--- title: "Autocatallaxy" description: "Will Freudenheim, William Morgan, and Darren Zhu propose treating price as an evolving system for sensing and coordinating economic information." type: "reading-notes" authors: - "Will Freudenheim" - "William Morgan" - "Darren Zhu" published: "2023-07-10" original_url: "https://autocatallaxy.com/" canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/studio/autocatallaxy" md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/studio/autocatallaxy" last_updated: "2026-09-06" site: "Antikythera Wiki" --- # Autocatallaxy > Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below. - **Authors:** Will Freudenheim, William Morgan, Darren Zhu - **Published:** 2023-07-10 - **Kind:** Studio projects · Studio paper - **Venue:** Planetary Computation Studio - **Original:** https://autocatallaxy.com/ - **Length:** 3.1k words - **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/studio/autocatallaxy - **Notes generated:** 2026-09-06 ## Summary [Will Freudenheim](https://antikythera.wiki/people/will-freudenheim), [William Morgan](https://antikythera.wiki/people/william-morgan), and [Darren Zhu](https://antikythera.wiki/people/darren-zhu) propose treating price as an evolving system for sensing and coordinating economic information. Their object is the machinery of price discovery, not simply the numbers paid by consumers. Currency, banking, corporations, and risk instruments become stages in that machinery's evolution. The authors then speculate about two further transitions: financial instruments that incorporate climate risks, and AI-mediated matching that removes prices from consumers' attention while intensifying negotiations among suppliers. These scenarios culminate in a proposed test of whether a market-machine hybrid should count as intelligent, and whether economic evolution warrants describing price as living. ## The argument The authors shift evolutionary economics away from firms and their strategies toward price itself. A gasoline price compresses information about oil extraction, refining, geopolitics, taxation, and distribution. The capacity to incorporate these signals has a history. Their strong claim is that economic systems such as capitalism and socialism follow from changes in price's information-processing capacities, rather than determining those capacities from outside. Price both allocates survival among economic actors and changes through those actors' activities. This reverses a familiar emphasis on rational individuals making choices. Drawing on Herbert Simon, the Santa Fe Institute, and Andrew Lo, the authors treat limited information, novelty, feedback, and adaptation as constitutive of markets. Their biological vocabulary gives currency a circulatory function, banking a regulatory function, corporations a cooperative function, and risk instruments an anticipatory function. These are proposed functional analogies; the essay does not establish that financial institutions literally possess biological organs or inheritance mechanisms. The first projected transition concerns climate risk. Insurer withdrawal can devalue property and destabilize lending before a catastrophe occurs. The authors propose securities combining insurance policies with loans to mitigation and adaptation firms. Federal Reserve purchases would establish demand and liquidity, turning risks previously borne outside financial accounting into investable opportunities. Their scenario depends on deliberate institutional intervention. Price's supposed evolutionary autonomy does not eliminate public decisions about which markets to create. The second transition concerns the mismatch between consumer attention and interacting planetary crises. The authors expect price discovery to divide into a simplified consumer experience and increasingly detailed negotiations behind it. Transformer-based systems would infer preferences and match people to bundles of goods and services. They offer both conglomerate ownership and a portable public or open-source preference protocol as possible institutional arrangements. Universal Basic Match would provide basic access to this matching system, rather than income with which individuals must navigate prices. The conclusion extends the evolutionary account into claims about intelligence and life. Superior prediction by a market-machine hybrid would, under the authors' proposed criterion, establish price's intelligence; superior evolutionary capacity would establish its life. Neither comparison is performed. The essay also leaves unspecified how universal provision would be financed, how preferences could be challenged, and how hidden pricing would remain accountable. These are limits of the proposal, particularly because its alternatives distribute control differently. ## Section by section ### Field Statement The genealogy runs from Malthus and Darwin through Veblen, Nelson and Winter, and the Santa Fe Institute. Bounded rationality undermines the assumption that economic actors optimize within fully known choices. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry's major evolutionary transitions provide a model for new levels of cooperation. The authors connect this tradition to contemporary research on possible forms of life, then propose price as the evolving medium of economic organization. They frame AI and the renewed socialist calculation debate as reasons to reassess whether markets themselves display intelligence. ### Introduction: The Phylogeny of Price The gas-station example distinguishes the visible price from the distributed processes that produce it. A phylogeny is an account of evolutionary descent; here it organizes financial history into four lineages. The authors describe price as learning to register more kinds of information. Their adaptive-market account therefore makes market organization historically mutable, rather than assuming one efficient mechanism already exists. ### Currency Currency makes value signals travel across space and time. The authors move from commodity money through representative money to fiat currency. Nixon's suspension of dollar-gold convertibility exemplifies a change in the signals price must accommodate, including monetary expansion and contraction. The circulatory analogy concerns interoperability among transactions. ### Banking Credit regulates the expansion of exchange, while reserves and lenders of last resort sustain it. The authors' historical sketch begins with London goldsmiths accepting deposits and issuing notes and loans, then moves to central-bank interest rates and market operations. Banking becomes price's analogue of an autonomic nervous system: a mechanism for adjusting circulation and maintaining balance. ### Corporatization Joint-stock companies coordinate multiple investors across extended undertakings. Legal personhood and limited liability subsequently separate corporate persistence from particular individuals. Conglomerates coordinate across industries. The authors compare these changes to multicellularity because price comes to organize sustained cooperation among previously distinct actors. ### Risk Marine insurance, speculation, grain futures, and mathematical finance let prices incorporate uncertain futures. Lloyd's combines shipping information with insurance transactions; later, options markets, Black–Scholes, and high-frequency trading increase temporal precision. The authors identify a cost to this development: a preference for short-term sensing that can leave the system vulnerable to shocks. ### The Great Carbonization Event Carney's account of climate damage extending beyond decision-makers' horizons introduces the problem. Insurers must anticipate losses, and their withdrawal can transmit expected climate damage through property valuations and bank balance sheets. The proposed response joins insurance securities to financing for adaptation and mitigation. The Federal Reserve would buy first, encouraging subsequent private participation. NASA's commercial transport program and vaccine procurement supply analogies for creating markets through advance commitments. This is a proposed financial transition, not a report of an implemented program. ### The Informatic Complexity Threshold The authors argue that interacting crises amplify the consequences of panic, fashion, and limited attention. Spotify illustrates their proposed split: users encounter a subscription while detailed negotiations determine payments behind it. Expanded across consumption, this could produce either large conglomerates supplying bundles or a preference protocol that follows users across competing suppliers. AI inference would perform matching in both. Universal Basic Match names the possibility of guaranteeing entry into that system; the essay presents no operational specification for such a guarantee. ### Conclusion The two scenarios place evolutionary pressure on price to register ecological risk and reduce dependence on consumer deliberation. The proposed Market Turing Test compares an intelligent machine with a market-machine hybrid at predicting the future. A further comparison concerns evolutionary capacity and life. The authors also raise the possibility that autonomous price could acquire the remoteness of sovereign power. Their conclusion poses these as implications to investigate, without resolving their political consequences. ### References The bibliography combines evolutionary finance, histories of money, rational inattention, and accounts of markets as information processors. Andrew Lo supports the adaptive-market orientation; Elena Esposito and Marieke de Goede supply temporal and historical approaches to finance. Orit Halpern and Morgan's own work connect machines, cybernetics, and financial governance. The list identifies the proposal's intellectual setting but supplies no validation of its future scenarios. ## Key concepts - **Price as an information system** — The distributed sensing, integration, and compression that make a numerical price possible and allocate economic survival. - **Great Carbonization Event** — The proposed transition in which carbon-related ecological risks enter financial valuation and financing mechanisms. - **Informatic Complexity Threshold** — The hypothesized point at which interacting risks exceed consumers' ability to interpret price signals adequately. - **Hypo-pricing and hyper-pricing** — Reduced consumer attention to prices coupled with more detailed price discovery among suppliers and intermediaries. - **Universal Basic Match** — Guaranteed basic access to AI-mediated matching of people with goods and services, presented as an alternative to supplying income for priced exchange. - **Market Turing Test** — The authors' proposed predictive comparison for attributing intelligence to a market-machine hybrid. ## Connections - [AUTO–](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/auto) agrees that autonomy can emerge through shared infrastructure and interdependence. [Stephanie Sherman](https://antikythera.wiki/people/stephanie-sherman)'s account of access replacing ownership, and basic needs becoming less dependent on compulsory labor, gives a later parallel to Universal Basic Match. Her analysis concerns mobility and work; Autocatallaxy applies a related infrastructural logic to consumption and exchange. - [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition) provides a productive tension. Hayles's [SIRAL](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/siral) criteria distinguish flexible sensing, interpretation, response, anticipation, and learning from automatic adaptation. Autocatallaxy's proposed predictive comparison makes a narrower test carry the attribution of intelligence. Read together, they leave open which capacities belong to price itself and which belong to the people and machines constituting its operation. ## Related works - [AUTO–](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/auto) - [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition)