From Common Sense to a Post-Agentic Future

A question from Martin Davies-Roundhill: what should happen to housing, work and ownership if autonomous systems do much more?

The paired portraits and credits appear on the series home. This is Martin’s independent commentary on Kohler’s published work. Alan Kohler has not reviewed or endorsed it.

Kohler’s documented work

What he has argued

Kohler has written about AI agents, their potential economic effects and their risks. He has not endorsed the term “post-agentic future” as used here, nor the political or social ideas on this page. His work gives me a useful starting point because it joins technological change to productivity, inequality, human dependence and the everyday economy. The next step in this installment is my own question, not a prediction attributed to him.

Martin’s response

Where I agree, and where I go further

If agents and robots do more of the work that currently earns people a living, society will have to decide who owns the productive capacity, how people obtain income and how necessities such as housing remain secure. Lower material costs could ease some forms of scarcity, but they would not decide where people want to live, who makes local choices or how scarce places are shared. Abundance changes the problem; it does not make governance disappear.

Open question

What I still want to understand

What economic arrangements could preserve agency and security in a world where machines can act, produce and coordinate at scale? I would be interested to hear how Kohler thinks about the connection between housing policy today and those larger changes. Until he responds, this remains my inquiry and this series remains independent commentary.

Research trail

Sources

Published 18 October 2026 · Commentary by Martin Davies-Roundhill · Contact End Up Here