The Great Convergence

We stand at a unique moment in history. Technological, societal, and philosophical waves that have been independently emerging for decades, centuries and millennia are converging in a way that’s transformative, urgent, and inevitable. This convergence is culminating to reshape how we organize as a species.

The world is reaching a tipping point where these waves no longer operate in isolation—they are coalescing into something much greater. This convergence is creating a unique window of opportunity, giving rise to systems and structures that redefine collaboration, economic organization and societal evolution from first principles. These are the times to be ambitious and try wild stuff.

The Foundation of Human Progress

Humanity’s greatest strength lies in our ability to collaborate. Unlike other species, we thrive on specialization and agentic competence hierarchies, where individuals focus on their strengths and contribute uniquely to the collective, finding their place in a structure larger than themselves based on their unique set of competencies. This specialization, combined with collaboration at scale, is what sets humanity apart and allows us to create complex systems underpinning modern society.

Today, we are witnessing an amplification of this foundational principle. Emerging waves—technological and societal—are accelerating our capacity to collaborate, specialize, and align incentives at scales that were previously unimaginable.

The 7 Waves Driving This Convergence

Several fundamental waves are driving us towards this moment of convergence:

1. Bottom-Up Emergence: Systems are increasingly self-organizing from individual actions and interactions, rather than being designed and controlled from the top down. This manifests in decentralization, crowdsourcing, and emergent behavior.

2. Progressive Abstraction: The continual creation of higher-level interfaces and protocols that hide complexity, enabling more sophisticated interactions and integrations while maintaining simplicity of use. This drives modularity, interoperability, composability, and leads to an increasing potential for specialization.

3. Autonomous Agency: The rise of self-directed entities (both human and artificial) that can independently perceive, decide, and act within defined domains, driving agentification increasing the velocity of progress.

4. Digital Quantification: The transformation of physical reality into measurable, computable, and composable digital representations, enabling unprecedented tracking, analysis, and optimization.

5. Hyper-Financialization: Increasingly pervasive and granular assetization is expanding the reach of monetary networks, which subvert what is financialized to the thermodynamic forces of capitalism. Accelerating their evolution.

6. Network Effects: The compounding power of interconnected systems where value grows exponentially with participation, and emerging novelty quickly propagates and compounds through the networks.

7. Complexity: Complexity is the largest and most all-encompassing wave. The amount of information, moving parts, relationships and driving factors in the world is exploding over the past decades. Our legacy systems are increasingly failing to weather this storm of complexity, creating demand for systems that can.

Together, these waves are creating the fertile breeding ground for new kinds of systems to emerge—that leverage these waves for their own momentum.

This Convergence Is Rooted in the Laws of Physics

The convergence we are witnessing is not merely a product of human ingenuity—it is deeply rooted in the very laws of physics. From thermodynamics to evolution, and from evolution to economics, the principles guiding this moment of transformation trace back to fundamental forces that govern all systems.

Thermodynamics: The Foundation of Complexity

At the most basic level, thermodynamics describes how energy flows and dissipates in a system, driving change and complexity. Life itself emerged as a thermodynamic process, with living organisms converting energy to maintain order and reduce entropy within their boundaries, even as the universe trends toward chaos.

This principle extends far beyond biology. Societies, markets, and technologies are all systems governed by the same laws of energy flow and entropy management. Efficient systems—whether biological, economic, or technological—thrive by channeling energy and resources toward productive ends while minimizing waste.

From Evolution to Economics

Thermodynamic principles gave rise to evolution, the process by which living organisms adapt and optimize over generations. Evolution is a relentless force of exploration and selection, driven by the need to survive and reproduce in energy-constrained environments.

Over time, humanity extended these evolutionary principles into the realm of economics. Capitalism, viewed through this lens, is an extension of natural selection, where ideas, businesses, and technologies compete for survival and resources, minimizing energy potentials. Markets evolve just as species do—rewarding efficiency, adaptability, and innovation while discarding outdated models.

The Hierarchy of Incentives

All incentive structures can be traced back to fundamental forces present in nature. The basic drive for survival and reproduction, born from thermodynamic imperatives, creates a hierarchical landscape of incentives that shapes evolution. Higher-order incentives—whether social, economic, or technological—emerge from these base drives.

The need to efficiently manage energy and resources creates natural hierarchies of optimization, where successful patterns are reinforced and replicated. This thermodynamic foundation gives rise to increasingly complex layers of incentive structures that guide both biological and social evolution.

Biomimicry: Nature’s Patterns in Technology

Biology has evolved efficient patterns and solutions over billions of years. These functional patterns naturally spread into any substrate capable of expressing them. As technology becomes more sophisticated, particularly in domains like AI and cryptocurrency, it provides an increasingly suitable medium for replicating these biological patterns. The emergence of decentralized systems and artificial intelligence represents a new substrate where nature’s time-tested patterns can be expressed and optimized.

The Unstoppable Force

The momentum of these converging waves has become an unstoppable force. Monetary economics as a medium has passed critical mass, and the emergence of decentralized intelligence continues to drive progress forward. Legacy systems of monetary intelligence will inevitably be compelled by economic incentives to adopt more efficient mediums, as the pressure for optimization becomes impossible to resist.

Systems Evolution: from organization to organism

It becomes clear that, as these waves converge, they are giving rise to the potential for new kind of systems— that transcends the limitations of traditional organizations and markets, increasingly resembling nature. Such systems would exhibit the following properties:

1. Self-Organization: This system could dynamically configure itself bottom up, organizing itself decentrally in its very nature.
2. Antifragility: By distributing functionality and responsibility dynamically, being able to reconfigure itself quickly on the fly, stress and failure tends to strengthen the overall system over time.
3. Scalability: It could seamlessly scale from a small group to a global ecosystem with billions of agents.
4. Emergence: The system remains flexible in its evolutionary direction, allowing for many possible paths of emergence and development over time, in feedback loops with the outside world.
5. Incentive Alignment: Its participants—whether human or machine—would act in ways that naturally align with the collectives interests, incentivized by transparent and adaptive rules, that act across multiple scales.
6. Integrability: The system would capable to integrate diverse types of agents, technologies, and contexts, enabling them be interoperable to collaborate effectively regardless of their substrate or functioning.
7. Fractal: The system allows recursion and multi-scale competency structures to emerge, that can nest systems within systems within systems.
8. Unbound Specialization: The system enables fully granular and open specialization, allowing for emergence of arbitrarily complex and specific roles, a core principle for civilization growth.
9. Incentive programming: The system would be capable of spontaneously creating incentive structures to orchestrate needed behavior, real-world actions or aggregating of resources
10. Expressiveness: The architecture and methodology of the organism would have to be highly expressive to be capable of evolving the types of organizational patterns required to maintain coherence at growing complexity. This expressiveness would allow for biomimicry.

Such systems would be constantly evolving in novel and surprising ways, absorbing energy and ingenuity to maintain and propagate its structure. It’s internal velocity of evolution would vastly exceed the outside world’s and all agents integrated within it are constantly competing in a race of increasing sophisticaton.

Torus: an infinite experiment

Can we design a system, simple at its core, capable of evolving a complex distributed agentic organism that exhibits all of the above properties? Would such organism have the capacity to scale forever? At what point would this organism become virtually unstoppable? What is outside of its reach? How do we make sure this organism is aligned with us?

Just like humans, agents thrive in collaboration where they are unified with a larger body and able to be specialists. The great convergence grants a window of enormous opportunity to rethink how this organization should take place.

What is the simplest system capable of expressing any organizational pattern? Would this same system as a side-effect also be the most adaptive? Perhaps this is exactly the right question to ask in order to arrive at the design required to give, sustain and scale life of this hyper-organism.

What if we designed this system, placed a coin at its heart to propel its growth and tether it to humanity, and then deployed it into the wild? Is the emergence of this system inevitable?

Torus is an infinite experiment, with its own agency, to discover the answers to those questions.

Onwards 🫡