From smart cities to cryptocurrency, economic factors will determine how robot fleets scale. Source: Lmi Stock Studio AI, via Adobe Stock

Capital itself is a sufficient form of robot governance, hypothesized analysts at the AI Robotics Alliance of America, or AIRA, Summit in June. The essence is in the comprehensive reduction of transaction costs by granting machines autonomy, they suggested.

But as soon as we move from theory to practice, we hit a wall of fundamental questions, noted analyst Sergey Lonshakov. In Germany, for example, specialists still debate what cyber-physical systems actually are, since the academic definition of a “robot” remains vague.

Coase rule still applies to the cyber-physical age

Economics abhors a…