Autonomous agents

[Mike Hearn]

Inspired by the writings of Greg Maxwell, I put together a wiki page on agents, autonomous programs that hold their own currency and are thus truly peers of their creators, rather than tools.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents

I have taken many of Gregs ideas from his StorJ post and added some of my own, around the use of trusted computing and the TPM chip to help agents avoid being hacked or scammed.

Let me know what you think.

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[Steve]

Sprinkle in a little AI and genetic algorithms and you have Skynet

[lathomas64]

is this an academic/philosophical exercise or is there some profit to be gained from this that I am not understanding? Still very cool if it is the former, I just want to be sure I'm not missing something here.

[jimbobway]

is this an academic/philosophical exercise or is there some profit to be gained from this that I am not understanding? Still very cool if it is the former, I just want to be sure I'm not missing something here.

Someone could program an agent that would try to make money, and profits could be split to the "father" of the agent.

[Mike Hearn]

Exactly.

Currently it's kind of academic. I think such things will eventually happen but it's probably years away, even considering Bitcoins current velocity. It would be a fun project but the effort involved would probably outstrip the profit opportunities.

Once the foundations are laid and there are frameworks to make authoring agents easy, I imagine it'd become more profitable to make them. And if an agent successfully solves the problem of recruiting humans, you can profit by selling improvements to the agents.

[lathomas64]

can imagine the upset next of kin finding out someone left their possessions to their autonomous agent.

[foggyb]

"Autonomous" (in the true sense of the word) agent is a misnomer.

To claim true autonomy is to declare a creation of consciousness. This will never be brought to reality by human minds alone.

How about this: the creation of an 'autonomous' agent, which would send "donations" to a Presidential candidate, or the CEO of a large corporation.

Or, one can commit a crime, such as robbery, and have two 'autonomous' agents as witnesses for an alibi, or as witnesses that someone else committed the crime.

Largely, many efforts to create autonomy stem from self-centered goals. So, even if we could create consciousness, the agents we would create will undoubtedly be destructive and disruptive in general to human society.

The world today is already overburdened with crime, fraud, oppression and injustice. Now give to every criminal, dictator and thief the ability to spawn an unlimited number of agents to do their bidding.

 

[cunicula]

A nice use for this would be an automated bitcoin exchange system which pegs a cryptocurrency to the US dollar. The new cryptocurrency could be exchanged for US$1 worth of bitcoin via automated exchanges controlled in a blockchain. A bitcoin reserve would be controlled by the automated system. The bitcoin reserve would be steadily augmented by charging a tax on each exchange (say 0.2%).

The most difficult thing is feeding the system accurate US$ exchange rates.

My current idea is to ask miners to submit exchange rates in each block and use the median of the rate submitted in the last 10 blocks as the exchange rate. Mining would be by proof-of-stake in the new currency to provide an incentive for accurate submissions. Stakeholders could earn some exchange fees too.

 There would need to be some additional checks to prevent exploits. For example, if the submitted exchange rates were highly variable or if demand for exchange shot up relative to what you saw in previous blocks it might make sense to adjust the tax way upwards temporarily.  i.e. a spike in demand and variable exchange rates are signs of exploits

[ribuck]

Some lawyers have been taking this quite seriously for a number of years. In a 2005 conference on the "Law of Transhuman Persons" they considered the legal ramifications of an autonomous software agent that made money by answering questions on the (now-closed) Google Answers paid research/Q&A service. The software agent was then able to do things like paying for improved hosting in jurisdictions whose laws suited its purposes better.

Obviously, Bitcoin makes the whole thing more practical.

http://web-owls.com/2007/05/01/the-transhuman-google-answers-researcher/

[stochastic]

Inspired by the writings of Greg Maxwell, I put together a wiki page on agents, autonomous programs that hold their own currency and are thus truly peers of their creators, rather than tools.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents

I have taken many of Gregs ideas from his StorJ post and added some of my own, around the use of trusted computing and the TPM chip to help agents avoid being hacked or scammed.

Let me know what you think.

This is actually what got me interested in Bitcoin in the first place.

[ribuck]

is this an academic/philosophical exercise or is there some profit to be gained from this...

I'm sure people will find lots of ways to profit from autonomous agents.

One trivial example: if you operate a business that rents server space, you will increase your profits by making your service agent-friendly.

[finway]

Watching.

[chsados]

this is freakin awesome!  i forwarded it to www.anonyupload.com

[Andrew Vorobyov]

Come on people.... Try writing successful trading bot for Forex market first