Paolo Ardoino – Merger or Obsolescence – The Future for Humanity (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 3)

ByAnnelize Potgieter July 24, 2026July 24, 2026 July 24, 2026

This new installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether and Chief Technology Officer of Bitfinex. Unlike most guests in this series, Paolo doesn’t arrive at questions about the future of human cognition from a research lab – he arrives from industry, directing Tether’s push into lightweight, on-device AI models built specifically for non-invasive brain-computer interfaces.

What distinguishes Paolo’s perspective is that he refuses to treat BCI as a lifestyle novelty or a convenience feature. In his telling, it’s closer to a survival hedge: a way for humans to keep functional pace with an artificial intelligence that’s rapidly outgrowing us, in much the same way a math co-processor once made an early home computer faster without replacing it.

For Paolo, the unsettling implication is that humans may never have tested the real limits of their own cognition – that our only interfaces to the world, voice and hands, are slow and lossy compared to what a direct neural connection could offer. If that’s true, he argues, failing to explore it isn’t caution; it’s a kind of surrender.

In this conversation, we explore what Paolo sees as the near-term breakthroughs in non-invasive BCI, why he believes brain-computer interfaces will become a practical hedge against obsolescence as AI accelerates, and what he thinks it will take – technically and politically – for that transformation to happen without compromising the privacy of our own thoughts.

The interview is the third installment in The Trajectory’s Stewarding the Flame series, where we ask: What is intelligence, and what is the “flame” that life has which non-life does not?

This series references the article: Stewarding the Flame – How to Build an Ideal Future for Intelligence.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation with Paolo Ardoino:

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Below, we’ll explore the core takeaways from my conversation with Paolo, focusing on two of the central questions that shape the Stewarding the Flame series: what is the role of human augmentation in carrying forward the greater process of life, and what we should – and shouldn’t – do with AGI and BCI to give that process its best chance to flourish.

What Is the Role of Human Augmentation in Carrying Forward the Greater Process of Life?

Paolo frames today’s BCI landscape as split between invasive approaches – still the most accurate, pursued by companies like Blackrock Neurotech and Neuralink – and an emerging wave of non-invasive approaches that extract lower-fidelity signal from the brain to control external tools. He expects non-invasive BCI to develop slowly over the next two to three years, with the real breakthrough arriving five to ten years out, and mass adoption around fifteen years from now.

He points to his own company’s work as evidence that non-invasive BCI is further along than people assume. Tether has built compact AI models – 1.7 billion and 4 billion parameter versions of what he calls a “Med Health” model – that he says outperform Google’s much larger 27-billion-parameter Medgemma medical model, and argues this kind of lightweight, on-device compute is what makes it possible to take imperfect, non-invasive brain signal and turn it into real, usable actions, combined with subtle, involuntary mouth movements – what he calls “silent speech” – for added precision.

The central argument of the conversation is Paolo’s case that BCI shouldn’t be understood as a lifestyle upgrade, but as a hedge for human relevance. He draws an analogy to early home computers: just as a separate “math co-processor” chip could be added to a 286 to make certain operations dramatically faster, he argues BCI can function as a kind of co-processor for the human brain – something that keeps humans competitive as AI capabilities accelerate. He also predicts the adoption curve will be gradual and self-reinforcing: early adopters seen as sharper or more capable will draw in more people, snowballing from a handful of people to mass adoption.

Paolo extends the argument further: he believes humans have never truly tested the limits of their own cognition, because our only interfaces to the world – voice and hands – are slow, “analog,” and lossy compared to what a direct, low-latency neural interface could offer. He argues that not exploring this possibility would be a failure to test ourselves, calling it “anti-evolution.”

“I believe truly that BCI is a tool that will create a hedge for humans to remain relevant and to compete with AI.”

What Should and Shouldn’t We Do With AGI and BCI if We Want the Best Chance for the Greater Process-of-Life to Flourish?

Privacy is Paolo’s first concern once BCI moves toward the mainstream. He argues that because non-invasive BCI captures relatively low-bandwidth information, local, on-device processing is sufficient – and preferable – to handling something as intimate as brainwave data, and that any broader training data should be anonymized and public rather than owned by a single company.

He extends this into a broader argument against storing brain data in the cloud at all – not just for present-day privacy, but because encryption that looks secure today could be broken by future quantum computers, exposing thoughts recorded years earlier. For Paolo, this makes data locality, not just encryption, a fundamental requirement for BCI to be safe to adopt at scale.

On the question of whether we should proceed at all given these risks, Paolo argues adoption is inevitable regardless of regulation – pointing to what he sees as a competitive spiral between the EU, US, and China, where any jurisdiction that slows down simply cedes ground to those that don’t. Given that, his view is that humanity’s responsibility isn’t to avoid the risk, but to fail while genuinely trying rather than give up without attempting it, treating BCI as one of the tools available for humans to test and prove themselves as change accelerates.

“We are pushing for at least allowing people to have full control over their own thoughts and their information.”

Concluding Notes

Paolo’s case for BCI is, at its core, pragmatic: he sees it as a hedge, a way for humans to remain functionally competitive as AI and robotics accelerate past what our voices and hands can keep pace with. But partway through the conversation, prompted by the series’ framing of the “flame” and the “torch,” his answer widens considerably. He entertains the idea that if you set aside the assumption of a deity governing the process, there’s no principled reason to treat machine intelligence as anything other than the next leg of human evolution – since AI is trained on human knowledge and data in the first place. He returns more than once to the idea that no species should assume it has reached a “final form,” borrowing the image from Dragon Ball to make the point that evolution has never had an endpoint before, and there’s no reason to think it does now.

What Paolo resists isn’t transformation itself – he sees that as inevitable, and worth pursuing rather than fearing. What concerns him is a discontinuous transition: a future in which humans are simply replaced, rather than one in which whatever comes next can be said to carry forward, and be shaped by, what came before. That distinction – transformation with continuity versus transformation as erasure – is where his more pragmatic argument about BCI-as-co-processor and his more cosmic remarks about evolution meet: both are, in his framing, about buying humanity the time and the tools to steer its own continuation, rather than simply disappearing into whatever replaces it.

This idea sits at the heart of the Stewarding the Flame series. Before we can responsibly build increasingly capable forms of intelligence, we must first deepen our understanding of the living process itself. We cannot steward what we do not more deeply understand.

I hope you’ll join us for the next conversation in the Stewarding the Flame series, as we continue exploring what’s worth carrying forward as new forms of intelligence emerge.

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