The Role of AI in Cybereconomy

About this session

Artem Kotelskiy, speaking for cyber•Fund, argued that AI and crypto were pushing capitalism toward what the fund internally calls a cybernetic economy: a resource allocation system that is self-regulating and, unlike the one we have now, hyperefficient. His case was that human limits, not the market mechanism itself, produce capitalism's failures, and that AI removes those limits while crypto supplies the infrastructure for the resulting activity to take place.

He opened with the fund's own record: more than two hundred startups backed across Ethereum, Solana and other networks, by his account. He then built the argument in two steps. First, prices work as a signal that adjusts supply and demand, but the people executing on that signal are bounded, limited in how much they can research, process, coordinate and act on, which he tied to asset bubbles and principal-agent problems. AI, in his framing, extends those bounded capacities directly, so plugging AI into the existing market mechanism just makes the invisible hand work harder.

The second step was less conventional. He distinguished markets already programmatically accessible, like public stock exchanges, from markets that are not, such as government procurement or task-based gig work, and used a personal anecdote about ordering party balloons through a chatbot to illustrate the second kind: the agent completed the task but picked poorly, because the underlying market had no structured way to be queried or bid into. His claim was that AI's real function is to instrument these markets: reading a request, extracting the actual intent and constraints, spinning up a temporary auction, finding counterparties, and settling into a contract. He named the missing piece mechanism-aware AI, agents that understand they are negotiating economically and know what to disclose, and said this does not yet exist. He also argued that agents transacting this way erode the ad-supported attention economy, since agents do not look at banners, and gestured at a machine-to-machine payment rail as the kind of infrastructure this favors, without detailing it further. Blockchains, he said, are a plausible but not guaranteed substrate for the coordination itself.

He closed on a values point: the cybernetic economy is coming regardless, but the path there is not fixed, and a passive path risks concentrating data and control rather than distributing it.