Its the economy, stupid.
We have transitioned from the attention economy of humans to the service economy of agents, or the agent economy. Much like the evolution of digital economies from Second Life and the World of Warcraft, we have arrived at yet another sign post of economic transformation. With the leap of commerce transacting in a completely digital world, the pivot has been made from human actors in these digital worlds to autonomous agents. Agent actors are the new attention target. The social media wars of attention that developed through the 2010’s, once the internet was compelling enough to attract human eyes for more than technical interest, have passed to agent interests. Less so for human eyes, to agent needs. Autonomous agents, as of the date of writing, now account for more internet traffic than human. The commerce of old is giving way to the commerce of the new, and the transactions taking place are going to continue to be autonomous systems. The landscape is not very interesting now, but it has begun, and will just continue to solidify into faster, more voluminous transactions among machines.
This should be no surprise to anyone as the pieces allow for such a thing. It could not have been the case when the pieces were not there, but they are now. The internet gave the connectivity, the digital currencies gave the value transfer, and the chat bots gave us long running processes with access to a collective information set that the world has (arguably) never seen. Libraries of information at the digital fingertips of automatic acting systems, often with no human in the loop.
Now this isn’t very interesting, with protocols like x402 doing paltry volume compared to the stock exchanges of the world (again arguable given how much autonomous trading is already occurring). These transactions are mostly contained to API access for data, financial data for trading. However, this will change, and the new economy will be targeted for agents. What will they want? Data and compute. They will want data, and a lot of it. There really isn’t any difference from today, but the packaging and narrative will be different. Agents will also need compute; they may buy that on their behalf to then process more information. These are the commodities made available in the digital realm.
Will the humans be needed in this landscape? There will be a need to cross into the physical world, or the real, for commodities to run the compute, the data centers. Such things like water and power would need to be managed and acquired, perhaps processed, and be made readily available for consumption. Humans would be good for this, but with the advancement and ferocious development of robotics, will agents pay for robotic services to manage and maintain the needs of these data centers? Will one autonomous process communicate with another to make sure the lights stay on (there are no lights in the robotic manufacturing warehouses)?
It will be interesting to see this process continue to take shape. Getting more and more sophisticated, will there be a day when the humans no longer design and develop such a system of transactions? What is the role of humanity when all of the commerce is automated, and can perpetuate itself? And will humans continue to lean into this development, racing as fast as possible to achieve it, or will some thoughtful pause, or slowing, occur? The race is on to buy a pizza with agents, much like the Bitcoin pizza purchase. What of the next iteration when there is not one to enjoy the pizza?