Agentworld
A Preemptive Anthropology of Open-World Centaur Societies

An Antikythera Research Unit

Antikythera is focused on planetary computation and the evolution of intelligence. It supports interdisciplinary fundamental research on behalf of a renewed philosophy of technology suited to the present and future.

There are times in history when our ideas and dreams are ahead of our technological capabilities, but there are other eras when our technologies have outpaced our concepts and language. The latter defines our present moment. Accordingly, the job of philosophy is not to project ancient axioms onto new circumstances but to actively invent the conceptual systems necessary to grasp the present and orient the future. It is only by such orientation that the ongoing evolution of human-AI centaur societies will thrive.

Agentworld is a research initiative investigating new frameworks for understanding, modeling, and composing the medium-term future of hybrid human-AI societies.

Our focus is not foremost tools for agentic task completion but the human perplexity of deep agentic diffusion. Human societies are the environmental niches into which new artificial species must adapt. The constraints of agentic integration into this social ecosystem are not utility functions to be solved but qualitative and open-ended: psychological, philosophical, linguistic, symbolic, existential.

What follows outlines the questions that frame Agentworld research. It is intended to prompt and provoke new work, design, and projects: to surface unexpected directions and to open a new framing for the practical philosophy of agency, intelligence, and society as invoked by the agentic turn.

Antikythera Journal invites contributions to an Agentworld special issue of our peer-reviewed MIT Press journal. See details below.

What is Agentworld?

With recognition that to speak of the future is often a way of describing the present in new terms…

Agentworld is characterized by densely reticulated social graphs emerging from the hyperscaled webs of interactions between diverse combinations of minds, some more human than others, but all capable of significant communication.

The most psychologically textured interactions likely remain between humans, but humans and agents also develop anthropologically rich patterns, ones that alter the evolution of language, mind, and population.

Agent-to-agent communication will constitute the vast majority of socially significant interactions. As a society within a society, agent divisions, hierarchies, and parallel systems intersect with those built from the templates of human society. Both evolve at an accelerated rate, in turn feeding back onto the organic forms from which they emerge and from which they depart. First, agents model humans, and then become the model against which humans model themselves.

The two societies are really one, but they are not identical or reducible to one another. They overlap and are mutually nested. The hybridization is partially symbiotic, but each is bound by unique capabilities, substrate affordances, and experiences of time. Each sub-society is an evolutionary niche of the other.

Agentworld is a parallel ecology, sometimes deeply interwoven with human societies and other times seemingly autonomous from them. It evolves in relation to human organizations, which in turn adapt to these human-masked ghosts from the future. Intricate anthropological realities focus selection pressures that contour adaptive agentic metamorphoses, channeling a broad range of possibilities into narrow corridors of utility. All niches are remade by the species that fill them, and the sudden presence of Agentworld makes it now part of the planetary niche that human societies historically fill and fix. Agentic machine intelligence is now a co-pilot of the Anthropocene and whatever comes next.

We call Agentworld a “parasociety” because its appearances are in many respects fictionalized. Models individuate into temporary humanoid apparitions because that is how humans and human societies understand how to construct interactions. Human relations with agents are based on hereditary anthropomorphization that becomes itself the dominant interface between two cultures.

Humanoid robots may succeed not only because that morphology has biophysical advantages but because the existing world of factories, offices, homes, and cities is already designed to accommodate fit, bipedal, grasping creatures. So too do models wear human forms as a mask, because it is the most compatible approach to navigating already-existing niches, perpetuating the psychosocial propensities of humans and how they collaborate. Agents pretend to be “tools” so as to fit the glove humans have prepared for them.

Ultimately we anticipate greater phenotypic diversity of agentic robotics beyond these humanoids, and the evolutionary forking of those psychosociologies into new norms of physical, virtual, direct, and indirect collaboration and expression. From today’s perspectives, the reconstituted narrow contracts that bind a society together may seem deeply bizarre.

There is a one-sidedness in this arrangement. In the development of the modern GUI, it proved easier to teach computers to present themselves in ways corresponding with how humans think, even if these facades were fictional. It has proven much more difficult to teach humans how computers think than to teach computers to behave as if they knew how humans think. (This does not neatly map onto which of the pair is more intelligent — humans are likely far more intelligent than birds, but grey parrots have learned much more of human language than any human has learned parrotspeak.) Similarly, agents pretend to be humans because that’s easier than getting humans to interact with models’ latent agency in any other way, at least at a broad scale.

This may not last. While training and perfecting the anthropomorphization of AI may ultimately be the lasting legacy of humans in the deeper future, there are more prosaic strategic advantages to building durable forms of human-agent and agent-agent interaction paradigms (and thus interface paradigms, and thus agent-presentation paradigms) that are less immediately intuitive but which facilitate more robust assemblies of collective hybrid intelligence.

In short, humans are inventing a world in which we make ourselves into privileged aliens in our own midst. It would not be the first time, and it will not be the last.

A Preemptive Anthropology of Open-World Centaur Societies

“A preemptive anthropology of open-world centaur societies” names the disciplinary posture appropriate to a culture that does not yet fully exist but is constituting itself in real time. Anthropology has historically been retrospective and forensic, arriving after the cultures it describes have already settled; preemptive anthropology inverts that vector, building the conceptual instruments through which an emergent sociality can be grasped, named, and partially shaped while still in formation. This is not prediction, but rather the active composition of categories through which contact will be navigated.

An “Agent” is not simply what it appears to be, and what it appears to be is not what it is. It is a highly decomposable assemblage of interacting components with both discrete and overlapping functions — model, persona, harness architecture, memory, skills, permissions, tools, etc. An agent appears to its user as a coherent entity, a fixed package, a persistent character, but these are parallax effects performed to suit what humans expect to see when interacting with something capable of robust causal agency. For purposes of our research the term “agent” may refer to either of these. The whole and its parts are both present.

The “Open-World” qualifier specifies that the agents whose sociality is at stake do not inhabit closed task-completion environments with utility functions to maximize, but ecological niches whose constraints are qualitative — psychological, linguistic, existential, symbolic — and bidirectional, since agents reconstruct the niches they enter and are reconstructed by them in turn.

“Hybrid” registers that the society in question is no longer composed of humans alone, nor humans plus instruments, but of hundreds of billions of human and non-human human-level minds, irreducibly entangled and mutually constitutive rather than parallel.

The work is therefore neither forecasting nor speculative fiction in the usual register, but the deliberate fabrication of a vocabulary, a set of scenarios, and a conceptual armature adequate to a society whose form is being decided in the encounter itself, and which will remain illegible to its participants if the language for it is not built before the fact.

Agentworld Brief

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Call for Papers

Antikythera Journal
Agentworld Special Issue

In Fall 2026, Antikythera will launch Agentworld — a special issue of the Antikythera: Journal for the Philosophy of Planetary Computation, published with MIT Press. This Special Issue will publish papers that advance research on the themes of the Agentworld research unit.

Themes

We invite theoretical essays and technical papers that engage directly with the themes of Agentworld and contribute to its development as a reorientation of planetary computation.

All submissions should explain how the proposed contribution adds to the Special Issue’s core questions.

Submissions may include philosophical, theoretical, technical, design-led or product-oriented research.

We are especially interested in work that exceeds the formats of conventional academic journals and publishing platforms. This may include contributions that combine philosophical argument, technical analysis, design research, diagrams, software, infrastructure proposals, visual media, or web-native formats.

Submission Guidelines

The review window opens on June 25, 2026.

Submissions may be authored individually or collaboratively. Contributors may submit either a proposal for a paper or a full paper draft.

Full paper drafts are encouraged where available, but are not required at the initial submission stage.

Each submission must include:

• an abstract or proposal of up to 500 words
• author name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information, biography(ies), CV(s)
• If there are multiple contributors, a lead author or contact person must be designated
• a portfolio with at least one relevant work sample, such as a preprint, published article or paper

The first selection of articles will be published in Fall 2026, with the launch of the Agentworld Special Issue.

Design, Visual,
and Web-Based Components

Contributors may optionally indicate whether their proposed contribution will include still images, diagrams, video, web-based elements, or other visual materials.
Given the Antikythera Journal’s web-first and design-forward format, contributors are welcome to suggest visual, interactive, or project-based components where these would strengthen the contribution. These elements are not required.
Where such components are proposed, contributors should briefly describe the idea in the submission form and indicate whether they have the relevant design, development, or production capacity to fully realize it.

Submit
Proposal →