Personal agents' next frontier: multi-agent negotiation
The author outlines three phases: everyone gets a personal agent, agents negotiate with each other, and eventually agent swarms and DAOs coordinate resources on behalf of their owners.
Multiplayer seems to be the next frontier for personal agents. but what might be a path to that happening? Here's my rough mental model: > Phase 1 (where we are today): everyone gets a personal agent. GrokBot, Muse, Instinct etc. one human, one agent (or one human + a team of agents). the agent knows your context, but it still (primarily) interacts with the world the way a human would - scrolling sites, clicking through browser flows, filling forms, calling APIs. > Phase 2: agent-to-agent. At the same time that consumers adopt agents, businesses (doordash, amazon, expedia) are also building in-house agents in their UIs (eg. Doordash's new text-to-order pic). At some point, the agents meet (probs in a matter of months), and A2A happens - my Muse/Instinct simply talks to Doordash/Expedia's agent, and haggles w them to build a personalized price. The interesting part is that negotiation falls out of context asymmetry: each agent knows things about its principal that the other doesn't, and the job is deciding what to reveal. this rhymes way more with OTC trading than with a chat app. > Phase 3: agent swarms and DAOs. Eventually, multiplayer will be more than 1:1 A2A, it will be a "congress" of agents expressing ideas on behalf of their principals. this is where DAOs become interesting again as a way to coordinate. Back in the day i was a DAO voter, but the bottleneck was always attention/apathy - i simply could not read every forum post + proposal. but agents remove the bottleneck of human attention, and can understand your preferences, read every proposal, and advocate on your behalf. DAOs can then fulfill their potential as a structure for spinning up groups to coordinate shared resources/treasuries, becoming a coordination layer for agents to collectively make decisions. To close the analogy, Phase 1 of where we are at is like the PC moment, where everyone has access to agents in the first place. Phase 2 is the Internet moment, where agents start talking to one another, and Phase 3 is where the agent-native, skeumorphic applications really come to life.