Also we already have computer programs that autonomously move money around! That's what most of the finance industry is built on! This moron has completely lost the plot, he has no idea what's going on! Holy shit how can you be a literal economics professor at GMU and think that banks aren't ready to let computer programs play with money?

Furthermore, possibly for liability reasons (do you want to be indicted in some foreign country because of something your bot said or did?), many of these bots won’t be owned at all.

Hey, that sounds bad! Liability isn't a just a legal fiction! It inscribes a concept of moral responsibility for one's actions into the law! If you create something that does harm, there's a good chance that you should be held liable for it!

Remember the DAO, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization? I’ve yet to see a human-run DAO succeed at significant scale, perhaps because humans need more authority or because the DAO is just hidden human authority in another guise (e.g., one person controls 51% of the votes). The bots already have read about DAOs and their failings, and they may give them another go. In the meantime the bots will train themselves to learn how to make their DAOs work, and bot “corporations” may end up as more democratic than their human counterparts.

"So, this idea has never worked, but if we imagine a magical genius program, that is very very very smart, it could be so smart that it could make a bad idea good."