How can AI itself transform the playing field? Seb Krier of Google DeepMind wrote about this exact vision in “Coasean bargaining at scale”.
The parts I find most disappointing about Seb’s writing are an apparent attachment to (personal, delegate) agents in particular as form factor, and a sort of implied need to wait for AGI until we can get cracking on providing improvements to human collective epistemics and coordination. Why wait? We’ve unlocked many applicable building blocks already, and agentic form factors are only a very narrow slice of the design space (and not even especially appealing for many application cases).
I otherwise find parts of Seb’s articulation appealing, especially unlocking more bottom-up coordination by reducing frictions, and treating inter-human activity as an important space for uplift by technology (rather than the sometimes solipsistic individualistic uplift stories from other places).
The parts I find most disappointing about Seb’s writing are an apparent attachment to (personal, delegate) agents in particular as form factor, and a sort of implied need to wait for AGI until we can get cracking on providing improvements to human collective epistemics and coordination. Why wait? We’ve unlocked many applicable building blocks already, and agentic form factors are only a very narrow slice of the design space (and not even especially appealing for many application cases).
I otherwise find parts of Seb’s articulation appealing, especially unlocking more bottom-up coordination by reducing frictions, and treating inter-human activity as an important space for uplift by technology (rather than the sometimes solipsistic individualistic uplift stories from other places).
I can’t speak for Seb, though it’s certainly not my view that we need to wait for “AGI” (and I suspect that’s not his view either).