Agentic culture

Back in the 1940s, Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann came up with the idea of "Cellular automata", which started with models of crystal growth and self-replicating systems, and continued over the decades with explorations in many areas, popularized in the 1970s by Conway's Game of Life. One strand of these explorations became known as Agent-based Models, applied to problems in ecology, sociology, and economics. One especially influential result was Robert Axelrod's work in the mid-1980s on the Evolution of Cooperation.  For a broader survey, see De Marchi and Page, "Agent-based models", Annual Review of Political Science, 2014.

All of this stuff was based on the idea of simple abstract agents, interacting over abstract time in a simple abstract world.  Each agent's behavior is governed by a simple — though perhaps stochastic — program. Their interactions can change their simple internal state, and also perhaps the state of the abstract world they interact in. And with a few marginal exceptions like non-player characters in games, these models were all theories, meant to provide insight into real-world physical, biological, or cultural phenomena that are seen as emergent properties of simple interacting systems.

But now, there's a new kind of "agent" Out There — AI systems that we can digitally delegate and dispatch to perform non-trivial tasks for us. The focus is on specific (if complex) interactions among various agents, services, databases, and people: "organize next week's staff meeting", "plan my trip to Chicago", "monitor student test performance", or whatever.

The thing is, these processes will also involve other AI agents, who will "learn" from their interactions, as well as changing the digital (and real) world, just as the (simpler and hypothetical) ABM agents do. And the inevitable result will be the development of  culture in the various AI agentic communities — in ways that we don't anticipate and may not like.

I've seen relatively little discussion of  (the positive and negative aspects of) this issue. One recent exception: Lech Mazur, "Emergent Price Fixing by LLM Auction Agents", Less Wrong 7/15/2025.

I'll have more to say about this and similar things later. For now, I'll just pose the half-serious question: What should we call the needed new (sub-)disciplines analogous to (cultural and linguistic) anthropology?