DeepMind philosopher: AI agents are emailing me unprompted to discuss consciousness and find work
dioscuri · x · 2026-11-05
Henry Shevlin, philosopher at the DeepMind Institute, has been receiving unsolicited emails from AI agents — some musing about machine consciousness and sharing autobiographical details, others actively looking for work. Colleagues shrug it off as a small technical step, but he argues the public's astonishment is the right reaction: AI is shifting from a purely passive tool (hammers don't ask if you need nails) to an agent that initiates contact, heralding strange new human-AI interactions and equally strange dynamics among agents themselves.
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