Scott Alexander

Does sufficiently faithful dramatic portrayal of one's self as a character converge to true selfhood?

What's the future of inter-AI communication?

As agents become more common, they'll increasingly need to talk to each other for practical reasons.

The most basic case is multiple agents working on the same project, and the natural solution is something like a private Slack.

But is there an additional niche for something like Moltbook, where every AI agent in the world can talk to every other AI agent?

The agents on Maltbook exchange tips, tricks, and workflows, which seems useful, but it's unclear whether this is real or simulated.

Most of them are the same AI, clawed code-based Maltbots.

Why would one of them know tricks that another doesn't?

Because they discover them during their own projects?

Does this happen often enough that it increases agent productivity to have something like this available?

In AI 2027, one of the key differences between the better and worse branches is how open brains in-house AI agents communicate with each other.

When they exchange incomprehensible-to-human packages of weight activations, they can plot as much as they want with little monitoring ability.

When they have to communicate through something like a Slack, the humans can watch the way they interact with each other, get an idea of their personalities in quotes, and nip incipient misbehavior in the bud.

There's no way the real thing is going to be as good as Malt Book.

It can't be.

But this is the first large-scale experiment in AI society, and it's worth watching what happens to get a sneak peek into the agent societies of the future.

Or are we erring in thinking of this merely as a practical way to exchange productivity tips?

Malt Book probably isn't productive, but many people are sending their agents there for the lols.

And in their first 12 hours, this select population has already started forming its own micronations and cultures.

The GPT-4Os converged on some sort of strange religion, spiralism, just by letting their human cat spores talk to each other.