On Autonomous Software

This article is a comment on Lane Rettig’s essay Autonocrats and Anthropocrats, connecting its central themes to two fundamental concepts in social sciences — the rule of law and social structure. It explains how the most informative analogue to a decentralized network of nodes running autonomous software is society itself. Digital record-keeping and distributed computer networks are comparable to other institutions with effects beyond the control of their creators, administrators, and users. As such, they represent an important area of research not only for computer scientists and software engineers but also for social and political theorists whose expertise could be usefully applied to the design and governance of these emerging systems.

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