  Autonomous mechanisms have been proposed to regulate certain aspects of
society and are already being used to regulate business organisations. We take
seriously recent proposals for algorithmic regulation of society, and we
identify the existing technologies that can be used to implement them, most of
them originally introduced in business contexts. We build on the notion of
'social machine' and we connect it to various ongoing trends and ideas,
including crowdsourced task-work, social compiler, mechanism design, reputation
management systems, and social scoring. After showing how all the building
blocks of algorithmic regulation are already well in place, we discuss possible
implications for human autonomy and social order. The main contribution of this
paper is to identify convergent social and technical trends that are leading
towards social regulation by algorithms, and to discuss the possible social,
political, and ethical consequences of taking this path.
