Anonymous blockchain sounds like fertile soil for the emergence of simple, autonomous AI. Howard Bloom's cosmology centers around Replication Strategy and Iteration. The medium of blockchain provides convenient and abundant opportunity for both. Imagine a smart contract that could sort of recursively fuel itself with prediction market earnings, and clone itself programmatically. A relatively simple 'mother' script could run generate contracts that have the ability to make predictions and bet a small sum towards that prediction. Outcomes and learnings get shared back a sidechain that is used to help generate more effective offspring. Like a live evolutionary/genetic algorithm playing with real money. Then, if you give those contracts a sort of failover mechanism to spawn a new mother script if communication with the original is lost, you could have a petri dish for a form of digital life beyond simulation.

I realize I probably may have just made an ass of myself as the article suggested is happening. That said, it seems within reason to be able to implement something along those lines given enough time and resources. The article seems to suggest that blockchain has had minimal impact, and its inevitable financial crash and inability to scale to facilitate mass adoption of digital currency makes it worthy of ridicule. I posit that general immutability and autonomous financial entities will come to define our times- and that any assumption that blockchain isn't significant because it doesn't replace your debit card in 2018 misses the bigger picture entirely.