Fundamental Currencies

Published on: 2/8/2026

In The nature of value, I wrote about how things are only worth what people collectively decide they're worth. I still think that's true. But lately I've been wondering if there's something more concrete underneath all of that. Is there some basic unit of worth that we could actually calculate?

The most common way we store value is money, so let's start there.

What is money?

Money, in my opinion, is just a promise. A promise that someone will do some work for someone else. It's easy to carry around and almost everyone accepts it, but at the end of the day, that's all it is.

Let's imagine you go to a restaurant and order some food. The prices on the menu are the promises you'll be making. You hand over the money and they hand you the food. They did the work for you: they got the ingredients, cooked the meal, and served it. And in exchange, you gave them a promise that they can pass on to someone else.

And that's exactly what they do. The restaurant gives some of that money to the employees who cooked and served the food. The employees give some of theirs to their landlord for a place to live. The restaurant also pays a farmer who spent months growing the crops. The farmer pays for equipment, which needs metal from a mining company, and the mining company pays an energy provider because digging things out of the ground takes a lot of fuel.

If you follow any transaction far enough, it's just people exchanging promises to do work for each other. The money goes around in circles, but what's actually moving is work.

What is work?

So if money is a promise to do work, what is work? What does it mean to do something for someone? And can we break it down any further?

I think we can. If you keep breaking it down, you end up with three things that I can't break down any more:

• Energy

• Time

• Intelligence

Everything that has value, every product, every service, every road and building, is some combination of these three. You need energy to do anything physical. You need intelligence to use that energy for something useful. And both of those take time.

To build a house, you need energy to mine and refine the materials, intelligence to design and build it, and time for all of it to happen. To grow food, you need the sun's energy captured by plants, the intelligence to farm well, and time for the crops to grow. Even writing software, which doesn't seem physical at all, needs electricity to power the computer, the intelligence of the programmer, and the hours they spend on it.

So money is really just a proxy for these three. Every dollar you spend is a claim on some mix of someone's energy, time, and intelligence.

How do they affect each other?

These three aren't independent of each other. Improving one usually helps the other two.

We built tractors to save time sowing and looking after crops. That let us capture more of the sun's energy in the form of food. More food meant we could feed more people, which meant more intelligence overall. And more intelligence meant we could figure out how to get even more energy, and so on.

Since the beginning, humans have been trying to make the most of the energy available to us. For most of that time, getting more intelligence meant having more people. But then we figured out how to build machines to do some of that work for us, and that freed some people up to do things other than producing energy. Artists, scientists, philosophers, they exist (at least in the numbers we have them today) because machines took over some of the work.

If you look at it this way, pretty much every big step forward in human history has been a breakthrough in one of these three that made the other two easier.

Most problems are energy problems

If you look at the biggest problems in the world, most of them aren't there because we don't know how to solve them or don't have the technology. They're energy problems. Or, if you want to be more precise, problems of not having enough intelligence to apply to energy.

Farming is destroying natural ecosystems. Pesticides are wiping out entire species and their habitats. This is a solvable problem. We know how to grow plenty of healthy food using less land and fewer chemicals. It might take more energy per unit of food, but if we had more energy, that wouldn't matter.

Plastic and other contaminants are all over the natural world. We could clean it up. We could send robots and drones into every forest, river, and ocean to collect the waste, and we have most of the technology to do that today. But it would take a huge amount of energy and a lot of intelligent systems to run it. Right now that energy gets a better return doing other things like making smartphones, building infrastructure, and powering homes. So the trash stays.

We could remove invasive species and restore damaged ecosystems. We could actually take care of the natural world. It just takes a lot of energy and intelligence to do it at scale.

We could house everyone in the world comfortably. Give them good food, time with the people they love, and space to do the things they enjoy. We don't, and it's not because we don't know how. Building houses, mining materials, making goods, and getting them to people all cost a lot of energy, time, and intelligence.

And if you look at the data, the places in the world where people are poor are also the places that use the least energy per person. I can't think of anywhere that uses a lot of energy per person and still has a low standard of living. So I'd say poverty is, for the most part, an energy problem.

Cheaper things or higher pay?

There's a contradiction in what people want. We want things to be cheaper. Cheaper food, cheaper housing, cheaper everything, so that we have more left over for the things we want to do and not just the things we have to do. We want life to be easier.

But we also want to be paid more.

Under current conditions, these two go against each other. It takes human time and human intelligence to make things. If you want to make something cheaper, you either make the materials cheaper or you make the labour cheaper. And of course, workers don't want their labour to be cheaper.

This is where we've been stuck for a while. We haven't made materials much cheaper to get, and we haven't made the intelligence to turn them into things much cheaper either. Industrial farming is sort of an answer. It's extremely cheap at scale, even if people have fair objections to it. But growing the same amount of food without it would cost a lot more energy, time, and intelligence.

So I don't think the answer is to pay workers less or to make worse products. The answer is to make the inputs cheaper. Make intelligence cheaper, make energy cheaper, and human time becomes more valuable on its own, because it isn't being spent on things machines can do.

What's holding us back?

Of the three, intelligence is the most expensive right now and the hardest to get more of. Energy is abundant, the sun alone gives us more than we could ever use. Time is fixed, you might say. True, but you can multiply it by doing things in parallel. Intelligence though, until very recently, needed a human brain. And a human brain takes decades to develop and can only do so much.

That's why I think intelligence is the thing holding everything else back. If intelligence were cheap enough, we could solve climate change. It wouldn't be easy, but it wouldn't be the existential threat it seems to be right now. Same with environmental destruction, poverty, housing, and food insecurity. These are all engineering and coordination problems, and engineering and coordination is what intelligence does.

Intelligence is about to get cheap

For most of history, the only way to get more intelligence was to have more people. Or, to some extent, to use animals: cattle to plough fields, dogs to pull sledges, donkeys to carry loads. They're not as intelligent as us, but they were intelligent enough to help us create and direct more energy.

With AI, intelligence can be scaled in a way it never could before. If you wanted more intelligence on a problem, you had to educate more people, hire more people, and get them to work together. That's slow, expensive, and only goes so far. Now intelligence can be copied, distributed, and scaled just like energy or information.

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

Imagine a hundred billion intelligent entities, each as capable as a human, all working at the same time. One hour of our time would give us a hundred billion hours of work. We're already seeing early signs of this. OpenAI recently showed a closed-loop system where an AI ran experiments, looked at the results, and optimized a protein synthesis process, making it a lot cheaper and faster without a human stepping in at every step. I think we'll see loops like that everywhere.

So what should we do?

I think this is what's going on underneath all the chaos in the world. Most people don't see it because they're busy surviving, doing the things they need to do and trying to get the things they want. And that's understandable. But if we did see it, that everything comes down to energy, time, and intelligence, I think we'd be a lot more deliberate about it.

We wouldn't just stumble forward. As a society, as a species really, we'd be more direct about what we're actually trying to do: make these three things as cheap and abundant as possible, so everyone can live a comfortable life with good food, a good community, space to create things, and time to spend with the people they love.

AI seems like the clearest path to that. It makes intelligence cheap, which makes energy cheap, which makes time cheap.

But there's a problem, and it's a big one. AI tends to put power in fewer hands. Whoever controls intelligence at scale will have a lot of influence over energy and time, and so over pretty much everything.

That's the problem we need to solve. But that's for another post.

Also, if you've spotted any flaw in my reasoning, I'd be grateful if you let me know!