Blockchain Revolution

Dueling Bots
What about conflicts of interest? If the weatherNode started expanding its capability
and entered the crop insurance marketplace, wouldn’t it have cognitive dissonance?
Farmer weatherNodes want to emphasize the impact of droughts, and insurer
weatherNodes claim droughts are minimal. The owners and designers of agents need
transparency of operations. If both are filtering sensor data through a biased screen,
then their respective reputations will drop.
Vitalik Buterin points out that autonomous agents are challenging to create,
because to survive and succeed they need to be able to navigate in a complicated,
rapidly changing, or even hostile environment. “If a Web hosting provider wants to be
unscrupulous, they might specifically locate all instances of the service, and then
replace them with nodes that cheat in some fashion; an autonomous agent must be
able to detect such cheating and remove or at least neutralize cheating nodes from the
system.”
14
Note that autonomous agents also separate personhood from asset ownership and
control. Before blockchain technology, all assets—land, intellectual property, money
—required a person or legal organization of people to own it. According to Andreas
Antonopoulos, cryptocurrencies completely ignore personhood. “A wallet could be
controlled by a piece of software that has no ownership and so you have the
possibility of completely autonomous software agents that control their own
money.”
15
An autonomous agent could pay for its own Web hosting and use evolutionary
algorithms to spread copies of itself by making small changes and then allowing those
copies to survive. Each copy could contain new content that it discovers or even
crowdsources somewhere on the Internet. As some of these copies become very
successful, the agent could sell ads back to users, ad revenue could go into a bank
account or posted on a secure place on the blockchain, and the agent could use this
growing revenue to crowdsource more ad content and proliferate itself. The agent
would repeat the cycle so that appealing content propagates and hosts itself
successfully, and unsuccessful content basically dies because it runs out of money to
host itself.

---