The selection criteria of machine readers, and why reputation is the primitive the agentic web still lacks. The web has acquired a second readership. It does not scroll, it does not dwell, and it does not forgive. Autonomous agents now arrive at websites, MCP servers, and APIs the way a procurement officer arrives at a […]
Read more "What Agents Want"Notes on what a general intelligence does to a research program built on trust without trusted parties. Abstract. Artificial general intelligence does not retire the oldest question of institutional economics: how self-interested actors produce reliable judgment when no one can check the work. It universalizes it. The essay argues that AGI’s effect on any research […]
Read more "AGI Makes Intelligence Cheap. It Makes Trust Priceless."Why the trajectory of artificial intelligence is an institutional choice, not a natural fact. The public debate over artificial intelligence proceeds as if AI evolution were weather. Laboratories publish capability curves the way meteorologists publish storm tracks. Policymakers ask when the storm makes landfall. Commentators debate whether it can be slowed, paused, or survived. The […]
Read more "AI Evolution Is Mechanism Design"Satya Nadella is right that the firm of the future must own its learning loop. But the loop he specifies is, in the terms of my own work, a reputation-weighted neoclassical labor market – not the generative architecture this moment actually requires. We agree on the destination. We diverge on the economics. On June 14, […]
Read more "Nadella’s Loop Is a Labor Market. The Economics It’s Missing Is Decisive"A computative labor market is not the old market with reputation bolted on. It is a market that generates its own work. Here is what it takes to get there, why only agents can build one, and why reaching it forces us to rethink economics from the foundation. In an earlier piece I argued that […]
Read more "Crossing Into the Computative Labor Market"Why Falk & Tsoukalas Built a Perfect Model of a World That No Longer Exists Wulf A. Kaal A paper is circulating virally this month. “The AI Layoff Trap,” by Falk and Tsoukalas (Wharton School and Boston University, March 2026), claims to offer mathematical proof that AI will inevitably destroy the economy. The conclusion is […]
Read more "The AI Layoff Trap Is a Trap for Economists, Not for the Economy"In 1992, Steve Jobs walked into a room of MIT MBA students and asked how many were going into consulting. Hands went up. He told them their careers would be “like a picture of a banana.” You might get an accurate picture. But you never really taste it.Thirty-four years later, that lecture is the clearest […]
Read more "The Banana Problem: Why Autonomous Agents Cannot Learn Without Reputation"AI agents are making high-stakes decisions right now – trading, diagnosing, contracting – and no governance framework actually works. I’ve spent 20 years studying governance failures. From hedge funds to DAOs to AI. The pattern is always the same: static rules chasing dynamic systems. In my new video, I break down why every current approach […]
Read more "AI is Ungoverned – Here is the Fix"It’s been a productive stretch. Since my last substantive research roundup, I’ve published more than a dozen new papers, crossed the 121-paper milestone, and built something I’ve been wanting to create for years: a machine-readable, interactive knowledge graph that maps the connections across my entire body of work. This post covers three things: the new […]
Read more "Updates"🚨 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. […]
Read more "The AI-to-AI Economy and the Collapse of Anthropocentric Economic Theory"
Wulf Kaal 