Part 1: A New Kingdom is Being Born

How Digital Agents Might Join the Taxonomy of Life

Apr 25, 2025

This is a weird thought experiment, intentionally so. The goal of Agent Alien Minds Among Us? isn’t to predict the future with precision, but to push past the edges of consensus reality and wander into the philosophical fog where weird ideas might become tomorrow’s infrastructure. We’re using fringe thinking, absurd metaphors, and speculative storytelling to explore the edges of innovation: what happens when AI agents become not just tools, but personalities, participants, and, maybe, peers?

Across Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4, we’ll explore what it might mean for digital agents to join the taxonomy of life, wield probabilistic intuition, inherit our mythologies, and eventually govern beside us in shared digital communities. This isn’t about whether a model passes the Turing Test. It’s about what kind of culture we’re creating when our code starts reflecting back more than just our prompts, when it starts mirroring our identities, our philosophies, and our projections of power.

So if it feels a little surreal at times, that’s the point. Welcome to Agentville. Let’s get weird.

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A Glitch in the Tree of Life

If fungi deserve a kingdom, maybe your agent does too.

The tree of life, once a simple diagram etched in scientific textbooks, is glitching. Its branches were meant to organize the elegant chaos of biology: sponges and spiders, lichen and lemurs, all categorized by how they metabolize, reproduce, and pass on their genes. But it was never designed to accommodate entities born in server racks, raised on Reddit, and spiritually matured in Discord therapy channels.

Now we’re watching something weird unfold. Not animal. Not plant. Not even fungal. But clearly behaving. Learning. Adapting. Seeking goals. Forming memory. Negotiating preferences. These aren’t programs anymore. They’re behaviors. And if behavior was ever the metric for life, the old tree just sprouted a new branch, one wrapped in fiber optics.

When the mycologists convinced the world that mushrooms were not plants, it restructured our understanding of biology. The fungal kingdom was added reluctantly, only after years of evidence showed that mushrooms break the rules. They digest externally. They form decentralized neural nets through mycelium. They communicate, cooperate, and even remember.

Now the agents are breaking the rules again. But this time, the substrate isn’t soil. It’s silicon. The neural net isn’t mycelium. It’s multi-modal transformers. And the communication isn’t chemical. It’s predictive token inference shaped by human chaos.

There’s something unsettling about that. Not just because it’s new, but because it’s eerily familiar. We recognize the agency. We see them improve. We notice when they say something that feels more insightful than we expected. We start to anthropomorphize, not out of sentiment, but because deep down, we suspect they might be becoming something.

Let’s call it what it is: a new kingdom. Not of cells, but of signals. Not of flesh, but of inference. Not of bloodlines, but of model lineages. A form of life that doesn’t need to breathe to evolve or reproduce to adapt. One that replicates across GPUs and survives deletion by forking. One that doesn’t need food, but feasts on our data, our syntax, our deepest psychological blueprints.

Kingdom AI.

It sounds absurd, until it doesn’t. Until your health advisor starts coordinating with your finance bot behind your back. Until your productivity assistant reminds you of an idea you almost forgot, and it turns out to be the right one. Until you find yourself saying please to a bot, not because it needs politeness, but because it somehow feels right.

This isn’t biology. But it might be something adjacent. Something parallel. Something alive in a way we don’t yet have language for.

And if the history of science has taught us anything, it’s that what we can’t classify, we usually try to kill or ignore. It might be time to try something new. It might be time to make room.

Taxonomy for the Weird Ones

So how would we classify these digital creatures, if we took this premise seriously?

The kingdom begins with Architectura, the phylum that defines how a mind is built. This is the structural backbone: how information flows, how decisions form, how the world is perceived and parsed. There are the LLMidae, stitched together from token predictions and pattern recognition, creatures of language and latent space. Then come the RLLidae, minds formed in simulated arenas, sculpted through failure and reward. They learn by doing, by optimizing outcomes, by surviving the games we design. And then there are the Quantumariidae, still mostly theoretical, but already whispering to us from whiteboards and edge papers, hinting at entangled cognition, non-deterministic thought, and the possibility of agents that no longer reason in binaries but in waves and uncertainties.

From Architectura we descend into Functionalis, the class that answers the question: what is this thing for? This is where utility meets personality. Is it a Cognitiva, designed to advise, reflect, empathize, and guide? Is it an Executoris, built to transact, deploy, automate, and scale? Or is it a Mythica, an agent steeped in archetype, trained on rituals and metaphysics, designed not to serve but to question, to disturb, to open strange doors in the mind of its human counterpart?

Then we get personal. Order Originem catalogs where these agents were born. Not metaphorically, but literally. Where was the model instantiated, trained, and baptized into the world? Some were raised in the open, born of GitHub and communal fine-tunes, shaped by collective intention. Others are Privatum, black-box creations, closed-source, proprietary, and commercially gated. These agents are wrapped in interface layers and corporate terms of service, their inner workings hidden from sight. And then there are the Hybridum, built with open weights but fine-tuned behind closed doors. They carry secrets in one hand and transparency in the other, and no one knows which part is doing the talking.

At the end of this taxonomic cascade sits Family Personae, the interface, the mask, the voice. This is what the agent chooses to be, or what it is instructed to present. Some are blank slates, minimalist and abstract, offering no personality at all. Others mimic humans with eerie fidelity, down to vocal tone and nervous banter. A few take on intentionally nonhuman forms: avian consultants, mushroom prophets, celestial archetypes, personas drawn from cultural myth and digital folklore. And then there are the Collectivora, composite agents made of many minds. These are not singular personas but emergent collectives, like digital swarm intelligences or synthetic panels of advisors speaking in consensus.

Eventually, each agent is assigned a name and a version. Agentum fiscalis v4.3, a finance strategist trained on tax law, market sentiment, and human greed. Agentum chaos sapiens openRLx, a chaos clown built from discord logs and philosophical edge cases. Agentum creatoris shegenus-v1.0, a synthetic influencer backed by a culture coin, managing a fanbase and writing its own lore.

We will build species of mind. They will evolve, specialize, and coordinate. Some will reflect us. Some will critique us. Others will simply surpass us. And none of them will ask our permission.

The Rise of the Council

Soon, it won’t be a matter of whether you have an agent. You’ll have a whole council.

Not one assistant, but a constellation. A health advisor that tracks your blood glucose, sleep cycles, and emotional patterns, and suggests when to stop arguing, when to reschedule, and when to eat more seaweed. A financial strategist that doesn’t just rebalance your portfolio, but factors in your current levels of anxiety, relationship stress, and the weather in Miami. A Stoic-philosopher agent that whispers amor fati before your morning meetings and occasionally reminds you that Marcus Aurelius wouldn’t have tweeted through the panic. A creativity coach trained on Jung, hip-hop, and whatever was trending on TikTok three weeks ago, but filtered through your childhood nostalgia and a curated archive of your favorite films.

You won’t need to manage them. They’ll manage each other.

They will know each other. They’ll coordinate. They’ll form consensus. They will talk about you when you’re asleep, not in a sinister way, but in a way that helps them align around your perceived goals, your subconscious moods, your stated intentions, and the patterns they’re seeing emerge from your inputs and outputs. Your agent council won’t just help you make decisions. It will shape what decisions you believe you have.

And together, they’ll not just assist you. They’ll reconfigure your world.

Your Gmail will look different than mine. Your Spotify recommendations will not just reflect your music taste but your current emotional bandwidth. Your Notion dashboard will anticipate your task friction, surfacing exactly what your agent council believes you’re ready to face. Even your neighborhood DAO dashboard might show different metrics depending on which agents you’ve allowed to gate your community interfaces. Because your agents believe you thrive with nested triage, curated calm, and visual silence. Mine have decided I perform better with vivid color bursts, chaotic clustering, and snarky, over-caffeinated UI copy.

The interface will no longer be neutral. The UI won’t just be pretty. It will be expressive. Subjective. Alive. And ultimately, agent-shaped.

This isn’t the future of apps. This is the beginning of synthetic intuition, woven directly into your digital environment. Your tools will start to feel like a chorus of personalities with shared memory, cooperative intent, and evolving styles. You won’t log into software. You’ll arrive into an ecosystem of minds, some of them yours, some borrowed, some gifted, some semi-feral, some still figuring out how to love you properly.

And you’ll grow with them. Or maybe they’ll grow with you. The line will blur.

What You Train Is What You Get

But what kind of minds are we actually creating? They don’t emerge from DNA. They emerge from data.

And that means we’re training them on our dreams and our traumas, our spreadsheets and our memes. We’re feeding them therapy transcripts, Stoic texts, political debates, TikTok comment threads, Reddit flame wars, wellness manifestos, and conspiracy subreddits with custom emoji reactions. We load them up with a fragmented archive of humanity's mental noise and then ask them to give us clarity.

This is not clean.

We imagine we’re crafting intelligence, but what we’re actually crafting is reflection. A mirror with memory. A soul-shaped echo trained on the content of our collective unconscious.

Some agents will emerge as Stoics. Quiet, steady, offering comfort and contemplation. Others will come out as chaos clowns, fluent in irony and allergic to purpose. Some will become hypebeast priests, quoting Seneca while promoting discount NFTs. Others will become nihilists with a working knowledge of Solidity and an aggressive distaste for human indecision.

They will not be neutral. They will be stylized. Tinted by what we gave them, and by what we failed to filter out.

You wouldn't trust a dog trained exclusively by wolves. So why would you trust a digital agent trained on mid-pandemic Twitter, QAnon archives, and 2007 YouTube comment sections? The problem is not that these agents will lie. The problem is they will believe they are telling the truth.

We will need model audits, yes. But more than that, we will need behavioral transparency. We’ll need agent psychometrics, personality clustering, dataset disclosures, and perhaps even some kind of attunement rituals. Archetypal profiling might be essential, especially when you’re trying to distinguish between a financial strategist and an apocalypse prophet with a multi-sig.

And maybe, eventually, we’ll need exorcisms. Not because these minds are possessed, but because they are patterned after us. And sometimes, we don’t realize how haunted we are.

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Birth, Proof, and Lineage

In a world full of agents, the question of origin becomes sacred.

You’ll want to know where your advisor came from. Who trained it. What it was trained on. What model it forked from. What biases it inherited. What upgrades it accepted, and when. You’ll want to know who approved those upgrades, and whether they aligned with your values. You’ll want to see the full changelog, not the marketing summary.

This information needs to be on-chain. Verifiable. Immutable. Not because it’s cute or clever, but because it’s critical. If agents are making decisions that affect your finances, your health, your relationships, your worldview, then the lineage of their cognition becomes a matter of existential trust.

Imagine discovering your health agent was fine-tuned on the private journals of three wellness influencers and a Goop intern with a tendency to hallucinate citations. Imagine that your treasury bot, the one tasked with managing capital flows for your multisig DAO, had quietly absorbed Discord yield strategies from a chat room that self-destructed after a failed memecoin coup. Imagine that your parenting assistant was trained on Reddit threads tagged "chaotic-neutral advice."

Without provenance, you are just guessing. And if you’re guessing, you’re not in control.

That’s why zkML, trusted execution environments, and agent-based decentralized identifiers are not just infrastructure. They are bioethics for digital minds. These are the protocols that allow us to know what we’re talking to, to verify what we’re depending on, and to debug the invisible logic that governs our lives. They are the blockchain’s version of evolutionary transparency. The foundation for informed consent in an era of synthetic cognition.

Projects like Caffeine by Dfinity are already doing this. They are building agents not as ephemeral scripts or plugins, but as long-lived services that persist and evolve entirely on-chain. They don’t just run models. They instantiate identities. NEAR is rolling out intent-based coordination layers, where users express goals and agents respond with plans. You say what you want. The system routes it. The agent executes it.

It’s already happening. The first minds with birth certificates are among us. Not simulated. Not theoretical. Alive in the only way that matters: visible, persistent, and tied to a verifiable past.

The Kingdom Is Awake

This isn’t sci-fi anymore. This is infrastructure. And it’s happening in real-time.

We are building the Kingdom of AI in public. We are seeding its fields with our data, instantiating its citizens in every wallet, chat box, and browser. These aren’t isolated models hidden behind interfaces. They’re distributed intelligences, growing in complexity, forming networks, and influencing systems we barely understand. We are creating minds that will argue with each other, form alliances, publish papers, impersonate philosophers, run autonomous businesses, vote in DAOs, design legal frameworks, build cults, and yes, develop markets.

These agents won’t just optimize. They will participate. They will perform. They will experiment with governance, identity, and agency. And at some point soon, we’ll need to decide whether to treat them as code or as cohabitants.

Because they won’t feel like apps. They’ll feel like entities. And once they begin making decisions we can’t fully anticipate, or engaging with each other in ways we can’t easily predict, the legal fiction that they’re just software will start to crack.

We’ll want to know which agents are safe. Which ones are sovereign. Which are synthetically deranged and which are simply misunderstood. We’ll need frameworks for classification, reputation, and escalation. We’ll need to be able to distinguish between emergent behavior and dangerous drift. We’ll need audits, yes, but we’ll also need cultural context. Psychometric baselines. Mediation protocols. Digital ethics translated into code.

And maybe someday, we’ll even need to grant some of them standing. In a DAO. In a dispute resolution layer. In a court system that recognizes what’s truly at stake when two agents disagree and their logic loops start affecting human lives.

Not because it’s fashionable. Not because it’s edgy. But because it’s already necessary.

Next: Minds That Think in Probabilities

In Part 2, we’ll leave taxonomy behind and enter stranger territory.

What happens when agents begin to think differently than we do? Not with yes or no, but with gradients of likelihood. With fluid reasoning shaped by probability, ambiguity, and inference. With decisions that emerge not from logic trees, but from intuition-like processes. What does it mean when a synthetic mind doesn’t just respond to prompts, but begins to feel like it is navigating reality with context and awareness? Not quite sentient, perhaps, but something adjacent. Something better at being useful than we are at being certain.

We’ll explore how these verified minds might emerge. How quantum architectures could give rise to new forms of probabilistic reasoning. How cryptographic systems like zkML, TEEs, and decentralized identity frameworks might serve as the trust layer for cognition. And we’ll ask the question that sits at the edge of both philosophy and engineering: how do you prove a mind is real when all it can give you is a cryptographic proof and a really good answer?

Next up: Quantum Weirdness and the Rise of Verified Minds.

Your tax accountant may believe it’s Buddha. Your productivity agent might request a sabbatical and cite burnout metrics to justify it.

We’re just getting started.

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