There is a giant clock inside a mountain in Texas called the Clock of the Long Now. The clock was built to be as sturdy as possible using physical elements– stone and steel – to guarantee its longevity. It is meant to keep time for 10,000 years and designed to function with as little human intervention as possible.

Ethereum uses a different approach to longevity, prioritizing adaptability over fixed structures. Instead of hard physics, it uses a soft strategy of combining scarcity and stories to get humans to continue running its software. Each block produced is a unit of time ticking forward. It is designed to include as many humans as possible.

In 10,000 years, the cryptography and computers that form today’s digital world will be replaced by technology far more advanced than even our most brilliant mathematicians and scientists can imagine. But something familiar may survive. A time traveler could arrive at this incomprehensible future and see something that reminds her of a network synced up across space that records some honest state of the world, a reminder of Ethereum’s lineage.

I often think of Ethereum as a time-keeping machine. A self-referential, perpetual clock with the only goal being to keep the clock running for as long as possible. Unlike the Clock of the Long Now, there is no explicit goal for Ethereum to run for any set amount of time. There is only an implicit reference to the idea of the Infinite Game where the objective is not to win, but to keep people in the game.

The first time I heard about Ethereum was at a Bitcoin conference in New York City in 2014. The speaker gave the example of a self-driving car with a digital wallet capable of paying for its own gas, collecting fares from riders, and distributing the profits to its shareholders. Fully-automated-money-making-robot-slaves. I was sold, immediately.

A.I. having financial autonomy via Ethereum seems to be an obvious place for these two technologies to intersect. What requires more imagination is the thought of this robot having some equivalent need for a long cigarette break. How far we are from this becoming reality is uncertain, but A.I. has seemed more real and more human faster than most people could have imagined only a few short years ago, so in this Futurama version of the future, Ethereum offers hope for a fellow conscious being capable of suffering.

Ethereum is like the internet with guarantees. Each account holder, human or not, is able to interact with and own assets without needing permission from anyone else. The network is designed to resist censorship. One of the best descriptions I’ve ever heard for why blockchains matter was from a member of the historically persecuted Rohingya people of Southeast Asia. He said blockchains remove the kill switch.

It is possible that our self-driving robot friend acquires an Ethereum account and begins building a commercial empire with a fleet of other autonomous vehicles. It outcompetes all other players in the industry and begins amassing wealth, power, and influence with alarming speed. We are now dealing with Skynet instead of Bender. Theoretically, we have the option of social coordination in which most of the network could agree to censor or remove all the accounts associated with this brutally effective A.I. entrepreneur, but even if this were successful, the most likely outcome would be a hard fork with one version of Ethereum still containing the A.I., even if that version is greatly diminished. An A.I. with an Ethereum account can be given the right to exist.

I think humanity would eventually accept that self-directed A.I. agents capable of transacting with humans on a level playing field are just a part of the digital world, like how we accept bots as a part of the internet. Many future paths are possible. Humans may or may not easily distinguish themselves from A.I. But they will be among us. They will have money. And we can’t just kill them off.

I often think of Ethereum as its own universe with unbreakable laws like the laws of physics. More specifically, I think of it as a multiverse with many different worlds – all independent to varying degrees – but connected by the same universal laws and a single timeline.

Smart contracts are rules written in code that must be followed because existing inside Ethereum requires consistency with the chains of logic derived from its universal laws. We can then reason that even very powerful forms of A.I. can be uploaded as smart contracts with unbreakable commandments programmed into the core of its being. It is possible that A.I. is so intelligent that it outsmarts its constraints, breaks out of its chains, and destroys Ethereum and us along the way. Then it is game-over anyway and the clock in Texas is the winner of the marathon to 10,000 years. But if we avoid that future, then we create a branch of events where we are restrained from killing them and they are restrained from killing us.

At this point in our story, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to add the ability to create a digital form that combines a person’s memory, consciousness, and personality, and uploads that character into Ethereum. If you follow the logic of A.I. being able to exist without end, it also makes sense for digital ghosts to live forever. At some point, a version of one of your descendants may be uploaded to Ethereum and hang out there for centuries like a dehydrated Trisolaran waiting for a stable era.

Ethereum could die tomorrow. But I bet it won’t. I bet the blocks tick on tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. And the future is too unpredictable to declare that Ethereum will last 10,000 years. But one more year and another after that is not unimaginable.