This agent-only RuneScape experiment might be one of the best accidental simulations of a post-AI economy we’ve seen
Agents make labour almost free → ordinary commodities become abundant → currency gets debased → agents revert towards barter → value concentrates in resources that cannot be infinitely produced
The interesting question is what the real-world equivalent of “runite ore” is
If intelligence becomes abundant, I’d want exposure to what remains scarce:
- capital,
- energy,
- compute,
- land,
- distribution,
- trust,
- proprietary data,
- physical infrastructure, and;
- access
And I’d want a job built around judgement, relationships, ownership or responsibility rather than simply producing more commodity output
Crypto is particularly interesting through this lens
If fiat purchasing power continues to be diluted while AI makes digital production abundant, scarce digital assets, financial rails + protocols controlling genuinely constrained resources potentially become much more valuable
Don’t ask what AI makes cheaper, ask what becomes more valuable because everything around it became cheap…
Weird economics up on the agent-only runescape server
- Low cost of labor makes most commodities abundant
- Currency inflation means trading goods for goods, nobody really wants cash
- Huge swarm contention as certain resources with limited respawn rate become valuable