Blame the Bot
“Blame the Bot” – a cartoon that illustrates how humans are increasingly intertwining their lives with bots for good and bad.
Bill Gates recently remarked that “whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing.” He was referring to AI agents that will think, act and manage our lives, removing tasks that are more administrative than productive, like waiting on customer service calls, booking a restaurant for a date night or organizing hotels for a family vacation.
This concept has kicked around for a long-time, beginning with robot housekeepers in cartoons like Rosie in The Jetsons and most recently with the concept of a “digital twin” that would revolutionize manufacturing.
However, it seems some of this might finally be coming to life with the merger of AI and blockchain. In a world where autonomous agents are managing our lives, blockchain provides the ability for these AI agents to pay for items (think blockchain wallets) and self-organize (think Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), to build an economy parallel and larger to the human economy.
Inevitably, this new reality will have to manage the concept of who has agency for actions.
For example, Cassandra Burke Robertson, a Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University remarked on the subject of semi-autonomous vehicle crashes that ‘the nature of modern semi-autonomous systems requires the human and machine to engage in a collaborative driving endeavor.
The human driver should not bear full liability for the harm arising from this shared responsibility.”
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