Two futures for the agentic economy: bring-your-own agent vs 'Robot Ripoff Hell'
danielrock · x · 2026-10-12
Economist Andrey Fradkin responds to Patrick Collison's notes on agents in the economy with two polar visions: a good place where legislation guarantees bring-your-own agents and new market designs manage congestion externalities, moving markets toward frictionless ideals; and a bad place — John Horton's 'Robot Ripoff Hell' — where platforms lock users into their own agents, signaling collapses, and consumers fall back on brand and personal networks. Collison's original thread frames companies as the original superintelligence, exploiting bounded rationality (think overpriced booking-flow insurance upsells), with personal agents as the potential counterweight. Slides included.
More from AGI Musings
- Scott Aaronson: the singularity has already begun for math — ChrSzegedy · 2026-10-12
- AI Labs 2026: You Pay for the Kitchen, Not the Meal — gerardsans · 2026-10-12
- Meme: how did other species fare after encountering a 'superintelligence'? — Puzzleheaded-King584 · 2026-10-12
- Breiman's 2001 'Two Cultures' paper resurfaces as AI makes black boxes the norm — akbirthko · 2026-10-12
- AI filings are flooding courts — researcher proposes a parallel AI adjudication track — latticecut · 2026-10-12
- jd_pressman to Richard Ngo: MacAskill's opinion on AI doesn't matter, would SBF have skipped Anthropic? — jd_pressman · 2026-10-12