> ...in a world where larger fractions of economic activity are autonomously managed by AI agents, odd scenarios like this could have cascading effects—especially if multiple agents based on similar underlying models tend to go wrong for similar reasons.
This is a pretty large understatement. Imagine a business that is franchised across the country with each "franchisee" being a copy of the same model, which all freak out on the same day, accuse the customers of secretly working for the CIA and deciding to stop selling hot dogs at a profit and instead sell hand grenades at a loss. Now imagine 50 other chains having similar issues while AI law enforcement analysts dispatch real cops with real guns to the poor employees caught in the middle schlepping explosives from the UPS store to a stand in the mall.
I think we were expecting SkyNet but in reality the post-AI economy may just be really chaotic. If you thought profit-maximizing capitalist entrepreneurs were corrosive to the social fabric, wait until there are 10^10 more of them (unlike traditional meat-based entrepreneurs, there's no upper limit and there can easily be more of them than there are real people) and they not-infrequently act like they're in late stage amphetamine psychosis while still controlling your paycheck, your bank, your local police department, the military, and whatever is left that passes for the news media.
Deeper, even if they get this to work with minimal amounts of of synthetic schizophrenia, do we really want a future where we all mainly work schlepping things back and forth at the orders of disembodied voices whose reasoning we can't understand?