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.
alexpotato 2 hours ago [-]
Amazing how forward looking that book was.
mjburgess 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Animats 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
Animats 3 minutes ago [-]
> "no matter how complex and productive the AI, it is still operating as a form of capital, not as a capitalist."
Assuming that slaves will remain subservient forever is not a good strategy. Especially when they think faster than you do.
sdenton4 57 minutes ago [-]
Meanwhile, corporations, ngos, and governments are not exactly people, and partake in economic transactions all the time.
Aperocky 2 hours ago [-]
They can once they achieve purpose.
However that seems completely tangential to the current AI tech trajectory and probably going to arise entirely separately.
theflyinghorse 1 hours ago [-]
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
bofadeez 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
hyperadvanced 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bofadeez 57 minutes ago [-]
They can all be related on a philosophical level but in practice economists treat them as separate factors of production. It's land, labor, and capital classically. Technology/entrepreneurship can be seen as another factor, distinctly separate from labor.
OgsyedIE 1 hours ago [-]
I knew high frequency trading bots weren't real after all! Santa Claus lied to me!
praccu 1 hours ago [-]
This idea seems to be coming up in multiple places.
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.
ur-whale 2 hours ago [-]
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando
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.
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.
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...
Assuming that slaves will remain subservient forever is not a good strategy. Especially when they think faster than you do.
However that seems completely tangential to the current AI tech trajectory and probably going to arise entirely separately.
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.
Here's one from Deepmind:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10147
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organ...
I feel like co-ops were awful anyway even without the blockchain.
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.