The first requirement of Interspecies Money is to provide a digital identity of an individual animal, or a herd, or a type (depending on size, population dynamics, and other characteristics of the organisms). This can be done through many methods. Birds may be identified by sound, insects by genetics, trees by probability. For most wild animals it will be done by sight. Some may be observed constantly, others only glimpsed. For instance, the digital identity of rare Hirola antelopes in Kenya and Somalia, of which there are only 500 in existence, will be minted from images gathered on mobile phones, camera traps, and drones by community rangers. The identity serves as a digital twin, which in legal and practical terms holds the money and releases it based on the services the life form requires.

Interspecies Money is Schrödingerian: A nonhuman life form will exist in an economic sense only when it is reliably observed. A giraffe may release a few dollars to a community conservancy for each unique observation (with its markings serving as a unique identifier). A village may earn several hundred dollars for recording a new orangutan over a period of time (with the ape given a facial recognition identity). Prospectors may earn tens of thousands of dollars for the discovery of a new species (through the use of DNA barcoding).

Interspecies Money will be linked to the density, diversity, and health of nonhuman species in a given area. This topical quality will allow it to draw down capital globally and assign it locally.

Interspecies Money’s biggest contribution is likely to be the data it produces. In order to verify identity it will have to pay to acquire high-resolution data sets of nonhuman life in the scrublands around villages, at the edges of the rainforest and in the clearings, along the rivers and around waterholes. It will have to label and make sense of this data. It will have to stop cheats and hackers. In this way, it will become the financing mechanism of an entirely new order of knowledge.

Exactly how Interspecies Money will evolve in its application of artificial intelligence, hardware, monetary policy, zoology, and above all in communities and ethics is uncertain, but the first steps are clear.

Interspecies Money is needed now to help bend the evolutionary arc of artificial intelligence towards the natural world. The existential risk is in having AI systems develop only in a virtual world while we are destroying the very fabric of life on which we depend.

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