“The more I think about it,” he announced to me, as if he was having a eureka moment, “the more I realize the only way to prove you’re human is how certain parts of the society have been doing it for millennia.”
“It’s not surprising that you need to be vouched for, but I’m not sure if only certain parts of the society do it.”
“Well, I don’t want to be too specific or graphic, but you know what I mean. A bag of rice, et cetera.”
“Contraband basically, or you have to show some form of sacrifice,” I wiggled my left little finger while he grimaced but nodded.
“That’s where I don’t want to go. Funny isn’t it. ‘Proof of work’ is basically to show your misdeed. I wonder if that makes us human.”
“I don’t think that’s the case. Think about paper documents. They don’t need to be issued based on your misdeed.”
“No. Paper documents don’t prove you’re human.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“They are just a token that says the holder of this document is permitted to interact with the issuer of the document. There was some procedure to attest that there was a person that the document was issued to, and there are some features on the document for others in future transactions to have some confidence that the present holder of the document is likely to be the person that the document was issued to. It’s not the same as vouching for your being human and your being human doing something.”
“You’re entering the territory of philosophizing things. All those italics in the air.”
“I’m just concerned that, we are really entering the stage that, what’s the saying? on the Internet, nobody knows you are a cat. But cats do cute things and are mostly harmless, maybe except to your keyboard and furniture. Today there are things far more nastier than cats around. And it seems that the only way to prove we are human is to show that we do something only we can do. Again, proof of work—but it seems good deeds can be done by anyone, anything. Only human can do bad deeds, or be behind them.”
“‘deeds cannot dream what dreams can do.’”
“You’re not being serious.”
“You don’t need to steal a bag of rice for me to vouch you’re human, right? I’m happy to see you in person and observe how you work and read your results and then go to bat for you to say that I can attest that you the person wrote this or did that.”
“Much obliged. You are a friend in need.”
“In deed, right?”
“But I have the privilege of having known you. I guess I was lucky. This isn’t going to scale. And I can’t always send things your away to vouch for me.”
“You can’t. And I don’t have the time and capacity even if that’s only thing I do at every waking moment.”
“And so we have invented technology for that. And I don’t mean fancy things—themselves intellectual feats—like hash functions or public key cryptography. It all started with a piece of paper. The day when the signifier and the signified were separated, yadda yadda.”
“I know where you are heading, but I think I’m ok with that.”
“How can you be ok with that? I’m utterly concerned with the notion that you can’t vouch for my being human at scale.”
“Perhaps it’s indeed so.”
“What do you mean?”
“If it’s not possible to prove you’re human at scale, it implies being human is not to scale.”
“That’s a depressing thought.”
“How so?”
“Well, think about how many problems we have in this world, and if we can’t scale them…”
“You mean you want to scale those problems as if they could be climbed over, like a fence, or you mean the problems are not big enough already, and you want to amplify them even more?”
“You are still not being serious. All I want to say is big problems require big solutions.”
“What if going big is itself the cause of the problems you are seeing?”
“You’re not ambitious enough.”
“I’m just happy to vouch for your being human in front of another person.”
“That’s terrifyingly reassuring.”
“Isn’t that so? And I’m happy I can confidently give you that assurance when you need it. Even if, truth be told, that’s the only assurance I can offer.”
“You’re a terrible friend.”
“Indeed.”
2026-02-24