I am often drawn to remembering an article by Izabella Kaminska from late 2013, with the striking title "Is this how fiat currency dies, with thunderous CPUs?". Kaminska's 2013 vintage articles were equal parts hilarious (in her technical incompetence) and thought provoking (a genuinely reflective person a million miles from the cypherpunk ethos honestly grappling with bitcoin in a way that no other mainstream commentator did). And in this article she clued in to the real heart of it (sorry I can't find the original text, but anyway it was the title that already captured it). To this day, the trend towards a world dominated by compute power gets ever stronger. When I think about ways to help humanity ("tools for the people" as Amir used to say) in this approaching cyber/cypher-dystopia, I keep coming up against walls made of "thunderous CPUs". If we don't find ways to get distributed compute working in the presence of the censor, I'm not sure anything else will really matter that much. Note that Bitcoin already does that, but (a) mining's centralization tendencies are causing non-trivial fragility and (b) Bitcoin is not general compute, so we can't somehow leverage mining infrastructure.

Btw you might be assuming I'm talking about AI. I am, but not only. I think even any form of free communication may require compute power in future.