Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

i lacked the spells and incantations these past couple of days, i’ve been trying to do a little more cad design, making things i eventually want to 3d print. i didn’t lack the ambition. i didn’t lack the desire to make something and will it into existence. i just didn’t have the spells and incantations i needed to make it at the level i wanted to. i lacked the vocabulary. and for the first time in a while, i really had to learn. i had to learn about what makes 3d printing possible, how to make parts more efficient and durable, and how to think about the real world. i had to develop the words to describe curvature and shape, and what i wanted those things to feel like. it’s made me appreciate things so much more. i’m starting to understand why the curves on apple devices are so beautiful, and how much work has gone into them. i appreciate the physical space around me more, and what it takes to build the things in it. i keep coming back to this idea that ai really is magic. we’re all magicians and mages now, but we still have to learn the spells and incantations. the more i work with it, the less i believe that the advent of ai will cause us to stop learning. for me, it’s been the opposite. having the ability to make something has made me want to understand it more deeply. language isn’t unique to humanity, of course. but i think our ability to find the words for what we want is going to carry us further now. if you have the courage and the ambition to want something, you can start learning the spells and the incantation to bring it into the world.