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An Economy of AI Agents

arxiv.org

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Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#41

Post by zkmon »

baq wrote: post #36
zkmon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repetitiv…

Workflows exist to solve problems. If there are problems which need solving that are solved better/faster/cheaper by AI agents than with strict rule-based algorithmic systems, they’ll be used because it makes economic sense. Reliability requirements are different for every problem, cases where verification is easy and cheap and multiple attempts are allowed are perfect for not 100% reliable agents.

it's fine if you want AI to help you in defining the workflow/rules. But you don't use AI to define rules on the fly. That's the whole point. It is like having AI to write code at runtime based on the request. I don't think that's how you use AI in software.

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#42

Post by mjburgess »

baq wrote: post #37
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…

> 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

A transaction is an exchange between two parties of something they judge to be of equivalent value (and mostly, in ratio to a common medium of exchange).

You can program AI with "market values" that arise from people; but absent that, how do these values arise naturally? Ie., why is it that I value anything at all, in order to exchange it?

Well if I live forever, can labour forever, and so on -- then the value to me of anything is if not always zero, almost always zero. I dont need anything from you: I can make everything myself. I dont need to exchange.

We engage in exchange because we are primarily time limited. We do not have the time, quite literally, to do for ourselves everything we need. We, today, cannot farm (etc.) on our own behalf.

Now there are a few caveats, and so on to add; and there's an argument to say that we are limited in other ways that can give rise to the need to exchange.

But why things have an exchange value at all -- why there are economic transactions -- that is mostly due to the need to exchange time with each other because we dont have enough of it.

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#43

Post by mjburgess »

sdenton4 wrote: post #17
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…

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

Granting your premise, i'd be forced to argue that economic value (as such) doesn't arise from their activity either -- which i think is a reasonable position.

Ie., The reason a cookie is 1 USD is never because some "merely legal entity" had a fictional (/merely legal) desire for cookies for some reason.

Instead, from this pov, it's that the workers each have their desire for something; the customers; the owners; and so on. That it all bottoms out in people doing things for other people -- that legal fictions are just dispensble ways of talking about arragnemnts of people.

Incidentally, I think this is an open question. Maybe groups of people have unique desires, unique kinds of lives, a unique time limitation etc. that means a group of people really can give rise to different kinds of economic transactions and different economic values.

Consider a state: it issues debt. But why does that have value? Because we expect the population of a state to be stable or grow, and so this debt, in the future has people who can honour it. Their time is being promised today. Could a state issue debt if this wasnt true? I dont think so. I think in the end, some people have to be around to exchange their time for this debt; if none are, or none want to, the debt has no value

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#44

Post by mewpmewp2 »

zkmon wrote: post #39
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the rules are not as easy to define ahead of time. As an example imagine having to categorize some sort of text based requests etc. Or decide what the next step should be based on freeform text, images, etc. Hardcoded rule based would have to try and attempt to match to certain keywords etc, but you see how that can start to go wrong?

This is already solved by the traditional workflow systems. For example, if the request is received as a form submission, a form processor is invoked to categorize the request and route the request accordingly based on the identified category. Now, if the request is coming in as text or other media instead of a form input, then the workflow would call a relevant processor, to identify the category. Everything from th…

And what is this processor and how does it work?

How does it determine next step from raw non structured content?

Let's imagine for example that it's a message from a potential customer to a business. The processor must decide whether to e.g. give product recommendations, product advice, process returns, use specific tools to fetch more data (e.g. business policies, product manuals, etc), or current pricing, best products matching what the customer might want etc.

If it's an AI agent it could be something like:

1. Customer sends message: "my product Y has X problem". (but the message could be anything from returns to figuring out most suitable product)

2. AI Agent uses "search_products" tool to find info about Y product in parallel with "send_response" to indicate what it's trying to do.

3. AI Agent uses "search_within_manual" tool to find if there are specific similar problems described.

4. AI Agent summarizes information found in manual, references the manual for download and shows snippet of content it based its answer on.

AI Agent itself is given various functions it can call like

1. search_products

2. search_business_policies

3. search_within_documents

4. send_response

5. forward_to_human

6. end_action

7. ... possibly others.

How would you do it in the traditional workflow engine sense?

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#45

Post by zkmon »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #44
zkmon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already solved by the traditional workflow systems. For example, if the request is received as a form submission, a form processor is invoked to categorize the request and route the request accordingly based on the identified category. Now, if the request is coming in as text or other media instead of a form input, then the workflow would call a relevant processor, to identify the category. Everything from th…

And what is this processor and how does it work? How does it determine next step from raw non structured content? Let's imagine for example that it's a message from a potential customer to a business. The processor must decide whether to e.g. give product recommendations, product advice, process returns, use specific tools to fetch more data (e.g. business policies, product manuals, etc), or current pricing, best pro…

I think you missed the whole point. Processor does not have routing logic. It's only job is to parse the request (form, text, image etc) and categorize it enough so that the workflow can do the routing for next actions. Routing is done by traditional predetermined logic, using rules. The discussion here is about whether it helps to define that routing logic at runtime (on-the-fly), instead of having it coded in predetermined logic. My view is, it doesn't help.

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#46

Post by mewpmewp2 »

zkmon wrote: post #45
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what is this processor and how does it work? How does it determine next step from raw non structured content? Let's imagine for example that it's a message from a potential customer to a business. The processor must decide whether to e.g. give product recommendations, product advice, process returns, use specific tools to fetch more data (e.g. business policies, product manuals, etc), or current pricing, best pro…

I think you missed the whole point. Processor does not have routing logic. It's only job is to parse the request (form, text, image etc) and categorize it enough so that the workflow can do the routing for next actions. Routing is done by traditional predetermined logic, using rules. The discussion here is about whether it helps to define that routing logic at runtime (on-the-fly), instead of having it coded in prede…

I edited my comment to add more of what the agent would be doing. Not sure if this reached you, but if you read the edited one, how would traditional workflow engine solve the particular problem with a free form raw content that could be anything, and requires using various tools to solve the problem?

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#47

Post by mewpmewp2 »

zkmon wrote: post #41
baq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workflows exist to solve problems. If there are problems which need solving that are solved better/faster/cheaper by AI agents than with strict rule-based algorithmic systems, they’ll be used because it makes economic sense. Reliability requirements are different for every problem, cases where verification is easy and cheap and multiple attempts are allowed are perfect for not 100% reliable agents.

it's fine if you want AI to help you in defining the workflow/rules. But you don't use AI to define rules on the fly. That's the whole point. It is like having AI to write code at runtime based on the request. I don't think that's how you use AI in software.

In many cases I do have AI writing code runtime for my tasks. E.g. if I'm doing analysis of something, or some data, I can ask AI to gather the data (it writes code for scraping or uses pre existing scraping/web search tools), then it uses python or typescript to analyze the data. After which it will use e.g. React in the web app to render the Charts, Tables in customized, personalized format.

For instance, I might be looking for a product or something, it will use web search to gather all possible products, then evaluate all the products against my desired criteria, use some sort of scoring mechanism to order the products for me and then write an UI to display the products with their pros and cons specified, with products ranked using an algorithm.

Or I might ask it to find all permutations of flight destinations in March, I want somewhere sunny and use weighted scoring algorithm to rank the destinations by price, flight travel duration etc.. Then it writes code to use flights API, to get all permutations and does the ranking.

I used to have to go to things like airport websites, momondo, skyscanner, I don't have to do those things manually anymore, thanks to AI agents. I can just let it work and churn out destinations, travel plans according to a scoring criteria.

Worst mistakes it can make is, that is missed a really good deal, but this is something I could even more easily miss myself, or worst case it makes a mistake and parses the price/dates wrong, which I will find out when trying to book it, so I waste a bit of time, but similar and worse mistakes I do on my own as well. So overall I drastically reduce my search time for the perfect travel, and also time spent on my own mistakes or misunderstandings. And it will be able to go through permutations far faster and more reliably with infinite patience compared to myself.

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#48

Post by Freedumbs »

zkmon wrote: post #23

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?

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.

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#49

Post by zkmon »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #47
zkmon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's fine if you want AI to help you in defining the workflow/rules. But you don't use AI to define rules on the fly. That's the whole point. It is like having AI to write code at runtime based on the request. I don't think that's how you use AI in software.

In many cases I do have AI writing code runtime for my tasks. E.g. if I'm doing analysis of something, or some data, I can ask AI to gather the data (it writes code for scraping or uses pre existing scraping/web search tools), then it uses python or typescript to analyze the data. After which it will use e.g. React in the web app to render the Charts, Tables in customized, personalized format. For instance, I might b…

None of what you said qualifies as coding at run time. I think you missed at. At run time, code is executed, not designed or defined.

Re: An Economy of AI Agents

#50

Post by baq »

mjburgess wrote: post #42
baq wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

A transaction is an exchange between two parties of something they judge to be of equivalent value (and mostly, in ratio to a common medium of exchange). You can program AI with "market values" that arise from people; but absent that, how do these values arise naturally? Ie., why is it that I value anything at all, in order to exchange it? Well if I live forever, can labour forever, and so on -- then the value to me…

You’re asking all the right questions and give good answers, I just don’t see how any of these answers need to be limited to humans. If AI gets to the mirror life stage, the agents will have needs (e.g. if they become robots - electricity, fuel, coolants, lubricants, spare parts, etc.) - assuming they have a self-preservation instinct, either trained in on purpose or emergent (hopefully this is implied by ‘mirror life’.)
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