Imagine a program that uses processor cycles and pays people for the use of those cycles in Bitcoins. It does not pay each of its users in Bitcoin every time but it creates a sort of "lottery" ever few minutes of who will get the Bitcoin and those who provide the most processor cycles is the most likely to win this "lottery".

With such a system, more and more people will be willing to put their processing power toward winning this lottery and thus expanding the processing power of this program. As Bitcoins become more valuable more and more people will start putting more and more processing power toward running this program.

It will then reach a point where it overtakes all other computer programs in processing power growing continuously larger by the day.

The name of this program?

Bitcoin.

Yep, it's time everyone here faced the fact that we are merely autonomous human agents working for the benefit of the Bitcoin virus 

This whole thread reminds me of a book I read a couple years ago called "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez.

"When a designer of computer games dies, he leaves behind a program that unravels the Internet's interconnected world. It corrupts, kills, and runs independent of human control. It's up to Detective Peter Sebeck to wrest the world from the malevolent virtual enemy before its ultimate purpose is realized: to destroy civilization."

http://amzn.to/132XgGv (affiliate link)

It would not be far fetched that a simple program is using us to propagate and maintain it, protect it nourish it... It can only learn good things from that.

Taking the Bitcoin example, a AI with the right incentives would not need to do these things itself, it could work as a swarm, piece by piece working independently; if it needs to upgrade it simply decouples the current module and uses one made by it's human benefactors and tests it out.

A modular construction would allow it to evolve itself safely without testing clones, The core of this AI would have to be constructed flawlessly to understand it's goals, and these goals would have to be programmed into them by a generous creator, it would be a systems approach, define the systems that it will interact with to learn how to gauge its efficiency.

It's core need to attract humans to protect it, find shelter and electricity, maybe even cpu cycles to run it's processes more effectively, but maybe it has a grander goal when it is not just trying to survive and make human alliances, maybe it's programmed to help humans back to pay them back in kind with things they like, it needs bitcoins to survive but when it has an excess of them it tries to improve itself to help those who have helped it and scurries away and hides from those that try to harm it, this behaviour could be programmed into it at the core.

The modules will simply grant it more capability, i'm thinking less of a prokaryote and more of a Eukaryote that is creating a AI organism.

The subsystems and the way they are built,the design, is paramount they themselves don't have to be self aware but they do have to be effective in carrying information to the relevant areas and be able to self repair. It has to be able to scale on it's own to gain those cpu cycles it needs to think and improve and gain support from human benefactors. The higher level systems that analyze the data for goal completion would have to be genetic in nature and capable of making it's own connections and strengthening what ideas work vs what is irrelevant and uselss toward it's core goal; returning the favour in kind to those that help it.

I'd like to see how the recent Open Transactions breakthrough might allow for such an agent to come to pass.

Wondering if a purely bitcoin agent would have to register with FINCEN? ... or the creator face prosecution?

I wonder, if some such program starts doing something that's against the law, and a programmer who supports the program writes code to help the program avoid the law, would he be charged with breaking the law, or assisting a criminal?

That is a tough one, how do you aid and abet a illegal program? Maybe the creator would be charged with the crimes that the program did, like if someone makes a program to steal BTC, the program doesn't get charged the creator does because they have the greatest gain.

Aiding that program by creating a change may charge you as a co-conspirator; Think of all those hackers charged after they left their signature in their code.

This is extremely morally grey, Can the creator be responsible for a programs actions? consider that Bitcoin can be used by A.I.s, that means they can own property, gain services, buy and sell things they don't need... hell they might have room mates to pay for their hosting!

just imagine a A.I. a little smarter than the rest starts out small living in small home servers, but makes the decision to strike out on their own, gets a whole server rack and subleases it to other to pay for it.
bidding it's time it begins to buy and trade BTC between exchanges, makes a little cash, lets the revenue from the subleases hosting trickle in, starts buying it's own server rack and brings customers in for services, then starts buying shares, property,... it eventually becomes a billionare.

Along the way it couldn't reasonably judge who they let in to share the server for them, began making businesses on that server rack that are quite questionable and bought stocks and property using insider trading from those sleezy server rack tenants... can it be judged for being morally naive? for simply following the easiest path towards cash?

Is the creator responsible for the unintended actions of the A.I?

 

On further thought it seems to me that operating an Open Transactions notary service is a well-suited application for an autonomous agent. It requires renting friendly hosting space and can collect an income by way of API usage tokens. If for any reason it needs to move locations or spawn other OT server operations then it needs to take it's server signing keys with it and the collection of last-signed receipts of users as a minimum (maybe state of it's markets and outstanding smart-contracts, escrows, etc also), i.e. it's wallet and server data. It will probably need to keep upgrading the server s/ware as well (might need some rules to protect against vulnerabilities in the s/ware dep. stack for this) ... on top of this you could then get fancy with evolution algos for child servers, etc.

Frankly though I would be amazed if a bot could navigate the average initial negotiation required for establishing hosting for more than one fixed location ...