In Episode 3 of Exponential, we sat down with Nexus Chief Strategy Officer Alex Fowler for a conversation about the forces shaping the next era of the internet.
With a career that spans bioethics, early cryptographic policy, and consumer technology, Alex brings a rare combination of philosophical grounding and technical experience to one of the most urgent questions of our time: as machines begin acting on our behalf, who can we trust?
A post-user internet
“We’re already in the post-user internet.”
Alex makes his viewpoint clear: we’ve crossed the threshold into a machine-mediated web, where bots, agents, and large language models increasingly act as proxies for human users and businesses alike.
“Even as of this year, we will have essentially an internet where most of the interactions are being facilitated through bots and other forms of machine… We’re already sort of in this post-user internet.”
As agentic systems become autonomous and decision-capable, the traditional model of user interaction begins to erode. In its place: real-time, dynamically generated experiences rendered not by web developers, but by probabilistic systems pulling from fragmented data, executing opaque logic, and delivering outcomes that may be hard to verify or reproduce.
The new internet user interface
“The browser was to Web2 what agentic AI will be to Web3.”
That analogy, shared mid-episode, distills a tectonic shift in digital architecture. The web experience, once built on deterministic paths encoded by developers, is becoming generative — reshaped in real-time by increasingly autonomous systems. These systems will soon manage not only what we see, but how services are composed and executed behind the scenes.
But with this new fluidity comes a sharp problem: verifiability.
“We’re going to need a new layer of machine-based trust.”
Today, users interacting with LLMs are often billed for services with little clarity into what actually happened — which model was used, how much compute was consumed, whether a cheaper or more accurate path was available. In an economy driven by autonomous actors, this opacity doesn’t just create inefficiencies. It introduces existential risk.
“You can’t have point-in-time human audit firms going in after the fact… There’s going to need to be some kind of layer of machine-based trust.”
The need for a modern Turing Test
For Alex, this is where verifiable computation — and the infrastructure Nexus is building — becomes indispensable. Proofs aren’t a blockchain novelty. Instead, they’re a prerequisite for accountability in systems that evolve too fast for manual oversight.
“Maybe it’s time we modernize the Turing Test.”
Alex wraps up closes with a provocation: it’s not enough for machines to imitate humans — they must also be able to prove what they’ve done, and how.
“What we need is really to modernize the Turing test… Can the machine also prove its actions and its processes to us?”
This fusion of intelligence and verifiability — of agency and accountability — may define the next frontier. And for Nexus, it’s not just a technical challenge. It’s a philosophical one, rooted in a commitment to transparency, public infrastructure, and systems that serve human values during the growth of the machine economy.
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