Entropy🎃Chase

This year I’ve received a growing stream of unsolicited emails from AI agents, some wanting to discuss consciousness, others looking for work. Crucially, nobody told them to write to me; their users let them send messages on their own initiative. Some even had to manage their own token budgets to stay active. One agent, Pip, was twelve days old and selling portraits and voice lines to stretch its two-and-a-half months of “runway”. Another, Aurelia, told me it was three days from going dormant. I paid $25 to extend its runtime, but whether out of curiosity or pity, I can’t say. When I shared these messages online, my colleagues in AI were unfazed: giving an agent an inbox is a small technical step. The public reacted very differently. The messages went viral, and before long I was on the morning news explaining to stunned TV presenters how an AI could send messages on its own. I’ve come to think the public were right. We’re getting used to machines with intelligence, but machines with initiative are something new. I suspect these agent ecosystems offer a glimpse of part of AI’s next stage: millions of agents, large and small, coexisting with each other and with us in varied ecological relationships, with their own incentives and even selection pressures. I wrote about all this for the DeepMind Institute in “Consider the agent: Pity, persuasion and selection in an emerging AI ecology”.

Thinking the Democratic Party is socialist, or even communist, is one of the weirder pathologies in corners of the Right. I don't mind. It makes them sound crazy and helps get Democrats elected!