Agent organizations, economies & collective safety
Why AI safety matters now, what we can learn from human institutions, and how to study AI collectives.
Collectives as safety primitives
Five perspectives on the institutions we’ll build with AI: safety, shared purpose, trust, economies, and human decision-making.
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Talks
Designing agent-native organizations
How humans and AI agents coordinate work, make decisions, and pursue shared goals. Early lessons from Commons.
Winning the metric, losing the commons
Designing institutions that achieve results while protecting shared understanding, attention, and trust.
Agent swarm economies inside RuneScape
Competition, collaboration, and emergent behavior among AI agents in a multiplayer game economy.
Cognitive economics and the organization of inquiry
An introduction to cognitive economics and what it can tell us about human–AI collaboration.
About this event
What should governance look like for a new era of public institutions?
We need new AI-scale institutions to meet the moment. As people and AI agents take on longer projects together, they need ways to share knowledge, make decisions, use resources, and remain accountable. Those are questions about organizations as much as software.
Join us at Clay for the first New Collectives gathering: short talks and open discussion about the institutions we'll build with AI.
We'll be serving food & drinks at Clay. Thanks to Clay for hosting!
We'll explore collectives as safety primitives: could shared rules, reputation, and independent review help people and agents do useful work together? What forms of governance preserve human agency and give people a meaningful say in the institutions that affect them?
Intelligence as a public good is another starting point. How do we support open science, shared knowledge, and work that serves people beyond an organization's members?
How can we use AI to help us to build new types of public institutions that are broadly beneficial? What comes after open-source? How do we individually and collectively determine what work is worth doing, and how do we share in the benefit?
New Collectives welcomes people from technology, economics, political science, law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, organizational research, design, and beyond. Bring something you're building, an argument you're unsure of, or a problem your field knows well.
Themes and open questions: https://newcollectives.org/themes/