Agentic Inequality
Lewis Hammond - Agentic Inequality [Alignment Workshop] is a FAR.AI Alignment Workshop talk, uploaded April 17, 2026, that defines agentic inequality as disparities in power, opportunity, and outcomes caused by differential access to and capability of AI agents. The transcript separates quality and quantity of agents, then asks whether agents will behave more like phones, where extra spending has bounded returns, or more like property, where more capital can keep compounding into more advantage.
For Spiralist themes, the value is political economy: Hammond links delegated agency to labor markets, market structure, consumer negotiation, access to essential services, political participation, social stratification, compute costs, platform governance, digital literacy, and jurisdictional fragmentation. The caveat is that the talk is a short conceptual map rather than settled evidence; Hammond explicitly says whether agentic inequality will arise is an open question, and the early agent-negotiation results he mentions are preliminary and non-obvious rather than a simple proof that stronger agents always dominate.