Utopian governance using technology, inc generative AI
Electrohabermas, digital deliberation, platform democracy
2025-10-27 — 2026-03-09
Wherein a personal advocate agent is imagined as a fiduciary proxy, bargaining at scale in a virtual agent economy, while preferences are conveyed through zero‑knowledge proofs and differential privacy.
Could Hayek’s dream of distributed information flows through the economy be put into practice in a more humane way using AI agents?
This is the market economy version of civic tech, where price signals and contracts are the medium of communication, and the goal is to coordinate economic activity. The argument is that a sufficiently advanced economic negotiation might be indistinguishable from democratic consensus-building, and that the economic and political spheres might merge in a Coasean Singularity—or at least that this is a possible future.
I have many thoughts about the risks and opportunities here. For now, just a placeholder.
1 Coasean Singularity
Seb Krier argues in Coasean Bargaining at Scale that a Coasean Singularity is arriving:
[…] consider AGI deployed as a vast ecology of personalized agents and systems. This emerging ecosystem is what Tomašev et al. (2025) characterize as the “virtual agent economy” a new economic layer where agents transact and coordinate at scales and speeds beyond direct human oversight. While this ecology will contain countless specialized agents, let’s focus on the one that matters most from an individual’s perspective: your personal advocate. Think of it as a fiduciary extension of yourself: a tireless, extremely competent digital representative, closely tied to you, its principal.
What could such an agent do? In principle, it can negotiate, calculate, compare, coordinate, verify, monitor, and much more in a split second. Through many multi-turn conversations, tweaking knobs and sliders, and continuous learning, it could also develop an increasingly sophisticated (though never perfect) model of who you are, your preferences, personal circumstances, values, resources, and more. This should evolve over time - an agent’s alignment should follow the principal’s own evolution. Recent research (Goyal, Chang, and Terry 2024) on negotiation agents finds that “human-agent alignment” is profoundly personal. Users expect agents to not only execute goals but also embody their identity, requiring alignment on everything from preferred negotiation tactics to personal ethical boundaries and the specific public reputation they wanted to project. There are of course important privacy considerations here, but none of these seem fundamentally intractable. For example these systems could be built on technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and differential privacy, ensuring that preferences are communicated and aggregated without revealing sensitive underlying data.
See also Shahidi et al. (2025).
2 Meaning economy
Related concept from Joe Edelman (of Couchsurfing fame): markets align with “deep human values”.