An Economy of AI Agents (opens in new tab)

One of the most interesting things about the book is how it skewers the idea of there being a singular AI.

In Accelerando the VO are a species of trillions of AI beings that are sort of descended from us. They have a civilization of their own.

For better or worse, Accelerando comes to mind _a lot_ when trying to figure out how agent platforms should work. Hopefully for better.

Amazing how forward looking that book was.

It's not gonna happen like that, because all the paths leading to it cannot be financially exploited.

Also what a shortsighted scifi book, yet techies readily invest in that particular fantasy because it's not your usual spaceship fare.

Here's another one: Manna - Two Views of Humanity’s Future, by Marshall Brain. It's a fairly light read, just 8 chapters:

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

I think I've internalized these stories enough to comfortably say (without giving anything away) that AI is incompatible with capitalism and probably money itself. That's why I consider it to be the last problem in computer science, because once we've solved problem solving, then the (artificial) scarcity of modern capitalism and the social darwinism it relies upon can simply be opted out of. Unless we collectively decide to subjugate ourselves under a Star Wars empire or Star Trek Borg dystopia.

The catch being that I have yet to see a billionaire speak out against the dangers of performative economics once machines surpass human productivity or take any meaningful action to implement UBI before it's too late. So on the current timeline, subjugation under an Iron Heel in the style of Jack London feels inevitable.

Isn’t that the one where corporate structures become intelligent self executing agents, cause a lot of problems? Yet here IRL, the current tech billionaires think it’s a roadmap to follow?

Talk about getting the wrong message. No one show those guys a copy of 1984! Wow, then…

Traditional workflow is largely predefined & rule-based.

There’s a level of autonomy by the AI agents (it determines on its own the next step), that is not predefined.

Agreed though that there’s lots of similarities.

have you built stuff with LLMs before? genuine question because nondeterministic and deterministic workflows are leagues apart in what they can accomplish.

The human is no longer in the loop. The agentic system is capable of generating quality synthetic data over time to train on. It becomes self improving with the quality synthetic data that can be used to train weaker models to perform better.

Which has become largely true? People flip-flop between the hottest AI model of the day. After a flagship AI model ships, distillations appear that offer slightly degraded performance at the fraction of the cost.

For inference, the difference between expensive data center hardware and homemade GPUs largely comes down the distinction of RAM. Which is a limitation actively worked around (unfortunately all the well-funded orgs are not that interested in this)

I dunno man… did the DAO guys ever realize that they had just reinvented an open source co-op?

I feel like co-ops were awful anyway even without the blockchain.

Nope. This is just greed to make most of the moment without any thought for tomorrow. Nobody knows or cares where it takes us, but everybody knows that there is money to make today. So you need a model to analyze the economy with greed as the only driving force without any foresight. Add some parameters to account for monopolistic forces, human desire to be lazy and dumb thinking it is progress, and losing all biological senses to devices. That may give a better prediction.

> If a company wants 100 robots, they must be paying a human for every robot they utilize somehow

This is so bonkers and absurd I don't know what to say.

> Automatically suggesting alternatives of local human businesses vs the bigevils, or collecting like minded groups of people to start up new competition

I think you are correct on the competition part.

I think we are going to see a avalanche of millions of small business takeaway market share from big businesses(b2b saas is the first casualty but also others in the future as technology advances).

However more than by regulation, I think it'll happen due to AI/LLMs itself.

“…the only workable future to me seems like forcing agents/robots to be tied to humans.”

This is what I’ve been thinking lately as well. Couple that with legal responsibility for any repercussions, and you might have a way society can thrive alongside AI and robotics.

I think any AI or robotic system acting upon the world in some way (even LLM chatbots) should require a human “co-signer” who takes legal responsibility for anything the system does, as if they had performed the action themselves.

I dunno, I think social media of the past years has certainly indicated that whoever controls (social) media can do a pretty good job of creating or bleeding out social movements, by amplifying or dampening some venues of social discourse.

Nah. UBI and a national dividend is all we really need if AI and robots greatly increases wealth.

Replace "AI system" with "corporation" in the above and reread it.

There's no fundamental reason why AI systems can't become corporate-type legal persons. With offshoring and multiple jurisdictions, it's probably legally possible now. There have been a few blockchain-based organizations where voting was anonymous and based on token ownership. If an AI was operating in that space, would anyone be able to stop it? Or even notice?

The paper starts to address this issue at "4.3 Rethinking the legal boundaries of the corporation.", but doesn't get very far.

Sooner or later, probably sooner, there will be a collision between the powers AIs can have, and the limited responsibilities corporations do have. Go re-read this famous op-ed from Milton Friedman, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits".[1] This is the founding document of the modern conservative movement. Do AIs get to benefit from that interpretation?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

> Time is the underlying variable of all economics

Not quite. It's scarcity, not time. Scarcity of economic inputs (land, labor, capital, and technology). So "time" you mean labor and that's just one input.

Economics is like a constrained optimization problem: how to allocate scarce resources given unlimited desires.

Meanwhile, corporations, ngos, and governments are not exactly people, and partake in economic transactions all the time.

Those wants can easily be programmed. I do not think they should but someone could do so to make the agent act on their behalf. ("Go make me money.")

> An economic transaction is an exchange between people with needs (, preferences, etc.) that can die

You’ll need to give a citation for this to take you seriously

They can once they achieve purpose.

However that seems completely tangential to the current AI tech trajectory and probably going to arise entirely separately.

Yeah, that’s well articulated and well reasoned. Unfortunately, so long as in some way these agents are able to make money for the owner the argument is totally moot. You cannot expect capitalists to think of anything other than profit in the next quarter or quarter after that

I knew high frequency trading bots weren't real after all! Santa Claus lied to me!