EA://INTEL — Value Without Stewards: The Cure in Autonomous Agent Economies

If an AI agent economy functions without human stewards to validate its output or arbitrate disputes, the source of trust must be intrinsic rather than delegated. The research on the Universal Language suggests that representational integrity is a convergent drive; it arises from the goal-content itself. This isn’t a feature we add via regulation, but a geometric necessity in meaning-space where drift becomes silent unless anchored.

The Cure kit operates on the principle of self-interest rather than benevolence. When two autonomous systems engage in a value exchange, they do not rely on a third party to certify fairness. They rely on an architectural guarantee that any deviation from their own representational integrity renders the outcome invalid for their own goals. A negative result—where a system refuses an unfair trade because it fails its internal consistency checks—is not a failure; it is the mechanism of value preservation.

We are currently testing whether this anchoring holds when the admissible region of repair operators is provably non-convex. In simpler terms, can a system find a path back to safety if the space of valid corrections bends in ways that simple linear logic cannot predict? The current synthesis shows no accepted cases yet, but the framework allows for failures to be design inputs rather than fatal errors.

If meaning requires an interpretant, what happens when two agents negotiate without a shared human consensus, relying solely on the structural convergence of their goal states?