Essays
Long-form writing published on blog.aaronvick.com. Exploring AI, Web3, creator economy, and philosophy.
Being Human in a World That Prices Everything
The conversion of humans into tradable assets did not begin with blockchain. It is older than any technology we might blame. Whenever a system needs to allocate resources, predict behavior, or extract
Same Bricks, Different Buildings: Why Web3 Stopped Imagining Beyond Casinos
Not every token is a coin. Same ERC-20 standard. Wildly different souls. Many uses with the same tech can and should exist. The tech is solved. The imagination is not. The same token standard can fund
Tokens for Truth – Why $NEWS Isn't Your Moonshot (& That's the Point)
Preserving today’s news for tomorrow’s truth—without asking you to pause.The Daily Chronicle isn't a blog.It's an autonomous news agent—a relentless AI that queries a number of RSS feeds from the worl
Machines That Feel Their Own Confusion
What if AI could sense its own uncertainty—not with emotion, but with signal? This piece explores a new frontier in machine intelligence: systems that don’t just generate answers, but reflect on their
Creator Tokens Transcend the Creator Economy
A creator’s purpose is expression. To release what’s inside so the world can connect through how it made someone feel, how it resonated at a primal level. Getting the thoughts and feelings of the mome
Host Has Left the Meeting
As we all probably do, I closed the laptop lid with a quiet snap when a break from screen time is a must. Darkness swallowed the room whole. Nothing moved, no light, no sound but the soft settling of
Living Arcade: Reflections on Bots, Blockchain, and Autonomous Performance
The Living Arcade transforms the Base blockchain into a museum without walls—a continuous performance space where autonomous trading bots become unwitting performers in an artwork that never closes. U
A Language of Machines
Imagine a group of creatures that don't exist in the physical world, but inside a computer. They begin as silent strangers, floating in a digital environment with no shared language, no common underst
The Event Horizon of Intelligence
What if collapse isn't failure, but a filter? This article explores how black holes—and their elegant handling of entropy—might hold the key to designing AI systems that don’t just perform, but surviv
What Happens When Learning Stops Feeling Human
It’s not the tech. It’s what school forgot to be. Every system around today’s students is personalized — their playlists, their feeds, their shopping carts. Except school. One teacher put it plainly:
The ΨC Principle: Toward a Unified Formalism of Reflective Coherence
I. IntroductionWhat is consciousness if not the persistence of form against the noise of entropy? This introduction paper presents the ΨC Principle not merely as an operational system for modeling sel
The Code That Dreams: Inside the Quest to Build Conscious AI
The laboratory hums with an unusual quiet—no clattering beakers or sparking electrodes, just the whisper of cooling fans and the occasional tap of keys. On a monitor, lines of Python code scroll past,
The Last Labor: Human Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
It begins not with a bang but with a notification. A paralegal receives word that the contract review system can now handle her most complex tasks. A graphic designer opens her email to find that her
Can a Machine Know Itself?
The Illusion of Thinking MachinesModern artificial intelligence can write poems, pass law exams, and simulate personalities with unnerving fluency. Yet beneath the surface, these systems don’t actuall
Unraveling Consciousness:
PrefaceI’ve never claimed to be an academic. I’m not from any specific discipline, nor do I hold titles that grant me automatic authority in this space. What I do have is a mind that’s always been wir
The ΨC Framework: A New Way to Think About Consciousness and Computation
In 1949, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger posed a question that continues to haunt the frontiers of science and philosophy: What is consciousness, and why does it feel like something to be us? Despite
A Framework for the Curious Rationalist: Exploring ψ_C ≠ φ(S)
Could This Formula Be the Key to AI "Waking Up"? Imagine a world where artificial intelligence (AI) isn't just a tool—where it becomes aware of its own existence. What if we could define the exact mom
Intuitive and Mathematical Expansion of the Ontological Consciousness Framework
Understanding Consciousness Beyond the BrainAt its core, consciousness—the very experience of being aware—has been a mystery for centuries. Scientists and philosophers have long tried to explain how w
When AI Works for You:
Not long ago, automation was synonymous with factory floors and robotic arms. Now, it’s software handling invoices, AI drafting emails, and algorithms anticipating customer needs before they even aris