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An Economy of AI Agents

arxiv.org

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Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#5

Post by mjburgess »

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.

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#7

Post by Esophagus4 »

ur-whale wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#8

Post by Aperocky »

mjburgess wrote: post #5

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 t…

They can once they achieve purpose.

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

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#9

Post by ur-whale »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #7
ur-whale wrote: post #2

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

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.

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.

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#10

Post by bofadeez »

mjburgess wrote: post #5

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 t…

> 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.

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