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An Economy of AI Agents

78 points by nerder92

by vermilingua

2 subcomments

Hmm, where have I seen this before…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

by zkmon

2 subcomments

Please ELI5 for me: How are AI agents different from traditional workflow engines, which orchestrated a set of tasks by interacting with both humans and other software systems?

by Herring

0 subcomment

It's hard to predict the future. For example this was a popular article not that long ago - https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

by mjburgess

7 subcomments

AI systems cannot be economic agents, in the sense of participating in a relevant sense in economic transactions. An economic transaction is an exchange between people with needs (, preferences, etc.) that can die -- and so, fundamentally, are engaged in exchanges of (productive) time via promising and meeting one's promises. Time is the underlying variable of all economics, and its what everything ends up in ratio to -- the marginal minute of life.
There isn't any sense in which an AI agent gives rise to a economic value, because it wants nothing, promises nothing, and has nothing to exchange. An AI agent can only 'enable' economic transactions as means of production (, etc.) -- the price of any good cannot derive from a system which has no subjective desire grounded in no final ends.

by praccu

0 subcomment

This idea seems to be coming up in multiple places.
Here's one from Deepmind:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10147

by tokioyoyo

1 subcomments

Is this what will be tried to fix the potential fallout from continuously decreasing fertility rates (resulting in population decline, thus affecting the consumption-based economy)?

by sriku

0 subcomment

Wouldn't "The Age of Em" be relevant to this paper? Was surprised to not find a reference to it in the preprint.

by ur-whale

1 subcomments

Maybe the time for actually useful distributed autonomous corporations is not far away anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...

by beefnugs

1 subcomments

Well for starters if some incredible change to capitalism doesn't occur, we are going to have to come up with never before cooperative software tools for the general populace to assess and avoid the most egregious companies that stop hiring people.
Tools for: mass harassment campaigns against rich people/companies that don't support human life anymore, dynamically calculating the most damage you can do without crossing into illegal.
Automatically suggesting alternatives of local human businesses vs the bigevils, or collecting like minded groups of people to start up new competition. Tracking individual rich people and what new companies and decisions they are making doing ongoing damage, somehow recognize and categorize the trends of big tech to "do the same old illegal shit except through an app now" before the legal system can catch up.
Capitalism sure turns out be real fucking dumb if it can't even come up with proper market analysis tools for workers to have some kind of knowledge about where they can best leverage their skills, companies get away with breaking all the rules and create coercion hierarchies everywhere.
I hate to say (because the legal system has never worked ever) but the only workable future to me seems like forcing agents/robots to be tied to humans. If a company wants 100 robots, they must be paying a human for every robot they utilize somehow. Maybe a dynamic ratio somehow, like if the government decided most people are getting enough resources to survive, then maybe 2 robots per human payed.