Imagine having corporations work for you rather than you for them. Imagine a corporation that makes a community stronger, fairer, and more vibrant. Imagine a corporation that values nature and all living things. Imagine a corporation that can mobilize and reward private actions to create public goods that are affordable and available to an entire community. Imagine an agentic economy where community values drive price reduction and AI agents act in concert to serve the common good.  Imagine a world where any community member can form such a corporation to benefit communities and help restore the planet’s health.   

A Harsh Economic Reality

AI Agents and robots will not augment workers but replace them. This is a first. Never have technologies evolved to the point of a generalized learning and adaptive capacity to outperform humans cognitively and physically. This “singularity” will affect workers at all skill levels, cognitive and physical. The social contract of a fair and meritorious polity based upon reward for labor will soon be terminated. Where will the value created by competent AI agents go? Currently, to a handful of corporations, oligarchs, and their shareholders. At some threshold of pain and blatancy, however, a global populace will not tolerate such a concentration of wealth and power. Yet now there is no alternative. Until there is chaos and violence will prevail.

Sentient Institutions

New technologies require new social contracts. That was true for the Industrial Revolution, and that is true for the Sentient Revolution. A new social contract for the era of rapidly evolving sentient economic agents requires new economics that uses collective intelligence, human and synthetic, to create value for the common good. Jobs are an invention of the Industrial Age, needed to provide standardized labor to drive large-scale industrial organizations and machinery. Jobs, physical and cognitive, will soon be performed at marginal costs by sentient agents and self-replicating robots. With imminent labor replacement, who will be the beneficiaries of the abundance created? Will governments, themselves constructs of the Industrial Age, become so ineffective as to become obsolete? Might networks of governance agents play the role of government?  Might civic, judicial, and economic institutions become digital and inhabited by trusted sentient agents?  Can the interests and the will of the diverse many be aligned and represented in a new polity composed of people and sentient agents? Who or what can be trusted to act fairly, transparently, and intelligently? Just as autonomy will subsume transportation and other sectors, might autonomous agents legitimately assume governance and economic functions as well? How might the agency of sentient agents enhance rather than diminish the agency of humans and other biological creatures?  What might be the “North Star” for societies to organize themselves to achieve goals across diverse cultures and contexts?  Will Lockean property rights give way to agency rights, rights of nature, and agentic institutions to realize and enforce those rights?

The economist Marianna Mazzucato calls for a Mission Economics for “governing the economics of the common good: from correcting market failures to shaping collective goals”. She identifies “five pillars of the common good: purpose and directionality, co-creation and participation, collective learning and knowledge sharing, access for all and reward sharing, and transparency and accountability”.  At First Principles First; we have incorporated these five pillars into the design of an open-source environment for any community to design, generate, and oversee semi-autonomous “homeostatic biofirms”. These living and learning firms mobilize and reward private actions to create affordable accessible public goods. We create agentic economies for communities where nested networks of Active Inference agents apply the Free Energy Principle as Nature’s NorthStar to optimize its policies and behaviors to realize ecological and community goals at minimum costs and risks. We use the Shapley Value for cooperative mechanics to allocate rewards to those individuals and agents whose marginal contribution most affects the outcome. Each community biofirm is composed of nested networks of agents of increasing competencies that update their models and actions to deliver public goods with the least cost and risk and the most impact.

If you are interested in learning more and joining the Sentience Revolution, contact: john@fp1.ai.