Web 3.0 has a future after all

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

I fully expect the ideas behind Web 3.0 to make a major comeback — as the legal and institutional framework for AI bots. It’s worth thinking through how this might work.

Say you run a charity and want to create and distribute an AI bot that will teach mathematics to underprivileged schoolchildren. That’s great, but the bot will encounter some obstacles. In some jurisdictions, it may need to pay licensing and registration fees. It may need to purchase add-ons for recent innovations in teaching. If it operates abroad, it may wish to upgrade its ability to translate. For a variety of reasons, it might need money.

All those transactions would be easy enough if AIs were allowed to have bank accounts. But that’s unlikely anytime soon. How many banks are ready to handle this? And imagine the public outcry if there were a bank failure and the government had to bail out some bot accounts. So bots are likely to remain “unbanked” — which will push them to use crypto as their core medium of exchange.

Critics often point out that dollars are more efficient than crypto as a form of exchange. But if AI bots can’t use dollars, then they will have to use crypto. Yes, some owners might give bots access to their checking accounts, while others might want to OK every bot expenditure through the dollar-based banking system. But most people, I suspect, would rather let the bots operate on their own, without all those risks and hassles — and again, that brings us back to crypto.

There are well-known arguments for why “agentic” bots are often more efficient than “tool” bots, and they are going to need money that is consistent with a reasonable degree of bot autonomy. 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. That will be another force pushing the bots to operate in the crypto nexus.

There is much more at the link, including a discussion of NFTs as property rights in this regime.  You can expect law, adjudication services, and smart contracts as well, all as substitutes for a “proper” legal system.