@jack - Worth a look — direct historical precedent for the mini-AGI thesis: Project Cybersyn, Chile 1971-73.
Salvador Allende hired British cyberneticist Stafford Beer to build a real-time nervous system for the nationalized economy. Telex network from hundreds of factories feeding a central operations room. A statistical filter (Cyberstride) flagging anomalies before they became crises. An economic simulator (CHECO) for forward modeling. The operations room looked like a Star Trek set, designed so non-technical decision-makers could read the state of the economy at a glance.
It was the first serious attempt to do what Block is now attempting: replace bureaucratic coordination with a continuously updated model fed by operational data. During the October 1972 truckers' strike — a nationwide attempt to paralyze the economy — the government used the network to coordinate the few hundred trucks still loyal and kept critical supply lines moving. Pinochet's coup in September '73 ended it; the operations room was dismantled.
Beer had telexes and a mainframe. You have the entire transaction graph and frontier models. But he had something worth borrowing: an explicit theoretical framework — the Viable System Model — that named which functions the system had to perform and where they sat recursively. Your capabilities / world model / intelligence layer / interfaces stack maps onto VSM almost one-to-one.
Worth citing the lineage. Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries (MIT Press, 2011) is the definitive history.
