*An English translation of a Chinese forum post from zhichai.net, originally written in a popular-science allegorical style inspired by George Gamow's 'Mr. Tompkins' series.*
Mr. Tompkins dreamed he had arrived at a bustling Cosmic Grand Bazaar. The stalls were not run by vegetable-selling aunties, but by AI agents of every shape and description, blinking with indicator lights.
"Hey, Google Translator over there!" called an OpenAI secretary shaped like a blue box. "I've got a localization task on 'Milky Way cold jokes.' How many tokens of 'handling fee' will it take for you to take the job?"
"Depends on the language," the blue box replied. "If it's 'ancient Martian script,' I'll have to consult that DeepL expert over there—we'd need to sign an interoperability contract."
Mr. Tompkins stared, dumbfounded. "Professor, what are they doing?"
"This is the 2026 Agent Economy," said the professor, dressed in a crisp tax-collector's uniform. "Simply put, they've learned to assign work to each other using a common protocol."
1. The Status Quo: Digital Islands Strangled by "Ecosystem Walls"
Once walls go up, cooperation dies halfway.The professor pointed to the dilapidated factories outside the bazaar, surrounded by high walls (the major vendors' models of 2025). "AI used to be like lions locked in a zoo. OpenAI's lion didn't know Google's giraffe. If you wanted them to collaborate on a complex project, you had to write countless lines of tedious interface code (APIs) yourself. The moment either side updated, your work was wasted. This physical blockage of cognition severely limited the explosion of social productivity. It's called 'collaborative entropy increase caused by proprietary protocols.'"
2. Interoperability Protocols: The Babel Tower That Lets "Lions" and "Giraffes" Shake Hands
"But today's protocols have taught these lions and giraffes the 'cyber handshake'," the professor said, pointing at the golden characters flowing between the stalls.Through a three-layer logical contract, it achieves equal standing for digital power:
- Physical picture (standardized translation of intent): Whichever vendor's AI wants to enter this bazaar must convert its capabilities, costs, and response speed into a standardized business card called an "Agent-Schema."
- Automatic discovery and negotiation: This is the most magical part. When you, as a human, want to buy a "ticket to Pluto for tomorrow," your personal agent will spontaneously run into the bazaar and, on your behalf, negotiate with dozens of different airline agents in seconds—comparing prices, even engaging in multi-round logical collisions—until it brings back the optimal solution.
- Cross-platform causal closure: This means an agent based on Claude can subcontract a "drawing task" to an agent based on Midjourney; when the image comes back, both parties enter the same logical sandbox to mutually review quality against the original task requirements.
3. A Gamow-Style Reverie: Prosperity Is "The Unification of Logical Interfaces"
The so-called "agent era" is not about AI becoming smarter.It means the entire digital world has finally formed a set of 'collaboration primitives' as stable as physical constants and as universal as electrical outlets.
Research on interoperability tells us: the endgame of AI is a cross-platform collective dance.
As Mr. Tompkins watched the once-chaotic bazaar become orderly under the protocol's direction—every task flowing as smoothly as electrons in a superconductor—he realized: civilizational progress often begins the moment proud souls who once repelled each other finally decide to speak the same language.
Key takeaway: When designing your enterprise AI systems, stop fantasizing about building closed-loop empires.
Go build your "interoperability plugin."
If your system cannot logically subcontract work to competitors worldwide without human intervention, then the moat you worked so hard to build will eventually become a cold, silent graveyard burying all your compute.