheap, because you can run more systems in parallel, accomplishing in hours what used to take years.

Think about what happens to time when intelligence scales. If you had a hundred billion intelligent entities — as capable as a human — all working simultaneously, then one hour of human time yields a hundred billion hours of work. Time compresses. Progress accelerates. We're already seeing early signs of this. Recently, OpenAI demonstrated a closed-loop system where an AI conducted experiments, observed results, and optimized a protein synthesis process — making it significantly cheaper and faster without human intervention at each step. That kind of loop will appear everywhere.

What we should do about it

I think there's a hidden truth underneath the chaos of the world. Most people don't see it because they're too busy surviving — doing the things they need to do, trying to get the things they want. And that's understandable. But I think if we saw this truth clearly — that everything reduces to energy, time, and intelligence — we would be more deliberate about it.

We wouldn't stumble forward unconsciously. We would, as a society, as a species, be more direct about what we're actually trying to do: make these three currencies as cheap and abundant as possible, so that every person can live a comfortable life with good food, meaningful community, space to create, and time to spend with the people they love.

Artificial intelligence seems like the clearest path to that future. It makes intelligence cheap, which makes energy cheap, which makes time cheap. The compounding effects could be extraordinary.

But there is a problem — and it's a serious one. AI, by its nature, consolidates power into fewer hands. The entities that control intelligence at scale will wield disproportionate influence over energy, time, and therefore over everything.

That's the problem we need to solve. But that's a topic for another time.