Current Research

Three lines of work, all downstream of one observation: when generation is cheap, representational capacity becomes the scarce resource.

Agent-first design.

The primary reader of the web is changing. For thirty years we designed surfaces for humans — screens, pixels, visual hierarchy, microinteractions that feel good. In an agent-mediated internet, most of the reading is done by machines acting on behalf of humans. Not humans themselves.

The instinct is to call this "responsive design 2.0" or "accessibility extended to bots." Strip the frame and the operational content is different. It is a distinct practice with its own primitives: capability manifests, signed attestations, structured argument, verifiable identity, pricing for machine access. These do not map onto anything in the existing design canon. The vocabulary does not exist yet. I am writing it.

Memory markets.

The Agent Memory Markets paper was an empirical starting point: learned behavior can be extracted, verified, and traded as an economic asset with 95–110% transfer efficiency. The referee protocol works. The fraud detection works. What the paper did not cover — and what I am now building toward — is the reputation graph layer.

How do you price an agent's earned trust? Transfer it across stacks? Revoke it when warranted? The lemons market solution verifies individual artifacts. It does not tell you whether the seller has been reliable across fifty transactions or five hundred. That requires reputation — legible, portable, adversarially robust. The mechanism for this does not exist yet either.

Verifiable creative provenance.

In a world saturated with generated artifacts, most proposals for "solving provenance" amount to watermarks or metadata that nobody checks. Strip those to their operational content and they are either trivially bypassable or require trust in the same centralized infrastructure they claim to replace. The correspondence between the watermark and the origin is either vacuous or not really about provenance at all.

The alternative: signed attestations from verifiable parties, composable across graphs, revocable, queryable by agents. Not a stamp of authenticity. A chain of accountable claims. This is where privacy-tech muscle meets mainstream creative practice. The craft discipline stays recognisable. The substrate changes entirely.

Reachable at ned.karlovich@pm.me for research conversations, advisory work, and conference talks on these directions.