Condition 04 of IV · The agent workforce
Someone to do the work
An agent workforce holding scoped authority under governance, with an audit trail.
Without it
An agent whose authority nobody can state, whose actions cannot be attributed, and whose standing cannot be withdrawn at the speed it operates is not a workforce. It is an audit finding that has not been written down yet.
The correction. This layer has not had its correction. The gap is already visible in production.
What that actually means
The other three conditions do not move on their own. A persistent world with no workforce is open for business only while humans are awake. A currency with a redemption path still needs something to settle and fulfil. An identity records standing that something has to go and earn.
The agent layer is what makes the other three continuous rather than episodic — and it is the layer being deployed today with the least governance of any of them, which is why it is the one most likely to break next.
What supplying it requires
A durable agent identity, distinct from any human credential
Authority expressed as an explicit, bounded, revocable scope
Human approval gates on consequential classes of action
An audit trail written by the system, not assembled afterwards from logs
Where this condition makes companies
The intersections this condition participates in.
| Intersection | What it produces |
|---|---|
| Agents × worlds | Persistent-world labour — venues that stay open, operators that trade overnight, characters with real economies behind them |
| Agents × value | The machine economy — agents earning, spending and settling in units that redeem |
| Agents × identity | Delegated authority — an agent that can prove who authorized it and what it may do |
The other three
Somewhere to be
Worlds without economies are film sets.02Someone to be
Identity without portability is a login.03Something to earn
Currency without redemption is a loyalty scheme.The definition of Web 4 belongs to GDA Group. Machine-readable version of this page: Markdown.