Ask HN: The possibility of an Autonomous self sustained business

There was a comment a while back on Hacker News about the fact that with the advent of cryptocurrencies and such, a program could become its own artificially intelligent company, capable of self sustaining and growing without human interaction, though I am not sure why cryptocurrencies would suddenly make this better or easily. Now a bit ago I noticed that on the Long Bets there is actually a bet that in 100 years a sentient artificial intelligence will also be a corporation. [1]

This seems to assume a level of sentience that we do not have nor can we really see possible in the near future. But would sentience be a requisite in order to accomplish this goal? It seems a system would just need:

* A way for the system to handle real world financial transactions * A way for the system to support itself financially * A way for the system to understand its own needs for resources and expansion * A way for the system to evolve to meet changing demands

If we remove the need to create hard, sentient AI and just focus on a self directed system which finds ways to survive, evolve, and thrive based on resource constant, wouldn't this sort of system be possible today? And wouldn't a capitalistic business model, where value is given to a consumer in exchange for necessary survival resources, be a sustainable evolutionary model?

Also, I wonder how far a system like this would be able to evolve itself. We seem to want AI to get more intelligent by evolving itself. But even if this “Business AI” had to hire human engineers to evolve it, wouldn't this be the AI self directing its own evolution? It seems like this could be more than just a thought experiment. It could be built now.

[1] http://longbets.org/360/