"How long before non-human agents start to partake in the new digital economy being forged without the helping hand of an actual person?"
Never. We so poorly understand what consciousness is that's the best word we have for it, and AI is nothing but some algorithms, utterly incapable of volition and independent action. It can paint pretty pictures with pixels, but not with a brush, and someone has to tell it what to paint. It can't tie shoes, digest food, or cut hair - unless specifically made for that purpose with highly specialized hardware that doesn't do anything else, and tasked by a person to do so. People have a ~4B year head start on AI, and it is not yet capable of the complex decisions make by single celled creatures that live in our guts. Consciousness doesn't come from the brain. Single celled gut fauna don't have brains, because they're single cells, and don't have even one neuron (or they'd be a neuron instead of a single celled creature) but they have consciousness, learn, and make decisions, and even participate in human consciousness. In fact we have about as many neurons in our guts, to communicate with our gut fauna, as we do in our brains.
Neural networks will never gain consciousness because consciousness does not arise in our neurons or our brains, as conscious decisions made by single celled creatures without neurons proves. AI research is so far from reaching that goal that it hasn't yet even acknowledged that human consciousness is a multi species undertaking, we have no idea what causes it, where it comes from, or even what it actually is. Algorithms can be used to calculate numbers much better than meatsacks can, and people can use AI to disrupt finance and economic structures designed for meatsacks, but that doesn't mean AI can do that by itself.
That won't happen in my lifetime, if ever. We'd have to figure out what it is we're even trying to do first, and we have no idea at all. AI is just calculators and programming, having nothing to do with consciousness.
"Given the current economic and political climate we can be sure that these shifts in narrative are guaranteed to occur at some point."
That I absolutely agree with. Let's hope we surprise the oligarchs and decide we're done being parasitized by them, and are going to profitably make our own goods and services they can't leech off. At least some of us are going to do that, and if everyone that doesn't ends up GMO slaves we're going to be the only people that matter.
We can see numerous examples in history, and even prehistory, of paradigm shifts that completely changed human society. Decentralization of the means of production of modern goods and services is such a paradigm shift, enabling bespoke local production to eliminate parasitic losses. Banksters don't have any mechanisms to tap our individual production. They can't tax it. They can't inflate it. They can't profit from it. Their only income is parasitizing our collective production in centralized industry, and decentralization increases productivity by eliminating parasitic losses, which leaves the parasites without income.
They can't put aluminum rails and stepper motors back in the genie's lamp. They can't eliminate the technology, even if they bomb us back into the Stone Age. The laws of physics determine what technology is possible, and clever monkeys tinker. We'll just get here again, as we have. Physics mandates that decentralization outcompetes centralization, and parasitic oligarchs will be eliminated eventually.
Once we get into space, we will be absolutely free to tap the unlimited resources in the infinite universe. Good times are coming. We just have a rough patch to get through first.
Thanks!