The Irrational Anthem
Patrick Collison, thinking out loud on X about agents in the economy:
Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence… relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. … Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.
Inattentive, underinformed, irrational.
That is also a pretty good description of an audience.
Let the agent decline the travel insurance. Nobody will miss that bit.
But the irrational part is not always a weakness to be exploited. Sometimes, it is the part that buys the weird game, joins that Discord, stays up too late. That friction is evidence of appetite.
Outsource the rationality and you don't become a spreadsheet.
You get to indulge your undiluted irrationality.
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?
Ten hours of research does not always end in a purchase.
Sometimes it ends in "I could make this."
The agent that compares the mousetraps can also sketch the blueprint and hand you the parts.
…the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine… 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.
The universe gets a little more partisan.
And the audience gets a little more artisan.