The Long Now Foundation held a Salon on the future of Commerce, 25 years from now.

Q: What is one question you have about commerce in 25 years that you would love to know more about now?

My A: How much commerce will be done by humans? And to what extent will agent-based commerce take off, driven by lower transaction costs on various crypto rails and eventually AI-based transactions?

And now, the MobileCoin MOBot goes open source. It is an e-commerce chat-bot using the privacy-protecting MOB crypto payment within Signal to “automatically manage lightweight transactions directly within a chat.”

2 responses to “The Long Future of Commerce”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    and a reply to my question by David Orban on Facebook:

    "More than today, possibly orders of magnitude more. However, as a proportion of the total amount of commerce, human-initiated transactions will become a vanishingly small part. There will be a larger part that is human-driven, even if executed autonomously by machines, serving human needs that are easily identifiable. The largest part will be constituted by machine-to-machine transactions that are going to be ever increasingly removed from direct human needs, to the point of it becoming difficult to reconnect these transactions with any human need. In this sense they will be inexplicable.

    There could be a fourth group, hopefully very small: networks of autonomous transactions counter to human interests."

    Reply
  2. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    and that inexplicability is very interesting. It reminds me of my blog post discussion, many moons ago: "if we want to understand our individual role in the system and the architecture of mind [in a supra-human intelligence], will we be baffled, and notice shimmering patterns of beauty at best?"

    Reply

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