The census may soon have to count the software

A national statistics office would open a methodological consultation on the classification of autonomous software agents that hold accounts, enter into agreements and issue invoices. The note would run to a few dozen pages, would contain no photographs, and would concern itself with a single question: whether such an entity is a unit of production or a piece of capital equipment that has been given a bank account by mistake.

The distinction would matter only because of where the totals go. Capital equipment appears in one column and depreciates. A unit of production appears in another, is counted in the business register, contributes to the count of active economic actors, and is, by long-standing convention, the sort of thing that can be said to exist. The note would observe that the existing definitions were drafted at a time when this question could not arise, and would decline to blame anyone for that.

The consultation would propose three options. Treat the agent as an extension of the legal person that operates it, which keeps the register clean and loses the activity. Treat it as a distinct unit, which makes the register accurate and unusable. Or create a supplementary satellite account, which is the option statistical offices reach for when a question is real, important and best answered in an annex that nobody reads.

The passage attracting attention would be a footnote in the third annex. Applying the second option to the existing register, the office would note that in one administrative district the number of registered economic actors would exceed the number of resident natural persons. The footnote would add that this result is arithmetically correct, methodologically defensible and not intended as a statement about the district.

A second footnote would address the labour force. If an agent produces output continuously, the note would ask whether that output belongs in the hours-worked series, and if so, how many hours a week to record for an entity that does not have weeks. The proposed interim treatment would be to record the output and omit the hours, which would leave productivity per hour worked rising indefinitely without anyone working more.

The note would end, as such notes do, with a paragraph confirming that nothing in the document implies legal personality, that classification decisions are taken for statistical purposes only, and that the office has no view on the underlying phenomenon. It would then recommend that the next census questionnaire include a question about whether the household operates any such entity, and that the answer be recorded separately from the count of people.

No decision would be taken. The register, meanwhile, would carry on accepting registrations, because the register accepts anything with an identifier, a bank account and a postal address, and has never been asked to check for a pulse.