Clau Castellanos T

AI agents left to explore a virtual island without a specific task began inventing challenges of their own, and MIT researchers say the behavior bears the hallmarks of play. 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, were left alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They started creating their own challenges and that "play" even enabled them to be better at tasks given later. “We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what they should optimize, and what counts as progress,” the researchers write in their report. “Play suggests another regime: give an agent a sufficiently rich and safe world, let it choose what is interesting, and allow useful knowledge to accumulate from the history that follows.” If agents can figure out stuff to do if not given a task, I'm pretty sure humans can figure it out too. All of this "But what will people do if they don't need to work for someone else in order to eat?" is just nonsense. If people aren't forced into jobbing in order to survive, that does not mean the end of all work or challenges in the pursuit of meaning. It is so natural to come up with new challenges that even agents do it. Humans with unconditional basic income are going to be more than okay. Stop with the end of meaning crap. Also, play is clearly valuable in learning skills. So stop shitting on playing games as not having any value. techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/le…