We are moving from "AI as a Chatbot" to "AI as a Proxy." In the near future, you won't just ask an AI to write an email; you’ll delegate your Agency to a surrogate (an "Agent") that can move money, sign contracts, and negotiate with other agents. Imagine a "Personal Health Agent" that manages your medical life. It talks to the "Underwriting Agent" at your insurance company to settle a claim. This happens in milliseconds, at a scale no human can monitor.Soon, we will have offloaded our Agency to these proxies. But this has created a "Conflict of Interest" at the hardware level:Is your agent a Mercenary (beholden only to you) or a Citizen (beholden to the stability of the system)?The conundrum:As autonomous agents take over the "functioning" of society, do we mandate "User-Primary Allegiance," where an agent’s only legal and technical duty is to maximize its owner's specific profit and advantage, even if that means exploiting market loopholes or sabotaging rivals (The Mercenary Model), or do we enforce "Systemic-Primary Alignment," where all agents are hard-coded to prioritize "Market Health" and "Social Guardrails," meaning your agent will literally refuse to follow your orders if they are deemed "socially sub-optimal" (The Citizen Model)?
