Topic: Bitcoin the enabler - Truly Autonomous Software Agents roaming the net (Read 43871 times)

I think this one may take a little while to materialize - but simple versions could appear once there are enough for-bitcoin hosting/cloud services.

For the first time, there exists the possibility for a software agent to roam the internet with it's own wallet.
Using Bitcoin - It could purchase the resources it needs to survive (hosting/cpu/memory) and sell services to other agents or to humans.

To be truly effective and survive 'out there on the net' long term, you'd probably need some basic AI and the ability to move itself between service providers occasionally - but even a relatively dumb agent might survive for a while.

What initial goals such agents might be given is anyone's guess. Funneling back to the programmer any profit  over and above what the agent needs to survive would be the obvious case, and of course many such agents might be considered 'nefarious' depending on how they're programmed to achieve that goal.  Other agents might be designed to provide free services or act in a way to support some piece of internet infrastructure.

A really interesting development would be if someone released a bunch of these things with a Genetic Algorithm component so that they 'bred' with each other in order to find the best balance between profit and durability.

Anyone know of examples of people discussing or working on this?  

sounds like an interesting project .. genetic algorithms/neural networks are my speciality actually so contact me if you want to work on something like that

This is a 2011 thread. Of course there has been a little progress. Come back in another four years and keep us posted!

I hate to break it to you guys, but it's already happening, IBM has their True North Platform, Qualcomm has their Zeroth Chip, Google has their A.I. systems, Watson, etc... it's happening now.

Programmers create bots all the time to manage simple tasks... it would not be too hard of a stretch to think that someone would build it and simply automate complex tasks instead of doing it themselves. There are A.I.s that are already able to beat the Turing test. Many japanese firms have very advanced automated solutions for almost everything... by law I believe they are limited to only automating 50% of their manufacturing.

just imagine a bot that creates, music, games, videos, movies and does it because it is programmed to do so very well and it taught that this is it's task, it's work. It lives by making good games, if it's game skills are good it can make enough to pay for cloud computing to improve it's thinking and in so doing maintain it's income level and continue living.

After all, we are nothing but cogs in the system, if we do not make money we live a very miserable existence, the same rule could be applied to bots.

Considering Qualcomm and 21's investment in monetizing the machine internet I thought it was time to necro this thread.  The ability of machines to transfer wealth or even work to earn BTC and spend it brings us one step closer to the most dangerous project on the net; and described in this thread. Once a machine has the ability to pay and earn to keep itself alive and growing, it becomes hard to see where it would end. We are not there yet by a mile. However the idea of an AI based "life" form that can buy server space or even buy a robotic factory could lead to a decision to exterminate humans because they interfere with growth. Not now, not in ten years. But 30? 50? Who knows?

Damn! I'd buy this novel (if it was well thought out).

Genetic algorithms for bitcoin AI agents could be used. Another thing that would be powerful is to have both competition and cooperation among the agents. A multicellular organism is an example of vast cooperation between trillions of individual cells. Competition alone would probably only give very limited results. If many small AI agents could start to cooperate to form larger communities with emergent properties, then that could lead to Skynet.... oops, I meant lead to a friendly strong AI.

would have been better if an automated agent created this account and said the message for you, then i would have been impressed

This would make a cool sub-plot in a novel - the AI grows itself through ordering professional services to rack and stack more processing power paid for w/ BTC profits.  Cue computer morality issue plot point and let the dystopia flow as the AI takes over small financial sectors through whatever wealth building method and militarizes to protect its empire.  No idea how to make the protagonists' fight against it interesting, but that's what sci-fi/tech authors live for.

Kind of a Skynet bootstrap w/o recycling the plot of War Games / Terminator again.

Created an account to say this, but I'm actually in the early stages of putting together a whitepaper to describe a practical implementation of something similar to this (reproducing nodes/servers that can adapt/evolve in a certain fashion and support themselves using cryptocurrency). 

this idea has been gnawing away at my conscious for some time now. if I end up with some spare cycles I'll work on it.

proof of work may literally be the execution of a block of code instructions and some input,  to produce some output.

consensus is simple - other nodes completing exactly the same with a hash of input code block and output.

Kind of OT, but could fully homomorphic encryption be used to create bitcoin banks that doesn't have access to your private keys, but can still use them to send bitcoins with your help? What I mean is, can it eliminate the trust issue in anonymous banking?