Our AI Agents Should Pay the People Who Help Them

You know what I find super exciting about all this agentic stuff? Authors being able to publish a request for payment right on their content, along with an interface for submitting micropayments.I've wanted this for a long time. I wrote about it in 2015 in Social Micropayments, and then again in 2016, when I described a Digital Assistant that watches what you enjoy and pays the creators out of a monthly budget. I'd say my thinking on it is about the same as it was back then. What's new is that the agents—the real ones, the kind I run all day in my own setup—are actually here, and they're getting good.Flattr had the right idea There was a system a long time ago called Flattr. It was started in 2010 by Peter Sunde (one of The Pirate Bay founders) and Linus Olsson, and it worked by people setting up a Flattr account beforehand, which is problem number one. If the site you navigated to also had Flattr, you could hit a Flattr button, and it would take a percentage of whatever you had in…