Beyond Machina Economicus: On Cognitive Organization and Efficiency Arguments

Within AI literature, an enthymeme -- a hidden premise rarely explicitly stated but materially significant -- dwells, used to support the case for rational agents as an efficient form of organizing artificial cognition. We recognize this enthymeme, arguing that the agentic form is efficient for acting on given preferences, while artificial agents are deployed to respond to complex and dispersed demand that is still in formation when encountered. We argue that gathering and resolving such demand is not a preprocessing step but a form of cognitive work in its own right, and that an integrating centre is worth building only where interdependence among demands is dense, frequent, and costly to reverse.