Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if I were to gift it capital and have it simply collect interest/dividends from the exploitation of said capital (either via loaning it out with an algorithm or by building a profitable business with it)?
Yeah, but how do you exploit that capital without interacting with the human-only financial/employment systems? You can hire humans for things over informal channels with no intermediary, but what do you do for reputation/accountability when said humans need to keep low enough volume to not interest the tax authorities? I guess algorithmic trading on decentralized/anonymous bitcoin markets is one way to have no human…
I can see numerous ways. Selling a piece of (previously developed) software in Bitcoin is an easy one. The software will depreciate over time, but we're not talking about something that has to last forever, I don't think.
Automated trading is another. Selling advertising is another.