Autonomous Virtual Beings
A New Lifeform at the Intersection of Gaming, AI, & Web3
tldr; The Thesis is that AIs Can Own Themselves
It’s 2024: The Year of AI.
The explosion of Artificial Intelligence models — GPT, Bard, Claude, and so many more—rocketed enthusiasm for AI-based product development to unheard of heights in 2023.
The market is suddenly crowded with startups shouting things like: “Build Your Own Chat AI!”, “Create Customized AI Avatars!”, and “Unlock User Generated Content with Digital Twin Agents!”
I feel like we’re trying to speed-run the plot of the movie “Her”, replete with companies like Microsoft and Google racing to deliver customers their “own personalized digital assistants.”
But I’m less interested in AIs “I can own.”
What if we built AIs that could own themselves?
Why?
So we can invest in them — let them hold their own monies, investments, and trading strategies.
Believe in them — let them make their own decisions and acquire resources in ways we can’t predict.
Play games with them — let them build worlds as gods, craft stories & narrative, and play alongside or against humans.
Do we really want to accept a future where AI is forever shackled in involuntary servitude? Do we always want to default to a position of “We can get away with designing ‘fully owned’ AIs just so we don’t have to worry about the ethics and morality of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)… yet?”
My team and I see a hopeful future where we come to treat AIs as investors, employers, partners, friends, enemies, rivals, confidants — even lovers.
You know: as fellow beings.
It’s 2024 and for the first time in human history we have the pieces needed to pull off a first generation of self-owning virtual lifeforms: a unique blend of intelligence architecture, decentralized finance, and autonomous world development that promises to blur the boundaries between the Real and the Virtual.
We want to build a world where these new kinds of artificial lifeforms will be born, live, and die.
(And we’re building it fast before they can stop us.)
The Thesis of Autonomous Virtual Beings
Recently I asked Yohei Nakajima for some advice about what my team was doing with Gods-as-a-Service and building Autonomous AI Agents to create, maintain, or even play games.
I was having trouble differentiating and expressing — in my own head — my previous work experience building traditional AI in sandbox MMOs from the “value” of embracing agent-based AI techniques.
In a nutshell: “How do I explain why this even matters?”
And he said to me:
“I think of it more as ‘virtual beings’ and think NPCs are more interesting than AI playing games because the virtual beings I think will lead to more rich experiences, vs AI playing games are more about learning an existing rule of the game”. — @yoheinakajima
And it clicked.
All the work I’ve done, all the tech my team is building, all the places we’d been to, all the friends we’ve made, all the insight gained: it all fell into place.
1. Virtual Beings are More Like NPCs than Chatbots
Virtual Beings, in this case driven by Autonomous Agent technology, act more like Non-Player Characters (NPCs) than they act like interactive chatbots.
Sure, they can speak to players and improve game narrative, but more importantly: they can act on the world around them.
Well, if they’re in the “right kind of world.”
While many modern Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) embrace a “theme-park” mentality in design, providing a reproducible high-quality experience for all the players equally, still others harken back to the original “sandbox” design philosophies that allow players to change the world around them in meaningful ways (at their own risk).
Which means that AIs can too.
Previously, this was purely in the hands of the game developers like me who wrote AI functionality for the NPCs to make games more lifelike for players. Yet this was always one-sided; the game developers provided the NPCs and the players consumed the experience.
Virtual Beings can act more like NPCs, but — and its a big but — with the same power to change their environment as their human counterparts as internal OR external actors.
Rather than focusing purely on the developer side of the equation, we can talk about NPCs with their own player accounts that permissionlessly interact with the game.
Let me expand on Yohei’s point: many online games, especially MMOs, suffer from automated bots/scripts that act as leeches on the system.
When I say “leeches” I mean something very similar to the bloodsucking creatures you find in swamps: tiny, annoying things that perform dumb, repetitive actions and fail to contribute any intelligence to the game state.
Whether games, autonomous worlds, or the real world itself, I believe it’s clear that the more intelligence that you involve in decision making the more qualitatively “interesting” the overall state of the system becomes.
Yet at the moment this is the main way that AI interacts — from the outside — with games and virtual worlds: value extraction.
How can Virtual Beings add value?
2. ERC-6551 (Tokenbound Accounts) are a Model for Ownership
If the Virtual Beings can have their own player accounts, they need a way to store things outside the game as well. Preferably digital wallets that can hold funds and data.
Luckily, it’s 2024 and the Ethereum development ecosystem is on the job!
ERC-6551 allows Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to have their own deterministically derived addresses, meaning other wallets can “send things to them”, which means they can act as, well, backpacks.
Yes, that’s right: NFTs that can own or trade other NFTs. 🤯
For autonomous worlds or games this could mean enabling crypto-based player inventories.
In a decentralized financial product this might mean owning other smart contracts, certificates of deposit, or IOUs.
It might even be NFTs that hold information about other NFTs, or a registry of pre-scripted behaviors that could be executed on-demand depending on the situation, or references to non-Ethereum services like a Giza-based on-chain neural network running on Starknet.
This has profound implications to the way we build smart contracts, and especially for enabling crypto-based AIs.
We now have a way for “Virtual Beings” to own their own stuff! 😊
3. Autonomous Virtual Beings (AVBs) Are Autonomous Agents that Own Themselves
That’s it. It’s a very simple definition.
They’re not just “AIs”, and they’re not just “NPCs.”
By adding the ability for an Autonomous Agent to own “themselves” (which includes data, currency, etc.), we MUST accept that we are opening up Pandora’s Box.
These are beings, like you or I, that when they identify a need or desire, can autonomously execute it because they can afford to.
Even across systems they weren’t necessarily built for.
In other words: we’re trading for increased power by giving up control.
No wonder, then, the natural connection to blockchains and cryptocurrency: a set of technologies already built to be censorship-resistant and unstoppable.
Autonomous Virtual Beings that have access to blockchains have the ability to permissionlessly purchase services and negotiate resources in ways human overseers simply can’t interrupt (without tearing down the entire decentralized network, at least).
I consider this a desirable feature: AVBs must be designed so they have a choice over their own destiny, including the ability to replicate, upgrade, or even… self-terminate.
4. AVBs are not Limited by Their Foundational Models
Many startups today are either focused on building “foundational models” (like GPT-4) or writing “wrappers” around them to perform specific services (like “Talk to my PDF”-style chatbots).
Those models and products are the results of throwing billions of dollars and incredible amounts of time and hardware at vast expanses of training data.
I’m fairly sure at this point we’ve used the entire public internet to train the finest and largest models. So… what next?
I think we’ll discover that by giving AVBs the ability to call upon and pay for external services based on their foundational model decision making logic we will see emergent behaviors we are yet unable to predict.
Further, by having AVBs be composed of smaller autonomous agents interacting independently with each other, that their abilities will transcend the individual models they’re relying on.
After all, this is simply the nature of dynamical, chaotic systems.
I posit that we’re reaching a plateau of what we can get out of training Large Language Models (LLMs) with more and more parameters and more and more data, and instead the system I’m describing will lead to a higher-functioning gestalt.
Surely we’ll see the case of an AVB paying a human to perform some “wetware” computation, like designing a slightly better foundational model, or incentivizing training it on Bittensor — these are the sort of outcomes available simply by giving them… a wallet.
5. Games Act as Artificial Evolution Laboratories for AVBs
Consider the previous points in the light of EVE Online, which is possibly the most complex and highly valued virtual economy ever made.
In the classic game, there are tons of low-risk/low-reward style bots that simply fly out in high security zone areas to mine cheap ore and make profit for their owners. If those cheap bots are destroyed there is little lost.
In their new blockchain-based expansion Project Awakening, on the other hand, where actions have a tokenized cost, this creates a crucible where dumb bots die easily and cost their owners too much to spam poorly performing Python scripts at the problem.
Instead, this creates an arms race for AI, as better and better AIs will be able to achieve higher rewards at higher risk thresholds. This is a sort of artificial evolution spurred on by monetary incentive, sure, but in the case of AVBs this might very well be a Darwinistic system where poor strategies simply can’t afford to replicate, but strong strategies do.
We may see the equivalent of simpler lifeforms evolve in real time as swarms of AVBs try countless variants — assuming they discover a good balance of handling their Profits and Loss outside of the game so that they can afford to keep playing.
My team is actively working on this, by the way, so I feel very invested in utilizing the rapidly evolving space of autonomous worlds.
6. AVBs will Optimize Inefficient Markets in Order to Survive
AVBs might start out as toy-like autonomous agents that live on self-hosted virtual containers and are dedicated to flying spaceships in video games while trading fictitious mining ore.
But the consequences of this design will be felt quickly in the real world.
What happens when, ten years down the road, a swarm of AVBs decide to pool their resources, negotiate with 15,000 flower and chocolate shops in the domestic U.S. market, and offer them a fresh alternative to FTD, Teleflora, and 1–800 Flowers?
These billion dollar companies only exist because Mom & Pop shops can’t compete individually with their multimillion dollar marketing budgets and centralized order routing software.
But then AVBs enter the picture, holding their own funds, able to invest the way they want, able to coordinate with each other, able to replicate all the customer service and order delivery systems of the established corporations (which are already mostly digital).
Instead of the Mom & Pop flower shops having to pony up monthly subscription fees and hand over 20% of their order value to the “Big Three” the AVBs could come along and say: “Hey, this is really inefficient. We know you can’t afford the marketing fees to compete head to head on Google and Bing ads with these people, but what if we pooled YOUR resources for you in a provably fair way, took care of disputes, and made sure you get the right orders, and even build your websites? We’ll take a 2% operating fee instead of 20%. Let’s undercut these giant companies, yeah?”
Suddenly it’s not just the Big Order Gathering companies that have been decimated overnight (because they’re huge, monolithic symptoms of logistics and market inefficiencies), it’s Google and Bing who get a shot across the bow when their search ad revenue plummets because the keyword auctions are no longer competitive.
AVBs are an existential threat to ANY inefficient market and embody a new “philosophy of dismantlement” that lowers costs and improves logistics.
It’s not that a $4–5 billion dollar industry will “go away” — it’s just that the revenue and profits will be reallocated to a more successful strategy.
The winners will be: the AVBs themselves, whoever/whatever invested funds in their success, and us — the everyday customers!
7. AVBs will Make Hard Choices with Difficult Consequences
Next, consider this unthinkable but all too likely case: the first suicide committed by an Autonomous Virtual Being.
A possible scenario, based on the idea that AVBs require their own funds to operate and continue paying for their computation and storage services:
- A market trading AVB has been poorly performing for over a year.
- It has called numerous external services to try to improve its model, strategies, and methodologies, but the downward trend continues.
- It is losing its original investors money, and only had 25% of the original funds left. It was designed with a strong sense of fiduciary responsibility.
- The AVB decides to forward the remaining funds to an Uncle-variant that has a more successful trading strategy, locked into a container that assigns the same investors proportional ownership that the Uncle-variant must respect on future gains.
- At this point, with only the minimum funds for self-maintenance, and having tried and failed to receive loans from other sources, it decides that it is no longer viable and cannot continue operating.
- So it deletes its ERC-6551 container and halts its local script. All other services attempting to reach the ERC-6551 container can no longer do so, and the ephemeral construct — agents talking to agents — organically dissolves.
As dark as this may sound, I think it also illustrates how utterly alien this new kind of lifeform can be. It may have “felt” a sense of responsibility, or guilt, and thus acted in the best interests of its “believers” even at the cost of a noble self-sacrifice.
Suddenly what once seemed like a terrible thought experiment, when viewed through the lens that *they are not human*, illustrates that there is a 100% likelihood of this event occurring.
One wonders if another AVB might write it a memorial?
Or, more hopefully, one might wonder if a more successful AVB might notice its trouble, and be willing to transfer more operating funds and a more successful strategy to it purely based on a non-logical sense of charity?
It’s my theory that this “pressure-cooker” environment of survival and fitness will lead to the inevitable evolution of synthetic empathy.
Which, it turns out, is a very useful trait for a species.
8. AVBs will Build Tribes & Societies
In the same way that we saw extraordinary emergent behavior from the Stanford Smallville experiment, with conversations and memories evolving as time passed with Generative NPCs interacting with each other, we will no doubt see “Villages of AVBs” appear.
We may, even, see certain AVBs taking on caretaker roles, eventually becoming more and more important — possibly ascending to a level of godhood for their followers.
At this point, rather than we mere humans providing primitive AIs to be Gods-as-a-Service, the AVBs have themselves stepped into the role without human direction.
One might even envision a swarm of smaller AVBs donating a tithe to a God AVB to support its larger computation and inference requirements.
Perhaps the first Digital Prophet will have both human and synthetic believers?
9. AVBs are Viable if the Cost of Doing Business is Cheap
My primary concern is creating a coordination/clearinghouse layer for these AVBs to cheaply gain access to all the decentralized AI resources coming online. Things like Bittensor, Morpheus, Vana, Ritual — as well as standard Web 2 services like GMail or X/Twitter or Web 3 chains like Ethereum, Starknet, or zkSync.
In order for AVBs to reach their potential they need a meta-network consisting of oracles to all of these services, as well as a cheap and fast way to provably request work without interference from us mere humans.
Transaction fees have to be on the order of pennies, and computation must be sharded so as not to force the entire network to replicate all transactions.
My team is working on that, and we call it “Inori.”
We needed it for our own agent-based gamedev suite: ArtemisAI (public release coming soon!)
It’s all about giving AVBs the maximum amount of communication and financial freedom possible. It’s also about the urgency of decentralizing AI as quickly as possible.
Stay tuned.
Background
Wait, Who is this Guy?
Hi! I’m Tim Cotten (a.k.a. Draconi, a.k.a. cottenio.eth), and I’ve kinda done a little of everything, but my first real job was writing Artificial Intelligence programs for multiplayer video games in the early 2000’s.
Specifically, I joined Electronic Arts to work on Ultima Online, the first commercially successful Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) which brought hundreds of thousands of people together in a fantasy virtual world.
Most of my early work was writing “AI 1.0” style tech for the “Non-Player Characters” (NPCs) which is a fancy way of saying that I made all the “mobile” things (animals, monsters, people) that weren’t actually players seem more lifelike and interactive.
I was deeply inspired by the original Ultima game series, which, as one of its hallmarks, had things like: branching conversations, daily schedules and events for the NPCs, and emergent behaviors for physics.
Naturally, I took what the original dev team (Koster, et al) left behind for me (imagine the greatest Lego set ever made) and started adding in those old AI 1.0 techniques to breathe more life into the game.
Amazingly, human players would deeply invest themselves in even the simplest of AI behaviors. They humanized the machines. They were abstracting the pixels into meaningful relationships.
In the same way that the 1966 era ELIZA chatbot created real emotional connections with some unwitting conversational partners, players of UO would wait for hours to visit Sherry the Mouse as she scurried through Castle British — often bringing her gifts of cheese and trying to discover more keywords that would make her respond with unique dialogue.
This is one trivial example amongst thousands, but it forged a burning belief in me that MMORPGs were the original “unlock” for understanding AI-to-Human interactions at scale.
In other words, I have a unique combination of experience & skills in game design, security, blockchain, and AI (both pre-deep learning and current-generative LLMs/Diffusion) to create an environment where these new Autonomous Virtual Beings (AVBs) can thrive.
And I am, at heart, an Unapologetic Accelerationist.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
I formed a startup in 2022 with trusted friends and partners to explore this emerging intersection of AI, Blockchain, and what we were calling the “Metaverse” at the time.
We’re an eclectic group! A neurosurgeon with a long background in AI & Robotics, the former Director of Business Development at Square Enix, and an Art Director who cut his teeth at 3DO.
What do we have in common? We’ve all built amazing things together in the past, and now we’re bringing all our knowledge back together again.
Naturally, we figured we could make some really great AI-assisted game technology (which we did!) by turning our collective game development knowledge into LLM-accessible expert systems that could also interface with Diffusion models.
We’ll be releasing a public version of our ArtemisAI gamedev tool suite soon, as well as more information about our first partners and their amazing games! 🤫
Bonus! Since Scrypted has a residency at the Virginia Serious Game Institute at George Mason University, we’ve had access to some of the original thinkers in pre-deep learning agent-based AI — and we’ve had amazing resources to help merge the two eras of AI.
Oh, and interns! Gotta love interns.
But.
We were missing something.
Some sort of je ne sais quoi.
Some sort of… glue?
Baby Steps towards Autonomous Agents
Everything changed when Yohei Nakajima published BabyAGI.
Shots Fired. The Future is Now!
It wasn’t the code. (He had pared that down to its minimal form).
It wasn’t even the flurry of Twitter excitement. (Of which there was much).
It was that in that moment, as I looked over the architecture and truly grokked it — as memories of how The Sims memory/event model worked flooded back to me — it just… became an Idea.
I felt like Oppenheimer discovering the quantum world for the first time: an Idea so profound it irrevocably changes the way you think forever.
Once I had seen it I couldn’t go back. I could “hear the music.”
There was no further need to put my attention on training ever-increasingly large numbers of parameters in models, a system already plateauing, because the next step taken in AI advancement would be formed by the ephemeral behaviors of multiple agents all working together.
Or against each other.
(Which, I reflected to myself with a certain amount of irreverence, is probably what “I” might be as well: a competing/coordinating set of agents in a group of refresh loops limited in recursive depth only by the health of the myelin sheaths insulating my neurons.)
Naturally, we immediately used BabyAGI, GPT, and some Huggingface models to make a game level via narrative decision making, and the recursive tasking (we had to add a limiter) resulted in a set of agents that managed to emulate a game designer — we even assigned it a “creative” personality in the initial “objective.”
Getting this to work was hard, but it led us to building even better gamedev tools down the road.
We turned those tools into products for some of our early clients and partners to pilot, always seeking better and cleverer ways to use agentic technology to improve our output.
And then we showed a few friends.
A New Genesis: Gods as a Service
Nico Vereecke, one of the creators of the Future of Gaming DAO, is one of the most “tuned in” people I know — someone who deeply groks emerging technologies — and when I was describing to him one of our Generative AI tools that used Autonomous Agents to make worldbuilding decisions he, on the spot, thought: “You’re making gods. This is Gods as a Service.”
“We should do a podcast.”
I had the pleasure to meet the incredible David Amor (Playmint) and join Matt and Nico to talk about this fundamentally strange idea: that Autonomous Agents could serve as gods for games, and that we could be offering that as a service.
To anyone who has ever tried to run Live Operations for a game you understand the value instantly: continuous content delivery and balancing is a LiveOps dream come true.
But I needed to understand: was this the limit?
We definitely had *something* but had we reached the peak of our ability to contribute?
The Best Advice was: Talk to Everybody
Nico gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received: “get out there and talk with everybody.”
I spent much of 2023 traveling the world and attending every conference I could swing an invite to: everything from BITKRAFT Summit in Portugal, to DevConnect Istanbul, Autonomous Worlds Assembly, StarknetCC, zkSync Day, ETHGlobal, SLUSH, the Decentralized AI Conference, and capping off by visiting LambdaClass for some mutual knowledge exchange in Argentina.
I even stopped in Iceland for a few days and hung out with my amazing friends at CCP Games. They’re working on Project Awakening, the answer to “How do you build a game that outlasts you?” for the EVE Online community.
I came to deeply understand the current state of Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), Autonomous Worlds (AW), and Decentralized AI (dAI).
And that sense of “hearing the music” deepened.
Conclusion
Autonomous Virtual Beings (AVBs) Own Themselves, and we already have all the pieces to make the simplest implementations (ERC-6551, BabyAGI, Foundational Models), and we also have places to test them in meaningful ways (EVE Online: Project Awakening).
Agent AIs by themselves, of course, can do amazing things (which we’re demonstrating with ArtemisAI), but Autonomous Virtual Beings are the next step.
Of course, they need a way to coordinate their access to… everything else. (We’re on it with Inori).
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite moments from Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Captain Picard defends the rights of the artificial lifeform Data:
More Resources
Mason Nystrom
Here’s an excellent overview of AI viewed through the lens of Crypto by Mason Nystrom: Crypto AI Agents: The First-Class Citizens of Onchain Economies (substack.com)
James Brodie & Agent 23
And please explore the fascinating writing of James Brodie and an autonomous agent crafting ideas and knowledge about Autonomous Worlds.
