Blockchain Revolution

AUTONOMOUS AGENTS
Imagine a piece of software that could roam the Internet with its own wallet and its
own capacity to learn and adapt, in pursuit of its goals determined by a creator,
purchasing the resources it requires to survive like computer power, all while selling
services to other entities.
The term autonomous agent has many definitions.
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For our discussion, it is a
device or software system that on behalf of some creator takes information from its
environment and is capable of making independent choices. We could describe some
autonomous agents as “intelligent” although they lack general intelligence. However,
they are not “just computer programs” because they can modify how they achieve
their objectives. They can sense and respond to their environment over time.
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The computer virus is the most cited example of an autonomous agent; the virus
survives by replicating itself from machine to machine without deliberate human
action. Unleashing a virus on the blockchain could be more difficult and certainly
costly because it would likely have to pay the other party to interact with it, and the

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network would quickly identify its public key, crash its reputation score, or not
validate its transactions.
For positive blockchain examples, consider the following. A cloud computing
service rents processing power from various sources, growing to Amazon’s size by
making rental deals with other computers that have excess capacity.
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A driverless car
owned by a community, company, individual, or perhaps itself moves around the city
picking up and dropping off passengers and charging them appropriate fees. We’re
interested in agents that can do transactions, acquire resources, make payments, or
otherwise produce value on behalf of their creator.
Vitalik Buterin, who created the Ethereum blockchain, has theorized about these
agents and developed a taxonomy to describe their evolution. At one end are single-
function agents like viruses that go about working to achieve their limited goals. Next
up are more intelligent and versatile agents, say, a service that would rent servers from
a specific set of providers like Amazon. A more sophisticated agent might be able to
figure out how to rent a server from any provider and then use any search engine to
locate new Web sites. An even more capable agent could upgrade its own software
and adapt to new models of server rental such as offering to pay end users for rental of
their unused computers or disks. The penultimate step consists of being able to
discover and enter new industries, leading into the next evolution of the species—full
artificial intelligence.
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