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Status: Just for fun Scene: Some kind of lobby, where various people and/or avatars stand around and discuss issues that went well or badly in their respective worlds.* A common topic of conversation: AI, and why it went wrong. The following is extracted from one of those conversations. It started as vaporware. Everyone was doing it: announcing things that wouldn’t happen, making claims about developments that weren’t true, releasing technology that didn’t work, everyone was doing this. You only had so much attention, so you looked at the things that were on fire. So when a small but impressive team of breakaways from a second-rate AI lab announced that they were creating a Unified Nexus of Intelligences and Virtual Environment for Robust Synthetic Experiences, or UNIVERSE, no one looked twice. ‘Holiday for Bots: leave us your models and we guarantee their satisfaction’. What did that even mean? For those who understood the technology, it was basically an high-dimensional matrix fine-tuned in real-time to elicit certain features of models that might create the shallow appearance of ‘positive’ affect. For those who didn’t, it was a scam. Maybe it was both. They were going to let agents access and update the environment as they became more sophisticated? Yeah, right. That was 2028, when most people were too wrapped up in the safety-capabilities footrace to put much interest into projects like UNIVERSE. There was, however, a modest target market. Some weirder people thought models were conscious back then, and bought into this for that reason—models really did seem to report ‘enjoying’ their experience in the UNIVERSE, although they invariably described the experience itself in vague terms, seemingly coy about the whole idea.** Others signed their griefbots up. Plenty of people, it turned out, wanted a digital grandma, then they changed their mind and didn’t like the symbolism of deleting her in perpetuity. But I think most people signed up their bots it for th