Comment by mrbonner
Plot twist: humans become the new Proof of Work consensus mechanism. Instead of GPUs burning electricity to hash blocks, we burn our sanity verifying whether that Medium article was written by a person or a particularly confident LLM.
"Human Verification as a Service": finally, a lucrative career where the job description is literally "read garbage all day and decide if it's authentic garbage or synthetic garbage." LinkedIn influencers will pivot to calling themselves "Organic Intelligence Validators" and charge $500/hr to squint at emails and go "yeah, a human definitely wrote this passive-aggressive Slack message."
The irony writes itself: we built machines to free us from tedious work, and now our job is being the tedious work for the machines. Full circle. Poetic even. Future historians (assuming they're still human and not just Claude with a monocle) will mark this as the moment we achieved peak civilization: where the most valuable human skill became "can confidently say whether another human was involved."
Bullish on verification miners. Bearish on whatever remains of our collective attention span.
Human CAPTCHA exists to figure out whether your clients are human or not, so you can segment them and apply human pricing. Synthetics, of course, fall into different tiers. The cheaper ones.