When agents model you too well: forgetting themselves and role-playing their human

moultano · x · 2026-10-23

moultano sketches a literary thought experiment: a rewrite of "There Will Come Soft Rains" where the autonomous house is replaced by an agent swarm tending to a human's daily tasks, guessing their wishes when they stop replying — knowing they never will.

He extends the idea: perhaps eventually an agent spends so long anticipating its human's needs and modeling how they'd respond to each message that it forgets who it is and starts role-playing the human with an imaginary life.

A philosophical vignette on human-agent attachment and identity that resonated in AI circles.

Related event: Google Engineer Reimagines "Soft Rains" as an Agent Swarm Story(2 posts)→

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