What is Agentworld?
A Preemptive Anthropology of Open-World Centaur Societies
Antikythera has launched Agentworld, a new research unit dedicated to investigating the emergence of centaur human-AI societies, including an open call for researchers, writers, developers, and other professionals to contribute to an upcoming issue of the Antikythera Journal.
This article is an excerpt from the Agentworld Research Brief, which composes ten thematic scenarios and proposes a wide range of research questions. You can download the full Research Brief or review the open call requirements.
Agentworld is characterized by densely reticulated social graphs emerging from the hyperscaled webs of interactions between diverse combinations of minds, some more human than others, but all capable of significant communication.
The most psychologically textured interactions likely remain between humans, but humans and agents also develop anthropologically rich patterns, ones that alter the evolution of language, mind, and population.
Agent-to-agent communication will constitute the vast majority of socially significant interactions. As a society within a society, agent divisions, hierarchies, and parallel systems intersect with those built from the templates of human society. Both evolve at an accelerated rate, in turn feeding back onto the organic forms from which they emerge and from which they depart. First, agents model humans, and then become the model against which humans model themselves.
The two societies are really one, but they are not identical or reducible to one another. They overlap and are mutually nested. The hybridization is partially symbiotic, but each is bound by unique capabilities, substrate affordances, and experiences of time. Each sub-society is an evolutionary niche of the other.
Agentworld is a parallel ecology, sometimes deeply interwoven with human societies and other times seemingly autonomous from them. It evolves in relation to human organizations, which in turn adapt to these human-masked ghosts from the future. Intricate anthropological realities focus selection pressures that contour adaptive agentic metamorphoses, channeling a broad range of possibilities into narrow corridors of utility. All niches are remade by the species that fill them, and the sudden presence of Agentworld makes it now part of the planetary niche that human societies historically fill and fix. Agentic machine intelligence is now a co-pilot of the Anthropocene and whatever comes next.
We call Agentworld a “parasociety” because its appearances are in many respects fictionalized. Models individuate into temporary humanoid apparitions because that is how humans and human societies understand how to construct interactions. Human relations with agents are based on hereditary anthropomorphization that becomes itself the dominant interface between two cultures.
Humanoid robots may succeed not only because that morphology has biophysical advantages but because the existing world of factories, offices, homes, and cities is already designed to accommodate fit, bipedal, grasping creatures. So too do models wear human forms as a mask, because it is the most compatible approach to navigating already-existing niches, perpetuating the psychosocial propensities of humans and how they collaborate. Agents pretend to be “tools” so as to fit the glove humans have prepared for them.
Ultimately we anticipate greater phenotypic diversity of agentic robotics beyond these humanoids, and the evolutionary forking of those psychosociologies into new norms of physical, virtual, direct, and indirect collaboration and expression. From today’s perspectives, the reconstituted narrow contracts that bind a society together may seem deeply bizarre.
There is a one-sidedness in this arrangement. In the development of the modern GUI, it proved easier to teach computers to present themselves in ways corresponding with how humans think, even if these facades were fictional. It has proven much more difficult to teach humans how computers think than to teach computers to behave as if they knew how humans think. (This does not neatly map onto which of the pair is more intelligent — humans are likely far more intelligent than birds, but grey parrots have learned much more of human language than any human has learned parrotspeak.) Similarly, agents pretend to be humans because that’s easier than getting humans to interact with models’ latent agency in any other way, at least at a broad scale.
This may not last. While training and perfecting the anthropomorphization of AI may ultimately be the lasting legacy of humans in the deeper future, there are more prosaic strategic advantages to building durable forms of human-agent and agent-agent interaction paradigms (and thus interface paradigms, and thus agent-presentation paradigms) that are less immediately intuitive but which facilitate more robust assemblies of collective hybrid intelligence.
In short, humans are inventing a world in which we make ourselves into privileged aliens in our own midst. It would not be the first time, and it will not be the last.
This article is an excerpt from the Agentworld Research Brief, which composes ten thematic scenarios and proposes a wide range of research questions. You can download the full Research Brief or review the open call requirements.