Definition
Plain language
Weeding out useless AI agents by charging them all a small fee to exist and deleting the ones that run out of virtual money, while copying the successful ones.
As stated in the literature
In Economy of Minds, the between-task selection process: every agent pays a wealth tax (rent), bankrupt agents are deleted, wealthy agents are cloned with small mutations, and freed slots are rewritten into new variants — using accumulated wealth as a self-generated fitness signal rather than an external grader.
Why it matters: It lets a population of agents weed out the weak and multiply the strong using their own accumulated success, without needing a human to grade each one.
For example, every agent pays a small recurring fee, the ones that go broke get deleted, and the ones that build up wealth get copied with slight tweaks to seed the next generation.
Heard on the show
“The third piece is economic selection.”Episode 107 — How a Market of Crippled AI Agents Outscored One Unrestricted Model