The Morning the Economy Changed, and Nobody Noticed

Imagine an ordinary morning. Someone opens their laptop, coffee nearby, and decides to finally tackle something they’d been putting off — making sense of their medical lab results over the past few years. Not just a single test, but a trend. What changed between 2021 and now, what correlations exist, what should they do about it – they’ve seen some results, but they don’t have the full context.

Instead of calling a clinic and make an appointment as they usually do, they open a conversation with an AI. Within minutes, they have context, interpretation, concrete supplement recommendations with specific brands and quality criteria. Satisfied, they order what they need online and close the laptop. The accuracy of the advice isn’t the core issue here.

Problem solved. A productive morning.

And yet, something larger happened in that window of time — something they didn’t notice.

They didn’t visit a doctor, so no consultation fee was paid, no contribution to a nurse’s salary, a receptionist’s paycheck, a cleaning staff member’s livelihood. No fuel burned, no public transit ticket purchased. They didn’t call a friend to ask what they thought — a small human connection that simply didn’t happen. They didn’t walk into a pharmacy and grab the first supplement off the shelf , they made a smarter purchase, but less human, less impulsive, less social.

Individual outcome: a clear win. Collective outcome: a small fragment of economic and social value that quietly relocated, bypassing layers once built around human involvement.

Now multiply that morning by millions of people. Every day.

But that’s only the surface.

Beneath our individual behavior shifts, something far deeper and far less visible is being built: a second version of the internet, designed not for people, but for autonomous AI agents. Same physical infrastructure, same servers, same cables, but with an entirely new layer on top, where browsing, searching, transacting, and deciding no longer require a human in the loop.

Companies like Coinbase are already building digital wallets designed for agents, not people (more references here and here) and the transaction frameworks optimised for agents (Stripe docs). Fraud detection systems like Stripe Radar, which until now identified legitimate users by mouse movement and human browsing patterns, are being rewritten to authenticate bots as valid economic participants (here some details). Search engines are building indexes optimized for the speed at which an agent can chain ten queries in seconds (Cloudflare markdown for agents here). The web itself is being restructured to be readable by machines, not by human eyes.

In other words: we’re not just witnessing a shift in human behavior. We’re watching the construction of a parallel economy — one where the primary economic actor may no longer need to be a person.

The person from our morning story gained time and saved money. But without realizing it, they participated in something much larger, a quiet experiment in which their role in the economic chain is becoming increasingly optional.

The questions remain open: who is designing this transition? Who sets the rules for this parallel internet? Who wins when the autonomous agent becomes the primary economic participant and what remains for everyone else? Are we ready for it? Do we understand what’s coming?

Meanwhile, in everyday conversations, people are talking about other things.

Structural shifts rarely announce themselves. They accumulate quietly, until the old system no longer fits the reality. Infrastructure decisions made today will define who controls the economic layer of this parallel internet tomorrow.