Field Manual No. 1 · Steps Ventures · October 2026

AI
is analog.

Artificial Analog Intelligence: the real AI?

AI makes faking things cheap. So the things you can't fake, like a person in a room, a signed original or a hand on the breaker, are getting valuable again. This is a field guide to the AI-driven analog boom, and where the money is in the next two years.

Not prepping. Just reality.
FM 1-01

The crossover

When faking something gets cheaper than checking it, presence becomes the proof.

Whole industries won't go back to typewriters. What happens is narrower and stickier. An analog checkpoint shows up at each trust boundary, the spot where someone has to prove they're real, a thing is authentic, or a system can be shut off. Digital keeps the volume. Analog holds the root of trust.

Signed media and passkeys will win some ground back. They can prove which device sent something. They can't prove the person is real, competent or acting freely. Those questions stay in the room.

crossover cost to fake cost to verify then now past here, analog wins
Illustrative, not data. The shape of the argument.
FM 1-02

It already started

Governments and militaries got there first. They had the most to lose and the least patience for a clever workaround.

2013

Typewriters at the Kremlin

Russia's Federal Guard Service bought electric typewriters for sensitive documents. Press reports tied it to the Snowden and WikiLeaks leaks. Every machine leaves a traceable typeface.

[src]
2015

Back to the stars

The US Naval Academy put celestial navigation lessons back into training, citing cyber threats to GPS.

[src]
2016+

Paper ballots

By 2024, over 98% of US election jurisdictions used paper ballots or voter-verified paper records. Paper is the audit trail the machines can't edit.

[src]
2019

The grid, by hand

The Securing Energy Infrastructure Act set up a national-lab pilot to test "analog and nondigital control systems" as a defense for the grid.

[src]
2024

The $25M video call

An Arup employee in Hong Kong wired about US$25.6M after a video call where the CFO and colleagues on screen were deepfakes.

[src]
2024+

Drones on a wire

In Ukraine, jamming broke radio-controlled drones. Both sides answered with drones steered over fiber-optic cable, which jamming can't touch.

[src]
2025

Blue books are back

Professors went back to handwritten exams. Blue book sales rose about 50% at the University of Florida and about 80% at UC Berkeley.

[src]
2025

Interviews in the room

Sundar Pichai said Google would bring back some in-person interview rounds. Coverage tied it to AI cheating in remote hiring.

[src]
FM 1-03

Where it hits next

Money follows losses, and losses follow fraud. Here's the order we expect, from already moving to still forming.

Now

Money movement and identity recovery

Big wires, real estate closings and account recovery pick up in-person or notarized steps. Families adopt code words. Callbacks go to numbers you already had, never the one in the email.

Now → 2027

Hiring and credentials

Proctored paper exams, oral defenses and in-person work-sample days. Remote assessment stops measuring the person.

2026 → 2028

Critical infrastructure

AI finds vulnerabilities faster than small utilities can patch them. The answer is hardwired protection, isolated control networks and manual-mode drills. The question every operator gets is simple: can you run it, or safely trip it, with the network down?

2026 → 2028

Evidence, claims and journalism

Chain of custody, physical originals and in-person sourcing gain weight. Unsigned photos and video lose it, first in insurance claims and then in court.

2027+

Research integrity

Physical sample archives, witnessed lab notebooks and replication by named labs, as AI-assisted fake papers scale up.

Ongoing

Social trust

Cold inbound becomes mostly synthetic. Introductions, vouching and in-person-first networks become how serious people meet.

Stays digital: retail, streaming and routine operations. Anywhere getting fooled now and then costs less than the friction of checking.

FM 1-04

Where the business is

The winning shape is the same almost every time. A network of trusted people, plus software that makes them cheap to dispatch and easy to audit. You sell verified presence back into a digital workflow.

1

Verified presence for real estate and big payments

NowServices → network
Pain
The FBI logged $275M in real estate fraud losses in 2025, plus $3B in business email compromise. Add cloned executive voices, and remote online notarization becoming a weak point itself.
Who pays
Title and escrow companies, lenders, family offices, and the insurers behind their crime and E&O policies.
Wedge
On-demand in-person ID checks and notaries plus out-of-band callback verification, priced per transaction.
Competition
CertifID owns software wire verification. The physical-presence layer is open.
2

Field verification for insurance and disaster claims

Now → 2027Services first
Pain
AI-generated and edited damage photos in claims. Zurich has reported a rise in digitally modified claim images.
Who pays
Insurers, claims administrators, disaster recovery programs, and auditors on public-assistance closeouts.
Wedge
Geotagged, chain-of-custody inspections by credentialed people, delivered as a tamper-evident evidence package.
Competition
Gig inspection networks sell convenience. Nobody sells custody that holds up in court.
3

Manual-mode readiness for small utilities

2026 → 2028Grant-funded services
Pain
Over 44,000 US community water systems, plus co-ops and munis, most with no security staff, facing faster attacks on their control systems.
Who pays
Federal and state resilience grants, with insurers pushing at renewal.
Wedge
Assessments, manual-operation drills, hardwired trip and override retrofits, and paper runbooks. A licensed engineer's stamp opens doors.
Model
Recurring drill contracts with grant writing bundled in.
4

Air-gapped AI for regulated firms

NowServices > hardware
Pain
The irony: fear of AI drives demand for private AI. Law firms, defense suppliers, health systems and family offices want models that never touch a public endpoint.
Wedge
Turnkey offline inference boxes plus managed setup for firms too small for a hyperscaler's private deal.
Watch out
Thin hardware margins, and every cloud now sells a "sovereign" option.
5

In-person skills verification

2026 → 2027Venue + platform
Pain
Remote interviews and exams no longer tell you who can do the work.
Who pays
Employers hiring technical roles, licensing boards, universities.
Wedge
Neutral, bookable rooms for work-sample days and oral exams. A verified skills day, not a test center.
Competition
Pearson VUE and Prometric own standardized tests, not open-ended work.
6

Vetted in-person networks

OngoingMembership
Why
When the inbox is synthetic, a warm intro is worth more. Paid professional clubs are already growing.
Catch
Easy to start and hard to scale. Best as a deal-flow engine for something else.
7

Physical provenance for records and goods

2027+Waits on a trigger
What
Paper escrow of deeds, cap tables and engineering stamps. "Human-made" certification for craft and creative work. Film and physical originals for evidence.
Catch
Real but slow. It waits for a court ruling or a regulation to force it.

Analog nostalgia

Vinyl, film cameras, typewriters, zines. Real demand, crowded field, lifestyle margins.

Crypto proof-of-personhood

Iris-scanning orbs and tokens. Heavy regulatory exposure and low trust with exactly the buyers who care.

Fighting incumbents head-on

Records vaults and test centers have scale. Sell to them or around them.

Where we'd start

  1. Claims field verification. Buyers already budget for fraud loss, and it starts as a service with no product to build.
  2. Real estate presence verification. The natural next door. Same field network, different buyer.
  3. Utility manual-mode readiness. Slowest sales cycle, most defensible. Grants pay for it and an engineering license gates it.
FM 1-05

The field kit

Skills that were fading and are about to be worth something again. Tick off the ones you have.

Run it by hand

  • Manual plant operation and reading analog gauges
  • Relay logic and electromechanical controls
  • Map, compass and dead reckoning
  • Celestial navigation
  • HF and ham radio, Morse code
  • Mesh networks with no internet

Prove it's real

  • Notarizing and witnessing
  • Chain-of-custody discipline
  • Paper records, ledgers and carbon copies
  • Film photography and physical negatives
  • Provenance documentation
  • Codebooks and one-time pads

Prove you're good

  • Oral exams and defending work live
  • Apprenticeship and teaching by hand
  • Memorization and memory palaces
  • Mental math and Fermi estimates
  • Handwriting you can read under pressure
  • Spotting a number that's off by 10x

Know people

  • Vouching and letters of reference
  • Guild-style credentialing
  • Having actually walked the site
  • Having actually met the counterparty
  • Local knowledge nobody wrote down
  • A phone number you already trust

Analog readiness: 0 / 24

FM 1-06

The scarcest skill

The most valuable people won't be analog purists. They'll be the ones who can switch modes.

Run it digitally every day. Take it to manual the day it's compromised. That skill decays fastest because nobody practices manual mode until they need it. Organizations that drill it, the way militaries do, will have the edge.

FM 1-07

Tripwires

Signals that would move these bets up or down. When one trips, the timeline shortens.

Insurers or title underwriters write in-person requirements into policy terms.
A court excludes unsigned photo or video evidence on authenticity grounds.
A licensing board drops remote exams.
A new federal funding round for analog backups at utilities.
A deepfake fraud big enough to make a bank change its wire policy industry-wide.
REF

Sources

  1. Fox News / AFP, "Kremlin turns back to typewriters to avoid leaks," July 2013. The FSO said the purchase was planned earlier. foxnews.com
  2. Military Times, "Naval Academy reinstates celestial navigation," Nov 1, 2015. militarytimes.com
  3. US Election Assistance Commission, 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey release, June 30, 2025. eac.gov
  4. Securing Energy Infrastructure Act, S.174 (116th Congress), enacted via the FY2020 NDAA. congress.gov
  5. AI Incident Database, report 3622, Hong Kong deepfake video-call fraud (HK$200M), 2024. incidentdatabase.ai
  6. Euromaidan Press, fiber-optic FPV drone immune to jamming, Oct 5, 2025. euromaidanpress.com
  7. The Daily Cardinal, "Blue books are back," Nov 2025, citing the Wall Street Journal. dailycardinal.com
  8. Storyboard18, "Google to reintroduce in-person interviews," 2025. storyboard18.com
  9. HousingWire, FBI IC3 2025 report: real estate fraud $275.1M, BEC $3.04B. housingwire.com
  10. Insurance Business UK, AI-generated claims images, Feb 2026. insurancebusinessmag.com
  11. US EPA, Public Water System Service Areas ("over 44,000 community water systems"). epa.gov

Forward-looking sections are opinion, not forecasts with numbers behind them. The crossover chart is illustrative.