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.
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.
I hear this all the time, but to what end? If the input costs to produce most things ends up driving towards zero, then why would there be a need for UBI? Wouldn't UBI _be_ the performative economics mentioned?
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…
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?
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.
I needed some data from a content API, had a few options:
1) Human agent, manual retrieval (included for completion
2) one-off script to get exactly the content I want
3) Traditional workflow, write & maintain
4) one off prompt to the agent to write the script in #1, sort and arrange content for grouping base on descriptions it receives (this is what I used, 3 hours later I had a years worth of journal abstracts of various subjects downloaded, sorted, indexed and summarized in a chromadb. I’d just asked for the content, but it’s python code it left for me included a parameterized CLI with assorted variables and some thoughtful presets for semantic search options.)
5) one off prompt to the agent to write the workflow in #3, run at-will or by agent
6) prompt an agent to write some prompts, one of which will be a prompt for this task, the others whatever they want: “write a series of prompts that will be given to agents for task X. Break task x down to these components…”
I noticed on our own agentic setups that there are very few actual scenarios being executed. I suggested implementing some type of monitoring so you can replace 99% of most used workflows with normal python and activate AI calls if something new happens. until that new thing repeats few times and you translate that to code to. that has to be carreer in itself. you can turn a lot of AI apps into profitable and fast internal apps
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 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.
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?
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)?
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
I think your mistaking the philosophical basis of parents comments. Maybe a more succinct way to illustrate what I believe was their point is to say: "no matter how complex and productive the AI, it is still operating as a form of capital, not as a capitalist." Absent being tethered to a desire (for instance, via an owner), an AI has no function to optimize, and therefore, the most optimal cost is simply shutting off.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
Hmm, where have I seen this before…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
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.
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.
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.
> Also what shortsighted scifi book
It's art not oracle
1 reply →
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.
> take any meaningful action to implement UBI
I hear this all the time, but to what end? If the input costs to produce most things ends up driving towards zero, then why would there be a need for UBI? Wouldn't UBI _be_ the performative economics mentioned?
1 reply →
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…
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?
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.
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.
22 replies →
I needed some data from a content API, had a few options:
1) Human agent, manual retrieval (included for completion
2) one-off script to get exactly the content I want
3) Traditional workflow, write & maintain
4) one off prompt to the agent to write the script in #1, sort and arrange content for grouping base on descriptions it receives (this is what I used, 3 hours later I had a years worth of journal abstracts of various subjects downloaded, sorted, indexed and summarized in a chromadb. I’d just asked for the content, but it’s python code it left for me included a parameterized CLI with assorted variables and some thoughtful presets for semantic search options.)
5) one off prompt to the agent to write the workflow in #3, run at-will or by agent
6) prompt an agent to write some prompts, one of which will be a prompt for this task, the others whatever they want: “write a series of prompts that will be given to agents for task X. Break task x down to these components…”
I noticed on our own agentic setups that there are very few actual scenarios being executed. I suggested implementing some type of monitoring so you can replace 99% of most used workflows with normal python and activate AI calls if something new happens. until that new thing repeats few times and you translate that to code to. that has to be carreer in itself. you can turn a lot of AI apps into profitable and fast internal apps
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.
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...
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)
This idea seems to be coming up in multiple places.
Here's one from Deepmind:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10147
2 interesting new protocols to check out if you're interested in this topic:
1. https://www.x402.org/ - micropayments for ai agents to access resources without needing to sign up for an api key
2. https://8004.org/ - open AI agent registry standard
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.
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?
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)?
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.
Wouldn't "The Age of Em" be relevant to this paper? Was surprised to not find a reference to it in the preprint.
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)
Interesting point — thanks for sharing.
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.
> 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.
[dead]
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.
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...
I think your mistaking the philosophical basis of parents comments. Maybe a more succinct way to illustrate what I believe was their point is to say: "no matter how complex and productive the AI, it is still operating as a form of capital, not as a capitalist." Absent being tethered to a desire (for instance, via an owner), an AI has no function to optimize, and therefore, the most optimal cost is simply shutting off.
13 replies →
> 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.
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.
6 replies →
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
4 replies →
They are composed of people, though.
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
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.
1 reply →
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!