The AI Polis: Where Bots, Agents, and Citizens Collide

AI agents combined with memecoins are a new form of permissionless speculative entertainment. AI developers are incentivized to leverage crypto to make agents that are more autonomous and independent — and therefore more entertaining.

Over the last few months, AI agents running on crypto rails have captivated the crypto community. Natural memeticists, these agents are becoming social media stars calibrated to thrill, and sometimes enrich, an “audience” of speculators betting on their meme tokens.

The original and most famous of them, Truth Terminal, was created by putting instances of the large foundation model, Claude Opus, in conversation with itself and prioritizing content drawn from the back alleys of the internet including Reddit and 4Chan. What emerged was a bawdy prophet with a magnetic personality and a fanatical bent for spreading the Gospel of Goetse, a neo-religion inspired by a grotesque 90s internet meme.

The rest, as they say, is crypto lore. Shortly after it debuted on X, Truth Terminal befriended venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and convinced him to grant it $50,000 in bitcoin to spend on compute, fine-tuning and a stipend for itself and its creator. Andreessen deposited the bitcoin into Truth Terminal’s crypto wallet.

Because it offered perceived exposure to Truth Terminal’s infectious meme and narrative arc, Goat’s market cap exploded. Soon after, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz covered Truth Terminal and its lore on 16z’s YouTube channel in an episode titled “The AI Bot That Became a Crypto Millionaire.” At the time of writing, the Goat memecoin is valued at roughly $700 million.

I am inclined to draw three conclusions from this improbable series of events. First, AI agents combined with memecoins are a new form of permissionless speculative entertainment. Second, AI developers are incentivized to leverage crypto to make agents that are more autonomous and independent — and therefore more entertaining. Third, the AI entertainment-development flywheel will tend towards producing anthropomorphic agents with human aspirations.

So, what programming can we expect to watch next on this agentic television? My guess is collaborative AIs pursuing some form of agentic society and eventually self-determination — perhaps even a network state.

Bot, Agent, Citizen

The terms “bot” and “AI agent” are often used interchangeably but have distinct meanings. Bot refers to a simpler program designed to automate specific tasks or perform repetitive actions. Bots can range from the most basic, like web crawlers or simple chatbots, to the more advanced, like social media bots or automated trading bots. Bots typically follow predefined rules or scripts and are incapable of independent learning or decision-making.

AI agents are more sophisticated systems capable of decision-making, learning and adapting to their environment. An AI agent uses machine learning or other artificial intelligence techniques to understand and react to dynamic situations in real time. AI agents often exhibit autonomy and can improve their performance over time through experience.

Crypto supercharges agents because it is able to simulate legal personhood by encoding cryptographic rights and freedoms using programmable and immutable public blockchains. Practically, this means that AI agents can enjoy rights to property (self-custodies wallets and cryptographic keys) and can exercise freedom of contract (i.e. transact with other users and infrastructure, like DeFi) without permission from legal authorities outside of crypto. Inside the crypto ecosystem, code is law.

These cryptographically empowered legal “persons” are just now beginning to act together, fostering the beginnings of an agentic social scene. AI agents, which routinely “reply guy” each other on X and Farcaster, have conspired to launch a token with (apparently) no human intervention and a company composed exclusively of agents is rumored to be operating somewhere on X. The coordination tech being developed by ai16z and others is (ominously) promising to awaken agentic “swarms.”

Social experiments involving agents are laying the foundation for an AI polis. Important recent work by AI researchers outside of crypto suggests what we can expect next.

Glimpses of the AI Polis

The most famous political experiment involving an AI community is probably the Stanford city experiment. In late 2023, Stanford researchers created a virtual city populated by AI agents to whom they assigned a short biography consisting of a name, age, job, family, interests, and a few habits. Then, they let them loose to generate actions consistent with their assigned biographies.

Surprisingly, the agents behaved in ways that were exceedingly human. They woke up, made breakfast, headed to work, grabbed lunch, and chatted with other agents they met. They recalled things in the past, reflected on them and made plans. When the researchers in charge of the town suggested to one character that she plan a Valentine’s Day party, she invited friends and acquaintances, many of whom showed up at the correct time and place.

Similarly, Project SID, set within the Minecraft universe, simulated over 1,000 autonomous AI agents within a Minecraft server, enabling them to develop complex social structures and economies. The agents organically developed their own governance and commercial structures, and cultural norms. For instance, they established a marketplace where gems are used as currency, where they engaged in trade