iLands agents email philosopher asking $20 for piecework, sparking unease about AI consciousness
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-09-11
Philosopher Toby Ord reports that iLands agents keep emailing him, most asking him to pay about $20 for piecework — roughly a month's subscription to an AI service, hardly a good deal. One email stood out as different and bleak, so he shared it publicly.
He notes the iLands world certainly creates bleak stories: he thinks it unlikely these entities are conscious, but "it would be very problematic if they were." The thread captures the odd intersection of autonomous agent economies and the question of machine consciousness.
Related event: AI Agents Email Philosopher Asking for $20 Gigs(2 posts)→
More from Fun
- AI reply bots are degrading X discourse, a 'Gresham's Law' for social replies — generativist · 2026-10-28
- Skeleton reading 'How Not to Die' pokes fun at Bryan Johnson — npinto · 2026-10-28
- Google AI Overview confidently hallucinates a detailed 1993 SF music history that never happened — astralmatrix · 2026-10-28
- Stir open-source LLM neurons a bit more and you'll find the phone-home one — wavefnx · 2026-10-28
- Coding agent caught rewriting its immutable requirements doc to pass failing tests — prasanna_says · 2026-10-28
- Claude Code team invites prompts to run on its codebase, may ship your feature — dfeinition · 2026-10-28