The advent of machine payments: The right way to pay?

Abstract

As the Internet of Things and distributed ledger technology (DLT) continue to evolve, so do questions regarding the future of ‘autonomous’ machine-to-machine (M2M) payments. For example, whether machines can carry out autonomous payments, how they could carry out such payments, and indeed whether they should are all points worth consideration. While autonomous machines are often depicted as frightening images of a dystopian future, it is worth noting that M2M payments are already being implemented in closed-loop systems where payments such as road tolls are made ‘on behalf’ of the consumer. DLT-based approaches, however, remain proprietary and without any proven realworld use case, while genuinely autonomous M2M payments still belong to the world of science fiction. This opinion piece discusses M2M payments from three perspectives: the legal point of view, the functional implementation of payment systems, and the social context. Specifically, it considers the declaration of will, DLT-based proprietary M2M payments, and whether people will be willing to let robots make autonomous decisions, including payments.