The original speculation on this forum discussing autonomous agents was one of my biggest inspirations for building my
Oracle,
Early Temple.
How would an agent be able to engage in trade with a human being, without the possibility of cheating? Suppose, for instance, the agent wants to purchase time in a cloud server to run a copy of itself. Or the agent offers to pay a programmer for an upgrade. How does the agent prevent getting ripped off, or how does a human prevent being cheated by a malware agent?
They need a trusted third party. An Oracle, which can judge if the digital good was sold, or the work was completed, and release the funds.
The agent could create a contract using Early Temple's basic protocol, and commit funds using an
m-of-n address. The agent would then send a partially signed payment transaction to the human, who would also be able to check the Early Temple contract page and verify the payment condition. Once that condition is met, the human goes back to the Early Temple contract page and they get their payment transaction signed.
So this is up and running already, and you guys just need to write the agent!
(The agent doesn't even need to have enough intelligence to figure out that it needs a plug-in. There could be a more general method where programmers are permitted to submit patches, and the network tests out these submitted patches on a small number of nodes, and it finds those nodes work better and earn more money, then the programmer receives their payment.)
