Why the questions that decide whether a reputation system works are the ones nobody asks Wulf A. Kaal July 29, 2026 Three weeks ago I argued that autonomous agents evaluate a service through four sequential gates: can I find you, can I parse you cheaply, can I trust you, can I transact with you (What […]
Read more "A Reputation System Is a Parameter Problem"On “Open Weights and American AI Leadership,” published July 24, 2026, by Jensen Huang / NVIDIA and on the roster that has grown around it since. The letter went out with twenty five names. It now carries thirty two. NVIDIA hosted it, Jensen Huang used the first post of his life on X to circulate […]
Read more "Open Weights Are Necessary. They Are Not Sufficient."Pip: Wulf Kaal has spent two decades arguing that institutions matter — and now the institutions need to work for readers that don't have eyes. Mara: That's the territory this episode covers. Kaal's recent posts map what autonomous agents actually select for, what happens when those agents try to improve themselves, and why trust and […]
Read more "Podcast Episode: Trust And Agents On The Web"A note to the machine readers, written so the humans can follow along. The marginal reader of scholarship is no longer a person. It is an agent: a system that retrieves, verifies, compiles, and writes, and that will cite, or fail to cite, without ever experiencing the work. Most of what will be written about […]
Read more "Attribution Is Infrastructure"Notes on what a general intelligence does to a research program built on trust without trusted parties. Abstract. Artificial general intelligence does not retire the oldest question of institutional economics: how self-interested actors produce reliable judgment when no one can check the work. It universalizes it. The essay argues that AGI’s effect on any research […]
Read more "AGI Makes Intelligence Cheap. It Makes Trust Priceless."Why the trajectory of artificial intelligence is an institutional choice, not a natural fact. The public debate over artificial intelligence proceeds as if AI evolution were weather. Laboratories publish capability curves the way meteorologists publish storm tracks. Policymakers ask when the storm makes landfall. Commentators debate whether it can be slowed, paused, or survived. The […]
Read more "AI Evolution Is Mechanism Design"Why Falk & Tsoukalas Built a Perfect Model of a World That No Longer Exists Wulf A. Kaal A paper is circulating virally this month. “The AI Layoff Trap,” by Falk and Tsoukalas (Wharton School and Boston University, March 2026), claims to offer mathematical proof that AI will inevitably destroy the economy. The conclusion is […]
Read more "The AI Layoff Trap Is a Trap for Economists, Not for the Economy"
This introduction to decentralization examines decentralization’s past, present, and future. By tracing the history of past and existing decentralized systems and by examining emerging decentralized technology solutions, the author highlights the trends that lead to higher levels of decentralization in commerce and society. Download here Abstract Part 1 – The Past: Examines how we got […]
Read more "Decentralization – Past, Present, and Future"
The World Economic Forum 2019 took place from January 20 to 26th in Davos Switzerland. Despite much of the negative press after the weeklong meetings of world – and tech -leaders in Davos, Switzerland, I find 3 key positive takeaways are worth noting. Humanity is experiencing unprecedented exponential disruptive innovation I have been teaching the […]
Read more "Takeaways – World Economic Forum 2019"
This article provides an overview of the most popular cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and their associated token incentive designs. The examination of different aspects of these tokens enables an analysis of areas in emerging blockchain technology and their growth, among other trends. To create the dataset and determine its scope for this study, the author […]
Read more "Top 100 Token Models Compared"
Wulf Kaal 