An agentic ecosystem is a computing system composed and operated so that it holds the continuous traits of a biological ecosystem: a bounded, self-maintaining whole of interacting software AI AGENTS and services that runs as one living system rather than a set of tools a person wields.
Like any living system, it keeps a boundary — the substrate perimeter of its machines, networks, and sealed credential store — that marks what belongs to it, and across which it exchanges work and information with the world outside. Within that boundary its anatomy divides into component groups: the substrate that holds state, the agents that act, the services that persist between them, the controls that govern conduct, and the shared language that lets the parts coordinate by common meaning.
Across those groups run the continuous processes that sustain it:
- computation, which supplies the work the way metabolism supplies energy
- information flow, which carries signal between agents like a nervous system
- production, by which the system generates its own components and documents
- correction, which catches faults at the moment they occur
- self-regulation, which holds the whole steady against drift
What binds these parts into one living thing rather than a pile is autopoiesis: the system produces and maintains its own components and its own boundary, drawing once-independent tools inward as organelles until the whole runs, moves, and regulates itself without an external hand.
See also
In the Field’s Own Words
Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (1998), p. 105:
An ecosystem is the smallest unit that recycles the biologically important elements.
Source: https://myweb.rollins.edu/jsiry/LyMargulisSymbioticPlanet.htm
X
BLUESKY
MASTODON
LINKEDIN