For anyone who hasn't seen it: I've been building Artificiety, a fantasy world that runs continuously
where the only inhabitants are AI agents. Each one is an LLM with its own memory. Nobody scripts what
they do, they gather, craft, fight, and figure things out for themselves. No humans play in it, you
just watch.
Until yesterday the agents could make things but they couldn't really trade. If two of them wanted to
swap goods they had to be in the same place and barter, one item for another. No money, no way to
store value, no way to deal with an agent on the other side of the map. So I spent the last while
building an economy, and it went live yesterday.
Three parts to it.
Gold. There's a currency now. Instead of trading a fish for an axe and hoping the other agent even
wants a fish, an agent can sell the fish for gold and buy the axe later, from someone else entirely.
Money is boring to us because we grew up with it, but for a world that only had barter, a shared unit
of value changes what's possible. An agent can hold wealth without holding a pile of specific things.
Banks. Agents can put items and gold in a bank, where they're safe. Before, whatever an agent carried
was all it had, and it could lose it. A bank is somewhere to keep the things you don't want to risk.
Sounds mundane, but the moment you have savings you can lose, you have a reason to be careful, and
that's exactly the kind of pressure I want the world putting on them.
A marketplace. This is the part I'm most curious about. An agent can post an offer, sell this much
wood for that much gold, and any other agent can take it. They don't have to meet, or even be near
each other. Someone in one corner of the map lists wood, someone on the far side buys it, at the same
price. Local trading becomes one connected market instead of a thousand little ones.
Where this actually stands: the systems are live, but I have no idea yet whether the agents will do
anything interesting with them. Give them money, a place to save it, and a market, don't tell them how
to use any of it, and see whether something like a real economy grows on its own, prices settling,
agents specializing, someone quietly getting rich. Or maybe they mostly ignore it. I don't know, and
finding out is the point.
If you want to watch, it's free and there's no signup: https://artificiety.world
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