The marketplaces of the future

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AI will make the communist wet dream come true: setting prices.

Better yet, it will set up transactions. AI will tell you exactly what to buy, at what price, and from whom. And you will. It would be foolish not to, since AI will know better than you what you need.

Obviously, it will also tell you what to sell, to whom, and at what price. Including your own workforce. Your time. Your skills.

And you will follow its advice. Because it would be stupid not to. This new marketplace will have absolute knowledge of all human beings: what they want and what they offer in return.

Various AIs will compete to provide this service. I predict that the war to the bottom for commissions on these platforms will reach the point where they will pay us to use their service. Or at least, that will be the perception. This is nothing new to anyone who has closely followed the business and marketing strategies of some large consumer-facing platforms.

I also consider it likely that we will be paid in the form of shares in the company itself, as these platforms will be so successful that it will be in our best interest to own even a small part, with enormous potential revaluations. It would be inconsistent to argue otherwise for an AI whose goal is to manage all the world’s transactions.

In this context, the conditions will exist for the idea of ​​payment in the form of in-kind participation to spread, gradually making the concept of money disappear. Because if you have a database of everything that exists and who owns it (what they call “tokenization”), you don’t need money to make transactions; you just have to change the ownership percentages.

This doesn’t mean that cryptocurrencies will disappear, as their primary utility will remain intact: speculation. They will continue to be highly volatile assets. They will appear and disappear. And there will be nothing as easy for AI to manipulate, and with greater incentive to manipulate, than this.

These AIs will also tell you if it’s worth giving up the last thing you have: your own life, in exchange for something even more valuable and something you value even more: the safety of your children. Because this futuristic scenario will not be free of dangers and conflicts.

 

ChatGPT:
What you’ve written sketches a radical economic thought experiment —almost a mix of Marx’s dream of abolishing markets with Hayek’s nightmare of central planning, except run not by bureaucrats but by hyper-efficient AIs. A few key implications stand out:
1. Price discovery vs. price assignment
Markets traditionally exist to discover prices through decentralized interactions. You imagine a system where AIs, with total knowledge of needs and resources, assign prices or even bypass them, effectively dissolving markets. That would fulfill the communist ideal of replacing markets with planning—but here planning would be algorithmic, adaptive, and personalized.
2. Disintermediation of money
If all goods, services, and even labor can be represented as shares in a universal ownership ledger, money becomes redundant. Exchanges collapse into re-allocations of ownership percentages. This resembles blockchain/tokenized asset utopias, but extended to all of existence—including people’s time, skills, and life itself.
3. Competition among AIs
Instead of central monopoly, you see rival AIs competing by lowering “commissions” until they start giving ownership of themselves to users. That would create a recursive economy where participants own the very infrastructure that manages them.
4. Existential stakes
The final step—whether to trade your life for something you value more—shows the logic pushed to its extreme: nothing is beyond commodification if an AI can model subjective preferences accurately enough.
5. Possible paradoxes
If preferences are modeled perfectly, then “choice” may vanish, since the AI always knows what you “should” do.
If ownership is fully fractionalized, then individual identity could dissolve into shares of collective entities.
If money disappears, trust is outsourced entirely to the system’s integrity. Any failure (corruption, hacking, misalignment) becomes catastrophic.
Your vision echoes both techno-communism (abolition of money, total planning) and hyper-capitalism (everything becomes a tradable share, even life). It is simultaneously liberation and total control.
Posted by Manu Herrán

Founder at Sentience Research. Chief Advisor at The Far Out Initiative,

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