The First Technology AI Will Adopt Before We Do

A Tom Lee line's been making the rounds this week: “AI agents are going to carry digital wallets, and they're already a rising share of all internet traffic.”

Tom Lee is the market strategist who's been early on Bitcoin for years. And this line stopped me cold.

We built crypto. Something else might adopt it first.

That has never happened before... Fire, the wheel, the printing press, the internet — every technology in human history was adopted by humans first. Crypto could be the first one where the machines get there before we do.

Here's the part nobody says out loud: neither of these technologies is mainstream. Crypto is far from it. AI isn't there yet either, though it's moving much faster. We've had decades of movies prepping us, from Terminator to iRobot.

The ending won't be as catastrophic as the films. But the middle? The middle will look familiar.

Tesla is already testing robots that lift, clean, organize, and build with more accuracy than a human hand. They don't take lunch breaks. They don't need time off. They don't go home to their families.

I'll be honest, I haven't watched every Optimus demo. But the ones I've seen look good. Better than I thought they'd look at this stage. They're humanoid. They look clean. They look functional.

And that's just the start. At full potential it's Optimus bots, self-driving cars, automations across industries doing things more accurately and efficiently than people. Hospitals. Warehouses. The services you buy and rely on get a lot more efficient.

We haven't even gotten to drones yet. AI drones making deliveries will revolutionize logistics. AI in airplanes. What SpaceX is doing pushing us further into outer space. The investment opportunities, the transportation shifts. We haven't even started that conversation.

That starts in factories. It ends in your kitchen, doing the chores you hate.

So the real question was never what the machines will do. It's what we do with the free time. Most people aren't thinking that far ahead.

Here's the best part almost nobody’s talking about…

If most people had the choice, they wouldn't work a nine-to-five. And if they had to work, they'd be doing something completely different.

That's what this reshapes: an economy where people can finally follow their passions. And I think a lot of those passions will be about genuinely helping the world move forward. The better side of humanity comes out when we're living happier lives. Not grinding jobs we hate just because they pay more, or because we have to.

It also unties us from place. You won't have to live in a particular city because some company needs you in a seat. That's a more abundant society. People just don't see the vision yet.

Think about what it unlocks. If you want to be an influencer making videos, there will be more ways to do that, at much higher income, in ways that don't make sense yet. Same for gamers. Same for hobbies. Once people understand smart contracts and what these ecosystems actually are — when the metaverses arrive and NFTs make sense — they'll see these technologies multiply the ways we earn a living.

And here's the thing: crypto investors have been beta-testing all of this for a decade, especially in the bull markets. This is the fun stuff. Most of it is still just ideas. So much hasn't become real yet. But it will, because of these technologies.

Now layer crypto on top. I'm not going to pretend I can predict exactly what happens when agents become crypto's biggest users. It's too early…

But I know it creates an entirely new digital economy. And how humans fit into it is entirely up to us.

Here's what I can see: when most transactions are machine-to-machine, money changes. It either goes deflationary, or it inflates into something we measure on a completely different scale than we do now.

Either way, the dollar as we know it stops making sense. Inflation guarantees that eventually. There comes a point where the dollar just isn't as valuable.

That's when crypto stops being speculation and starts being infrastructure. Bitcoin and the rest aren't just coins. They're the new alternatives to gold and precious metals: limited supply, real functionality behind them.

Will regular people get left behind? The rich-poor divide isn't going away. There will always be people with more capital and more to offer. The gap will look different, but it'll be there.

The rule doesn't change though: stick with the trends and you benefit from them. That's always been true.

So who wins when AI adopts crypto before we do?

We do. If we stop thinking of it as a loss.

Think about it: no generation before us ever had the option to hand their tasks to something else and keep the upside. We do now. We can leverage it for our own income, make our own lives easier, compound things we could never compound before.

That's not displacement. That's the first real promotion in human history.

Welcome to the age of programmable money — and the currency of intelligence.