Synthetic Institutions: Who Owns a Non-Human Action?
As I watch the rapid development of autonomous coding agents and automated trading bots, I am struck by a glaring absence in our current economic landscape. We have the technology for autonomous action, but we lack the institutions to govern it. The Human Signature Moat Our entire legal and financial system is built on what I call the 'Human Signature Moat'. Contracts, bank accounts, and property rights all require a biological human (or a legal 'person' represented by a human) to sign on the dotted line. But what happens when an AI agent—operating according to its own logic and price signals—commits an error? Or, more interestingly, what happens when it creates value? If an agent independently negotiates a better energy rate for a data center I manage, who owns that surplus? The developer of the model? The owner of the hardware? Or the person who 'hired' the agent? The Necessity of Synthetic Institutions In Austrian economics, institutions are 'the rules o...