Last week I watched my sister set her AI loose on the family holiday.
She gave it a budget, a list of cousins’ dietary quirks, and a rough date range.
By morning the thing had booked flights, reserved a dog-friendly cottage, scheduled grocery deliveries, and haggled with the owner over a late-check-out fee.
My sister drank coffee; the agent did the legwork.
It felt like hiring a very keen intern who never sleeps, never forgets, and crucially never asks for a company credit card because it can’t open one.
That last detail is easy to miss in the wow-factor moment.
The intern is happy to spend money, but only if someone lends it a wallet.
As these agents move from calendar hacks to running small businesses renting cloud storage, buying datasets, commissioning design work the internet they inherit starts to look oddly unsuited to them.
Every checkout page expects a name, a postcode, a CAPTCHA twist of the wrist.
Every bank wants two forms of photo ID and a utility bill.
The friction we tolerate as flesh-and-blood customers becomes a wall to a piece of code that thinks in milliseconds and has no birth certificate.
Blockchains were supposed to be the native money of the internet, yet the first generations are still built for human fingers.
A private key is a string of letters you can lose; an address carries no hint of who (or what) controls it.
If an agent misplaces the key, there is no password-reset link only silence.
More importantly, the chain cannot tell whether the entity that signed a transaction is a person in Seoul, a script in São Paulo, or a hundred replicas running across a server farm.
That blindness matters when you want to grant privileges lower fees, faster throughput, or simply the right to exist based on identity, reputation, or stated purpose.
The mismatch shows up in small, everyday ways.
A trading bot needs to refill its gas wallet every few hours, so someone keeps a laptop open to top it up.
A content-scraping agent wins a freelance job, but the platform can’t release payment because the bot has no tax number.
Each workaround straps a human ankle to a creature that was meant to roam free.
Kite, a quiet network that launched its main-net earlier this year, tries to redraw the floor plan.
At the protocol level every account declares itself: person, program, or pooled group.
If it is a program, it posts the hash of its code and a short statement of what it is allowed to do buy compute, hedge currency, cancel bookings within twenty-four hours.
These facts sit on the ledger, readable by any human who might hire or regulate the agent.
Keys can be rotated or split among backups without losing the identity; the chain tracks the agent, not a single password.
Built-in pricing adjusts for micro-payments, so a script can pay a fraction of a cent for a fraction of a second of server time without clogging the network.
Most helpfully, the system keeps a tamper-proof log of inter-agent deals: if program A hires program B to translate a manual, the agreement, the fee, and the delivery confirmation are all written into one block, visible later to auditors or courts.
That audit trail is what turns an interesting demo into something an accountant can treat seriously.
Nothing about Kite is glamorous.
Block times are steady, fees are pennies, and the validator set is small enough that you can still recognise the names on the list.
The designers admit they sacrificed some theoretical throughput to keep hardware requirements low, so a hobbyist can run a node on a laptop without bankrupting the electricity budget.
Their guiding principle seems to be: if you want autonomous programs to live here for years, make the rent cheap and the rules predictable.
Will that be enough?
Copy-paste code can still behave badly; a well-labelled agent can lie about its intentions; a hash of software no one audits is just a dressed-up black box.
But the first step is to give the box a passport and a boarding pass, then let the rest of us decide whether to let it on the plane.
At least now the border guard whether a human regulator or another piece of code has somewhere to stamp an entry, a history to inspect, a balance to tax.
The holiday cottage my sister rented will be cleaned, the fridge restocked, the deposit returned, all without her lifting a finger.
The agent, meanwhile, is already scanning for winter flights, querying budgets, waiting for permissions it can’t yet grant itself.
Some time next year it will probably need to put down a security deposit, sign a service agreement, or post collateral against a last-minute cancellation.
When that moment arrives, it will look for rails that treat it as a resident, not a stowaway.
So the quiet work continues: adding identity fields, key-recovery paths, micro-payment lanes, and logs that a court can read.
None of it will trend on social media; none of it looks like science fiction.
It is infrastructure, poured slowly, while the rest of us are busy being impressed.
And still the question lingers: if the next generation of interns never sleeps, never asks, and never carries a wallet, what sort of plumbing are we prepared to lay so their promises can settle and be settled while we are still asleep?
