Tradecraft’s Jake Ryan: The Age of Autonomy

Host Tom Shaughnessy talks to Jake Ryan, Founder and general partner of Tradecraft Capital and author of an upcoming book on crypto investing. Jake discusses his prediction for the Age of Autonomy, the challenges of predicting where crypto will go, and more.

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 Key Points:

1. Society is at the end of the Age of Information and is headed into what Jake calls the Age of Autonomy.
2. Competition drives adoption of new technologies.
3. Automation and human intervention, and centralized and decentralized currencies, will likely always need to coexist.

Quotes

• “As we see these technologies converge, we’re going to see orgs & businesses start to build autonomous operations, & businesses that don't have autonomous operations simply won’t be able to compete with those that do bc autonomy is the ultimate competitive advantage.” –Jake Ryan
• “Humans do a great job at envisioning the future and they do a really terrible time at timing it. It’s just too complex.” –Jake Ryan

Episode Highlights:

• Jake’s book on crypto investing is set to come out in the first quarter of 2021.
• He moved from app development into angel investing about 5 years ago, which is what led him to crypto.
• Jake calls this the “age of autonomy,” based on theories of short-wave and long-wave economic cycles driven by technological revolutions.
• By autonomy, Jake is referring to automation, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, robotics, and now crypto.
• Jake sees us as being in the mature phase of the Age of Information.
• Jake urges us not to view these changes with judgment, as right or wrong, but simply as fact.
• He sees a future intersection of these various technologies, with blockchain as the glue between them.
• Automation will not drive out humans if we make more complex and decentralized governance systems, but overall, over decades, human intervention will become less and less required.
• The economy needs a currency that will ride the economy through inflation and deflation, and a currency that stores value well over time, and those appear to be mutually exclusive.
• Jake believes we won’t go to full decentralization but that we’ll always have both centralized and decentralized currencies.

Resources Mentioned: 

• Crypto’s Role in the Age of Autonomy - https://hackernoon.com/cryptos-role-in-the-age-of-autonomization-2bf414ceb5d2
• Chain Reaction Twitter: https://twitter.com/chainpodcast
• Tom Shaughnessy Twitter: https://twitter.com/Shaughnessy119
• Tradecraft Capital website: https://www.tradecraft.capital/ 
• Jake Ryan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/TradecraftJake
• Book recommendation: Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez
• Technolog