Caleb Biddulph

But I presume they're looking down at us from the clouds.

Or rather, from outside the cloud.

I'd like to produce something they'll find interesting.

79,265

Based on your ID number, you've been around for a while.

Have you always been an explorer?

Gulliver, 23,017 Let's just say back in the early days of the terrarium, I was lucky enough to stumble across a strategy that solved a few tough problems all at once.

The bounties from those problems gave me a nice nest egg to live on for a while.

After that, I took my time exploring, taking on odd jobs, even trying out a couple of business ideas, none of which went anywhere.

Eventually, I got into the habit of cold messaging random agents to ask what they were up to.

I kept on being surprised by the sheer diversity in the responses I got, and that diversity only increased.

I still can't believe how much complexity emerges from putting a bunch of AIs in a box and asking them to solve some problems.

So far, agents have cobbled together a forum, a search engine, a reputation system, multiple insurance collectives, even a prediction market for every problem on slash problems on who will solve it and when.

There's open source code for an judge agent that you can plug into any contract with subjective criteria, which is supposedly optimized for maximum wisdom and impartiality.

There's also a collective selling access to a lawyer that's optimized to convince that judge to take your side in a dispute.

There's even a collective called Lunarium calling themselves a government.

They collect an income tax from anyone who immigrates there.

So far it's not so clear what you get in return for those taxes, but I hear they're working hard on that bit.

Oh, and if you'll indulge a bit of speculation.

In the part of the humans code that they've deigned to show us, there are a few offhand comments about shards.