What Do We Need for an Agentic Society?

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of agentic societies composed of intelligent objects with properties like autonomy and social ability, highlighting coordination challenges and open research questions.

Contribution

It introduces the idea of agentic objects forming societies, discusses coordination issues, and outlines a research agenda addressing sharing, judging, and acting.

Findings

Illustrative scenario shows coordination promise and failure modes.

Identifies open questions on sharing, judging, and acting in agentic societies.

Highlights need for research on trust, deadlocks, and adversarial influences.

Abstract

Thirty years ago, Wooldridge and Jennings defined intelligent agents through four properties: autonomy, reactivity, pro-activeness, and social ability. Today, advances in AI can empower everyday objects to become such intelligent agents. We call such objects agentic objects and envision that they can form an agentic society: a collective agentic environment that perceives patterns, makes judgments, and takes actions that no single object could achieve alone. However, individual capability does not guarantee coordination. Through an illustrative scenario of a teenager experiencing bullying and depression, we demonstrate both the promise of coordination and its failure modes: false positives that destroy trust, deadlocks that prevent action, and adversarial corruption that poisons judgment. These failures reveal open questions spanning three phases: what to share, how to judge, and when to act. These questions chart a research agenda for building agentic societies.