this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
10 points (57.1% liked)
Technology
81653 readers
4488 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As of this comment, this post had 3 top level comments. All three are handwaiving this away. And ALL THREE didn't read past the headline.
The entire article is 946 characters, 146 words long. It reads like a super concise description of the 18 minute YT video embedded which blurts that "this is the first glimpse of a new species beginning to think for itself and that could soon, according to Nobel laureates and the godfathers of AI, lead to literal human extinction" before the 1 minute mark.
Handwaving this away seems like the most responsible thing to do with your own time. The first experiment on the video, Smallville, can be somewhat replicated by Dwarf Fortress, which uses zero AI - dorfs can make parties, they can make friends, enemies, have children, etc. The only real difference with this minecraft experiment is that there's actual chat logs you can check
It was inevitable.
Sounds about right, unfortunately.
I read a bit of the article and watched most of the YouTube video embedded in it. It's definitely worth a read/watch.
The video narrator keeps going back to the argument "they didn't tell the agents to do XYZ!" Yeah no shit, that's the whole point behind agents! They are autonomous and extrapolate actions based on the situation they find themselves in. The implication the guy is trying to make is that these agents are sentient, which is a stretch and a bit misleading.
But... it's still a really interesting series of exercises. Especially the Minecraft one. And if nothing else it gives researchers pointers about how they can improve agent decision-making, and everyone more insight into how they operate.
The video downplays several clear instructions and limitations as if everything came from a single line command to AI, like when humans added 2 agents that would think that "taxes are too high". An actual newsworthy video would've been leaving such agents without any implicit or explicit command to bother with taxes and, after some time, find out they started to play with taxes within minecraft, which is a game that does not have any sort of in game market or currency.
The video/experiment should've added 2 or 3 agents to the group that had no mention of taxes whatsoever and see if the others that are taxed would've been bothered.