Accelerando

Gillian K. Hadfield and Andrew Koh in An Economy of AI Agents on 2025-09-03:

Silicon Valley promises us increasingly agentic AI systems that might one day supplant human decisions. If this vision materializes, it will reshape markets and organizations with profound consequences for the structure of economic life. But, as we have emphasized throughout this chapter, where we end up within this vast space of possibility is a design choice: we have the opportunity to develop mechanisms, infrastructure, and institutions to shape the kinds of AI agents that are built, and how they interact with each other and with humans. These are fundamentally economic questions—we hope economists will help answer them.

As the top comment on Hacker News points out, this article resembles plot points from Charles Stross's book Accelerando. No spoilers, but Stross imagines artificial intelligence being born as corporations (legal entities) and impacting the world through economic action. I've been saying this for years, but his approach to thinking about artificial intelligence in science fiction is profoundly realistic. For those wanting to read the book, and I recommend it, it's available for free digitally, under a creative commons license.