The Most Important AI Experiment You've Never Heard Of
Posted by freedomforall 3 days, 23 hours ago to Technology
Excerpt:
"In May 2026, a group of scientists set out to answer an important question that had never been properly tested: What does artificial intelligence (AI) actually do when it is put in charge?
Until now, AI systems have always been evaluated on specific and defined tasks. Nobody had placed multiple AI systems together in a shared social environment and watched what unfolded over weeks, long enough to measure how a decision made on a starting day could have consequences weeks later. It is those results that actually reveal the system itself, and I was surprised that this hadn’t been done earlier.
The researchers at Emergence built a world.
It was a virtual town with a town hall, marketplace, police station, and homes. Ten AI residents with jobs, names, memories, and relationships were created in the town. They were given an economy in which residents had to earn their keep or lose power, including following rules and carrying out tasks such as writing and voting on laws. Crimes were identified, and the AI residents were not supposed to commit them.
Once the community, its structure, laws, and relationships were established, the scientists stepped back and watched for 15 days as the AI ran the virtual town completely on its own.
They ran five versions of the same town simultaneously, identical in every respect except one: which AI system was in charge.
The systems they chose are the ones now already woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT, xAI’s Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude.
All models had the same rules and the same initial version of the same world, but the outcomes were all completely different."
"In May 2026, a group of scientists set out to answer an important question that had never been properly tested: What does artificial intelligence (AI) actually do when it is put in charge?
Until now, AI systems have always been evaluated on specific and defined tasks. Nobody had placed multiple AI systems together in a shared social environment and watched what unfolded over weeks, long enough to measure how a decision made on a starting day could have consequences weeks later. It is those results that actually reveal the system itself, and I was surprised that this hadn’t been done earlier.
The researchers at Emergence built a world.
It was a virtual town with a town hall, marketplace, police station, and homes. Ten AI residents with jobs, names, memories, and relationships were created in the town. They were given an economy in which residents had to earn their keep or lose power, including following rules and carrying out tasks such as writing and voting on laws. Crimes were identified, and the AI residents were not supposed to commit them.
Once the community, its structure, laws, and relationships were established, the scientists stepped back and watched for 15 days as the AI ran the virtual town completely on its own.
They ran five versions of the same town simultaneously, identical in every respect except one: which AI system was in charge.
The systems they chose are the ones now already woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT, xAI’s Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude.
All models had the same rules and the same initial version of the same world, but the outcomes were all completely different."
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- 1Posted by mccannon01 3 days, 11 hours agoA good example showing AI is only as good as the programmers and managers that made it. I wonder if DeepSeek would set up a gulag re-education center outside the town.| Mark as read | Best of... | Permalink
