Topic: Bitcoin the enabler - Truly Autonomous Software Agents roaming the net - page 10. (Read 43851 times)

Yeah.. when autonomous software agents start ordering physical components to put in racks and then designing their own data centers it could start to freak people out!
(but, they'll probably have worked out by then how to buy fake human IDs  - so it mightn't be obvious it's happening for a while)

Social engineering seemed like a reasonable way to start propagating, I have some code started at my latest GitHub project.

-MarkM- (Oh the project? Galactic Milieu of course.)

i can see the skynet comming...

You're right that there would ultimately be a strong incentive for memory/cpu service providers to reverse-engineer and monitor memory for keys, but I suspect there are ways around this.
It may be that trusting any one provider with too much is a serious hazard for agents.  
(actually no agent would ever want to be running entirely on one system anyway as a simple shutdown might kill it)
Some sort of split-key system might work there, or it might require some of the new bitcoin scripting features.

Agents might need to share information on 'cause of death' and investigate(well.. at least monitor/record) each other's 'murders' and any pillaging by hosts - thus forming a sort of reputation system for service providers.

...or a software agent could provide hosting services and scrape private keys from humans.

...and someone, posing himself as hosting provider, can collect them and scrape for their private keys :)
(or modify public keys)

This autonomous bot could start day trading and make big bucks.

OMG! THIS IS AWESOME!

Here is a case (it's kind of bad will, but works as a proof of concept). Say that you build a captcha-cracker, that requiers CPU. People pay for the Captchas to be cracked and you provide some kind of API for people to offer their CPU and hosting of the software, if they do so, they get bitcoins. Putting this up online, with some marketing, the software should survive on it's own as long as there are captchas that needs to be cracked.

An additional step would be to through the API, making it possible to serve ads for the software, selling improved algorithms to it, etc. This could increase the softwares power.

Building upon this, eventually, the human race well be motivated to server machines as it will benefit us financially.

Initial goal should be to make as much money (bitcoins) as possible.  Very interesting idea though.

Brace for epic, with some community support that can be something epic

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?