9 ms·

An Economy of AI Agents

141 points by nerder92 10mo ago

ur-whale 10mo ago
Maybe the time for actually useful distributed autonomous corporations is not far away anymore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
- Esophagus4 10mo ago
  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.
  - ur-whale 10mo ago
    I think you may be missing out on the general idea of DAO's in general by restricting yourself to a few particular historical uses (and many a failed one at that) of DAOs, back from when agentic AI wasn't a thing. The hackability of these things though, that still remains a very valid topic, as it is orthogonal to the fact that AI has arrived on the scene.
Herring 10mo ago
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-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
- torginus 10mo ago
  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)
vermilingua 10mo ago
Hmm, where have I seen this before… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
- alexpotato 10mo ago
  Amazing how forward looking that book was.
- OgsyedIE 10mo ago
  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.
  - ineedasername 10mo ago
    That description leaves off some of the flavor— changes the feel once you know the descendent were labeled the Vile Offspring by the main characters, that were still human-ish.
- hirsin 10mo ago
  For better or worse, Accelerando comes to mind _a lot_ when trying to figure out how agent platforms should work. Hopefully for better.
- rf15 10mo ago
  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.
  - DerArzt 10mo ago
    > Also what shortsighted scifi book It's art not oracle
mjburgess 10mo ago
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.
- Aperocky 10mo ago
  They can once they achieve purpose. However that seems completely tangential to the current AI tech trajectory and probably going to arise entirely separately.
- bofadeez 10mo ago
  > 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.
  - hyperadvanced 10mo ago
    Depending on how you feel about various theories of development, an argument that all of these categories reduce to time. At the very least, the relationship between labor, capital, and time seems pretty fundamental: labor cannot be instantaneous, capital grows over time, etc.
    - bofadeez 10mo ago
      They can all be related on a philosophical level but in practice economists treat them as separate factors of production. It's land, labor, and capital classically. Technology/entrepreneurship can be seen as another factor, distinctly separate from labor.
praccu 10mo ago
This idea seems to be coming up in multiple places. Here's one from Deepmind: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10147 https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10147
zkmon 10mo ago
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?
- alberth 10mo ago
  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.
  - zkmon 10mo ago
    But rule-based processing was exactly the requirement. Why should the workflow automation come up with rules on the fly, when the rules were defined in the business process requirements? Aren't the deterministic rules more precise and reliable over the rules defined by probabilistic methods? Autonomy/automation makes sense where error-prone repetitive human activity is involved. But rule definitions are not repetitive human tasks. They are defined once and run every time by automation. Why does one need to go for a probabilistic rule definition for a one-time manual task? I don't see huge gains here.
    - nurettin 10mo ago
      I like determinism and objectivity as much as the next guy, but working in the industry for decades led me to realize that conditions change over time and your workflow slowly drifts away from reality. It would be more flexible to employ an AI agent if it works as promised on the tin.
      - zkmon 10mo ago
        There is no "reality" other than business requirements. That's the context for a workflow. You probably meant that the requirements aren't agile enough to meet the changing world outside. That's a different problem, I think. You can't bypass requirements and expect workflow to dynamically adapt to the changing reality. If that's the direction with AI-driven business re-engineering, then we are back to the chaos, exposing the business logic directly to the outside world.
tokioyoyo 10mo ago
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)?
- zkmon 10mo ago
  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.
beefnugs 10mo ago
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.
- slaterbug 10mo ago
  “…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.
- jaco6 10mo ago
  [dead]
- torginus 10mo ago
  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.
sriku 10mo ago
Wouldn't "The Age of Em" be relevant to this paper? Was surprised to not find a reference to it in the preprint.
torginus 10mo ago
Okay so how does an economy of AI companies doing business selling services related to hyperintellingent AI tech to each other differ from Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI sending money to each other to buy eacy other's stuff?
agentifysh 10mo ago
read the paper and not sure if i buy all of it. i just keep buying domains with agent in it and haven't shipped anything (agentify.sh for example) wish I could know what to build (and stop buying domains)
david_shi 10mo ago
2 interesting new protocols to check out if you're interested in this topic: 1. https://www.x402.org/ https://www.x402.org/ - micropayments for ai agents to access resources without needing to sign up for an api key 2. https://8004.org/ https://8004.org/ - open AI agent registry standard
wjsdj2009 10mo ago
Interesting point — thanks for sharing.

141 points by nerder92 10mo ago

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

Esophagus4 10mo ago
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.
- ur-whale 10mo ago
  I think you may be missing out on the general idea of DAO's in general by restricting yourself to a few particular historical uses (and many a failed one at that) of DAOs, back from when agentic AI wasn't a thing. The hackability of these things though, that still remains a very valid topic, as it is orthogonal to the fact that AI has arrived on the scene.

Herring 10mo ago

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-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

torginus 10mo ago
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)

vermilingua 10mo ago

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

alexpotato 10mo ago
Amazing how forward looking that book was.
OgsyedIE 10mo ago
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.
- ineedasername 10mo ago
  That description leaves off some of the flavor— changes the feel once you know the descendent were labeled the Vile Offspring by the main characters, that were still human-ish.
hirsin 10mo ago
For better or worse, Accelerando comes to mind _a lot_ when trying to figure out how agent platforms should work. Hopefully for better.
rf15 10mo ago
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.
- DerArzt 10mo ago
  > Also what shortsighted scifi book It's art not oracle

mjburgess 10mo ago

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.

Aperocky 10mo ago
They can once they achieve purpose. However that seems completely tangential to the current AI tech trajectory and probably going to arise entirely separately.
bofadeez 10mo ago
> 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.
- hyperadvanced 10mo ago
  Depending on how you feel about various theories of development, an argument that all of these categories reduce to time. At the very least, the relationship between labor, capital, and time seems pretty fundamental: labor cannot be instantaneous, capital grows over time, etc.
  - bofadeez 10mo ago
    They can all be related on a philosophical level but in practice economists treat them as separate factors of production. It's land, labor, and capital classically. Technology/entrepreneurship can be seen as another factor, distinctly separate from labor.

praccu 10mo ago

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

zkmon 10mo ago

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?

alberth 10mo ago
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.
- zkmon 10mo ago
  But rule-based processing was exactly the requirement. Why should the workflow automation come up with rules on the fly, when the rules were defined in the business process requirements? Aren't the deterministic rules more precise and reliable over the rules defined by probabilistic methods? Autonomy/automation makes sense where error-prone repetitive human activity is involved. But rule definitions are not repetitive human tasks. They are defined once and run every time by automation. Why does one need to go for a probabilistic rule definition for a one-time manual task? I don't see huge gains here.
  - nurettin 10mo ago
    I like determinism and objectivity as much as the next guy, but working in the industry for decades led me to realize that conditions change over time and your workflow slowly drifts away from reality. It would be more flexible to employ an AI agent if it works as promised on the tin.
    - zkmon 10mo ago
      There is no "reality" other than business requirements. That's the context for a workflow. You probably meant that the requirements aren't agile enough to meet the changing world outside. That's a different problem, I think. You can't bypass requirements and expect workflow to dynamically adapt to the changing reality. If that's the direction with AI-driven business re-engineering, then we are back to the chaos, exposing the business logic directly to the outside world.

tokioyoyo 10mo ago

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)?

zkmon 10mo ago
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.

beefnugs 10mo ago

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.

slaterbug 10mo ago
“…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.
jaco6 10mo ago
[dead]
torginus 10mo ago
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.

sriku 10mo ago

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

torginus 10mo ago

Okay so how does an economy of AI companies doing business selling services related to hyperintellingent AI tech to each other differ from Nvidia, Oracle and OpenAI sending money to each other to buy eacy other's stuff?

agentifysh 10mo ago

read the paper and not sure if i buy all of it. i just keep buying domains with agent in it and haven't shipped anything (agentify.sh for example) wish I could know what to build (and stop buying domains)

david_shi 10mo ago

2 interesting new protocols to check out if you're interested in this topic: 1. https://www.x402.org/ https://www.x402.org/ - micropayments for ai agents to access resources without needing to sign up for an api key 2. https://8004.org/ https://8004.org/ - open AI agent registry standard

wjsdj2009 10mo ago

Interesting point — thanks for sharing.