The Technology is Inevitable. Are We Ready?
By Lisa Tamati | Pushing the Limits Podcast
There's a story I keep coming back to — one I heard recently from financial advisor and tech thinker CERN Basher (@Cernbasher) on the Pushing the Limits Podcast.
Imagine you're an ice cutter. It's the 1800s. You have a thriving business — horses, teams of men, massive saws, a whole logistics chain built around harvesting frozen lakes and delivering ice to cities. You are essential infrastructure. Then refrigeration arrives. Not gradually. Not with warning. It just arrives. And within a generation, everything you built is obsolete.
The ice cutters didn't fail because they were lazy or stupid. They failed because they were so deeply embedded in the existing system that they couldn't see what was coming — or couldn't move fast enough once they did.
I think about that story a lot as I watch what's happening right now with artificial intelligence and Bitcoin. Because we are living through a refrigeration moment. And most of us — most businesses, most governments, most economies — are still cutting ice.
The Macro Picture Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
Here's the uncomfortable truth: we are entering a period of profound, structural deflation — and it's going to reshape every economy on the planet, including New Zealand's.
When you combine artificial intelligence with robotics and automated supply chains, the cost of producing almost everything collapses. A single AI agent can now do the work of a team of analysts. Robotic manufacturing lines can produce goods at a fraction of the cost of human labour. Autonomous vehicles — robocabs, autonomous freight — are eliminating entire job categories.
This isn't speculation. It's already happening in pockets, and the acceleration is exponential.
The deflationary pressure this creates is unlike anything central banks have managed before. Their entire toolkit — interest rates, money supply, stimulus — was built for inflationary environments. What happens when the cost of goods, services, and labour all trend toward zero simultaneously? What happens to pension funds, property valuations, and the social contracts built on the assumption of perpetual growth?
These are the questions we should be asking loudly, especially here in New Zealand, where our economy is heavily tied to commodities, agriculture, and tourism — sectors that are either being disrupted or are acutely vulnerable to global supply chain shocks.
The K-Shaped Economy: Who Gets Left Behind
CERN Basher introduced me to a concept that I haven't been able to shake: the K-shaped economy.
When economic disruption hits, it doesn't land evenly. The letter K is the shape: one group curves upward — those who own the technology, the capital, the assets. Another group curves sharply downward — those who work in the jobs being automated, who lack access to financial tools that hedge against inflation and devaluation, who are priced out of the ownership economy.
This isn't a political talking point. It's a mathematical outcome of what happens when productivity gains accrue to capital rather than labour. And the AI revolution is the most powerful capital-concentrating force in human history.
The surgeon analogy makes this visceral. Think of the difference between a surgeon and a lemonade stand operator. The surgeon spent a decade training for something extraordinarily difficult. Their skills are genuinely rare, genuinely complex, genuinely hard to replicate. The lemonade stand operator bought lemons and made a margin. Both are legitimate businesses — but only one is protected from disruption by the sheer depth of expertise required.
Now apply that to the digital economy. The businesses, creators, and professionals who will thrive are those whose value is irreducibly human — judgment, relationships, creative synthesis, lived experience. The ones who will struggle are those doing work that is, at its core, information processing. Because that is exactly what AI does, better, faster, and cheaper every single day.
I run a health business. I've felt this personally. Big Tech platforms have already demonstrated that they can reshape or eliminate the visibility of entire businesses overnight through algorithmic changes. I've watched colleagues lose half their income when a single update changed how their content was distributed. The centralised internet — where a handful of corporations control what gets seen, what gets found, who gets paid — is already the biggest structural risk to small and medium businesses operating online.
Bitcoin Isn't What You Think It Is
Most people, when they hear Bitcoin, think speculation. They think volatile prices, crypto exchanges, get-rich-quick schemes.
CERN Basher and I spent a significant part of our conversation on something far more interesting — the work of Jason Lowry, a former US Space Force officer whose thesis Softwar reframes Bitcoin not as a financial asset but as a security technology.
Lowry's argument is elegant and unsettling: Bitcoin is the first monetary system secured by physical energy expenditure rather than political authority. Every other form of money in human history — gold, fiat currency, bank credit — ultimately depends on a trusted third party: a government, a central bank, a military. Bitcoin's security comes from the computational work required to attack it, which must be measured in real-world energy and hardware. It's prohibitively expensive to manipulate at scale.
Now extend that to what's coming: a world populated by billions of AI agents — software that autonomously executes contracts, purchases services, transfers value, makes decisions on behalf of humans and institutions. These agents need a financial layer that cannot be corrupted, censored, or inflated away by any single actor. They need a system of trust that doesn't require a human intermediary to verify it.
Bitcoin is that layer. Not because crypto enthusiasts say so — but because the mathematical properties of the network make it uniquely suited for machine-to-machine transactions in a world where AI agents are the primary economic actors.
This is why I take it seriously. Not as an investment call. As a piece of infrastructure.
Decentralisation vs Big Tech: The Battle for the Internet
I use AI daily. I run my business with AI assistance — research, content strategy, operations. And I can see, clearly, how the trajectory bends.
Right now, artificial intelligence is dominated by a handful of companies: OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta AI. These are extraordinary organisations doing extraordinary work. But they are also centralised — which means their decisions about what AI can say, what it can search, what it can recommend, flow through a very small number of decision-makers with their own interests, biases, and relationships with regulators and governments.
Decentralised alternatives are emerging — AI models that run on distributed networks, content platforms that cannot be deplatformed, financial rails that cannot be frozen. The tension between these two visions of the internet's future is, I believe, one of the most consequential political fights of the next decade.
For New Zealand, this matters acutely. We are a small, open economy at the end of the world. We have outsized dependence on global platforms for everything from tourism marketing to agricultural export pricing. When those platforms change their rules — when Google reshapes search, when Meta changes how business content reaches audiences — we feel it disproportionately. Our businesses can't lobby in Washington. We can't shape the algorithms. We just adapt or get left behind.
The case for New Zealand engaging seriously with decentralised infrastructure — Bitcoin as a reserve asset, open-source AI tooling, distributed content platforms — isn't ideological. It's strategic sovereignty.
The Commodity Constraint Nobody is Talking About
One thing CERN Basher flagged that I found genuinely eye-opening: while the software layer of the AI economy tends toward zero marginal cost, the physical layer is hitting hard constraints.
Training large AI models requires extraordinary amounts of energy and specialised chips. Deploying autonomous vehicle fleets, building out data centres, manufacturing the robots that will run the automated factories — all of this requires copper, lithium, rare earths, steel, concrete. The physical inputs of the technological revolution are subject to old-fashioned supply and demand. And many of them are undersupplied relative to where demand is heading.
This creates a fascinating economic paradox: the AI revolution will simultaneously drive deflation in information-based goods and services, while potentially driving inflation in the commodities required to build and power it. For New Zealand, which has significant natural resources and a relatively undeveloped mining and energy export sector, this represents a genuine strategic opportunity — if we're paying attention.
What Should New Zealand Do?
I'm not a politician and I don't pretend to have all the answers. But I have spent over a decade interviewing the world's leading thinkers on human performance, longevity, and emerging science. I've learned one thing with certainty: the people who thrive through disruption are those who engaged with new information early, updated their mental models quickly, and acted before the change became unavoidable.
For New Zealand, I'd argue we need to be doing a few things urgently:
Educate first. We need a national conversation about what AI and decentralised finance actually are — not the hype, not the fear, but the mechanics. Most of our political class and business leadership are working with outdated mental models. The ice cutters thought refrigeration was a niche technology for wealthy households.
Build strategic reserves differently. The New Zealand Superannuation Fund is one of the best-managed sovereign wealth funds in the world. It should be seriously examining Bitcoin as a reserve asset — not as speculation, but as a hedge against the devaluation of fiat currencies in a world of AI-driven deflation and central bank experimentation.
Invest in sovereignty. That means energy infrastructure, domestic AI capability, and a regulatory environment that doesn't simply copy the EU or the US but thinks carefully about what serves New Zealand's specific interests.
Protect the middle. The K-shaped economy is not inevitable if policy acts decisively to ensure that productivity gains are broadly distributed — through ownership models, education, and infrastructure that gives ordinary New Zealanders a stake in the technological economy rather than being displaced by it.
The Refrigeration Moment
The ice cutters didn't have the internet. They didn't have financial advisors on podcasts explaining what refrigeration would do to their business model. They didn't have the benefit of foresight.
We do.
The question isn't whether AI and Bitcoin will reshape the global economy. They already are. The question is whether we will be among the people and nations that lean into the change thoughtfully, or whether we'll still be sharpening our ice saws when the refrigerators arrive.
I find this moment genuinely exciting — and genuinely terrifying. Which usually means we're standing at the edge of something important.
If you want to dig deeper into these ideas, my full conversation with CERN Basher is available on the Pushing the Limits Podcast. You can also follow him at @Cernbasher and explore his thinking at brilliantadvice.net.
And if you're doing your own thinking about longevity, performance, and navigating an uncertain future — you're in the right place. lisatamati.com
Lisa Tamati is a professional ultra-endurance athlete, author, and host of the Pushing the Limits Podcast. She runs a longevity health practice and supplement company from Taranaki, New Zealand.