Source: Marginal REVOLUTION
Patrick Collison's framing of AI agents as functional analogs to corporations—entities that can negotiate, acquire resources, and operate autonomously over time—moves past hype toward structural economic questions. If agents can genuinely replace the coordination function that firms provide (reducing transaction costs, managing contracts, allocating capital), then we're looking at potential disintermediation of middle management and outsourcing layers, not just incremental automation of tasks. The economic test isn't whether agents can do individual jobs, but whether they can do them cheaper and more reliably than the organizational structures built to do them.