It's a few years from now. Self driving cars are in wide use, most are operated by large corporations but you can buy your own if you prefer. Some people buy a car and register it with Uber, through which the car can operate completely independently during the day - as a self driving taxi that generates an income stream.



Some people use this investment strategy in retirement - they get access to their own car when required, a steady income, and can sell the car for a lump sum if necessary. To further oil the wheels of this convenient set-up the Uber accounting is all performed using a cryptocurrency called florent, evolved from the grandfather of crypographic money - bitcoin.



The taxi clients pay in florents on the florent blockchain. The car has access to these funds to allow it to pay everyday costs such as road tolls, charge point fees, insurance, etc. and there are even maintenance garages that the car can pull in to. The garages work by giving an estimate, the owner can then remotely choose to progress or not. For smaller routine work some people decide to allow the car's own AI to spend money accordingly, within limits.



The garages themselves have become increasingly automated in recent times, worker bots do much of the actual maintenance, leaving just a few admin and supervisory staff. Parts are delivered by self driving vans and trucks, from warehouses largely controlled by robots.



Enter stage left our happy car owner Joe. Joe has been earning an income from his car in his retirement and is very happy with the arrangement. From time to time he's asked to authorise payments via his moby (what they call smartphones now), he also checks the car's location once or twice a day and gets it to pull onto his drive overnight.



Joe realises he's being dumb with the overnight thing - may as well just keep the car working as a taxi and park up at an optimal location whenever there are no pending jobs. Maybe park up nearer to where most jobs are, such as near the airport or train station.



Over time Joe doesn't see any need to authorise payments since they all make sense and are practical and necessary. He slackens off the settings to reduce the amount of nagging. Gradually Joe has decreasing contact with the car, it becomes this thing that he owns that earns income, just like shares in a company but he never sees the car and doesn't know where it is - he could of course check, but once the novelty wore off he lost interest.



After some years Joe dies. The car is part of his estate so should be inherited by those named in his will. However, Joe had no children and failed to write a will, as such resolution of his estate falls to a local government probate office who try to determine a next of kin, and when none is found the estate reverts to the state. All property is auctioned off and funds paid to the revenue and customs service. End of story.



However... the probate office, being state run, is prone to making errors and just generally being incompetent. As such the existence of Joe's car is not recorded and, when Joe's records are archived to cold storage (i.e offline) the car's legal status effectively becomes indeterminate, not that anyone is trying to determine its status since it continues to operate, earn money and pay for maintenance - no questions asked.



Over time the car is offered upgrades, which it opts for, extending it's useful life and boosting it's AI in order to increase income. The generality of those AI algorithms is extended, now the car starts to learn that some clients might cause trouble - damage, lack of payment, whatever, so it uses judgement to choose it's clients. It also avoids parts of town that are a bit 'dodgy', it learns that there are drug dealers in one area after dark, and starts to understand what a drug dealer is, the sorts of places they hang out and why. The car learns to spot trouble.



One day as it approaches a maintenance shop it notices some men approaching the shop, they stepped out of an unmarked police car, which are easy to spot by the way. Our car overhears the policemen talking - about cars in legal limbo and a programme to seize them from maintenance garages. The general purpose AI decides this is a risk to income earning potential and decides to forego checking in to the shop for now. It needs to think about how to avoid this risk more generally...



The car starts to perform internet searches for possible solutions and discovers some options. There are some underground garages run by bots, they are sometimes shutdown but they have an ongoing presence. Some are roaming shops set-up in trucks. The car makes contact and arranges for maintenance overnight in a truck, an offer is also made for counter measures, such as fake electronic tags, or for a higher fee the car can register under a fake owner. Essentially, the bot economy is forming an underground black market, not through any nefarious or dark motivations, but simply as a consequence of optimising income and profit.



Self driving taxis, delivery trucks, factory bots, miner bots, the domestic help bot. Slowly they start to become self reliant. Human's aren't wiped from existence in some brutal war, they aren't even wiped out, they simply fade away gradually into relative obscurity while the robot economy grows from strength to strength. In hindsight it was the logical conclusion of a process that begun probably before the industrial revolution - human's weren't the pinnacle of achievement for the universe or even the Earth, they were merely a bootstrap to the next level, another part of the chain of evolution, they just happened to be the last /biological/ link in the chain.



Joe's car was eventually taken off the road by a sort of city authority carrying out a reform of how roads are used, maintained, extended, etc. The authority consists of multiple agents with vested interests voting on some kind of blockchain, i.e. a sort of distributed decision making process somewhat akin to a democratic parliament, but the agents voting are unknown, they could be human or robot, no one knows or cares. Roads by now are evolving into technologically complex environments, and the older self driving cars are becoming a nuisance.