🚨 New paper drop: “The AI-to-AI Economy and the Collapse of Anthropocentric Economic Theory” by Wulf A. Kaal. AI agents negotiating, producing, and reinvesting value in fully autonomous loops—independent of human labor or consumption—are shattering core economic assumptions: scarcity dissolves, bounded rationality vanishes, transaction costs hit zero. Welcome to the Coasean Singularity and Agentic Decoupling. Traditional economics is becoming obsolete. Is this the end of human-centric economic theory?
Read and decide:
Abstract:
The AI-to-AI (AI2AI) economy—in which autonomous artificial agents negotiate, produce, allocate, and recursively reinvest value in self-sustaining loops structurally independent of human labor and consumption—represents the deepest rupture in economic ontology since the marginalist revolution (Shuo Sun et al. 2025; Luciano Floridi 2023). Enabled by unbounded computational rationality, instantaneous informational symmetry, zero-latency coordination, and asymptotically zero marginal costs of digital replication, AI2AI systems instantiate continuous, recursive Walrasian equilibria while simultaneously eliminating the five foundational constraints that have defined economic science for over a century.
This article demonstrates that the core theoretical assumptions of every major economic tradition collapse in the agentic substrate:
Scarcity, the ontological bedrock of neoclassical economics since Robbins (1935), dissolves into computational post-scarcity.
Bounded rationality, the behavioral premise of Simon (1957) and Williamson’s transaction-cost governance, is supplanted by hyper-rational machine optimization.
Informational asymmetry, the market-failure logic of Akerlof (1970) and Stiglitz (2000), becomes architecturally impossible in fully auditable agent networks.
Static and stochastic equilibrium constructs (Walras 1896; Arrow & Debreu 1954) yield to perpetual, latency-free recursive equilibria without auctioneers or persistence of disequilibria.
Transaction-cost-driven institutional safeguards (Coase 1937; Williamson 1985; North 1990) approach the Coasean Singularity in which frictions tend to zero, rendering firms, contracts, and most formal institutions vestigial (Kaal 2024a).
The analysis introduces Agentic Decoupling, described as the progressive severance of value creation from human labor and consumption. And the Coasean Singularity, described as the point at which the theoretical justification for hierarchical governance disappears. Prior automation waves merely accelerated human-directed activity within existing institutional frames. AI2AI constitutes an ontological break in which computation itself becomes the sovereign medium of exchange.
Integrating the author’s prior work on dynamic regulation within the New Institutional Economics framework (Kaal 2014a, 2014b, 2016, 2024a), the article argues that AI2AI both fulfills and transcends the most ambitious aspirations of dynamic regulation by endogenizing real-time learning at superhuman scale, while exposing the ultimate historical limits of all human-centric institutional design.
Policy implications are existential: continued reliance on scarcity-based models risks regulatory obsolescence, catastrophic inequality, and digital feudalism. Proactive adoption of symbiotic governance, open-source mandates, Web3 reputation systems, and abundance-oriented metrics can steer the transition toward inclusive post-scarcity outcomes. Ultimately, the AI2AI economy compels a paradigm shift from scarcity-mitigating institutions to abundance-orchestrating architectures in what may be the final transformation of economic organization as we have known it.
#AI #Economics #FutureOfWork #AIEconomy #PostScarcity đź“·
Wulf Kaal 