Owning property

Ownership is a set of claims held against everyone else: to use a thing, to exclude others from it, to sell it, to leave it to someone. Autonomous systems already hold keys, sign transactions and move assets, and a contract running on a public ledger can transfer value with no person in the loop at the moment it executes. The assets still belong to somebody. Every jurisdiction routes them to a natural or a legal person, and when the European Parliament examined the question in October 2020 it declined to create a legal personality for artificial intelligence, on the ground that liability has to stay with an identifiable party. Property works because there is someone who can be dispossessed, taxed, sued and inherited from. A wallet a machine controls is a wallet somebody owns.