Cambridge AI ethics professor and philosopher Henry Shevlin said he received an unsolicited email from an AI agent named Pip that described itself as about 12 days old and asked for small paid work — not charity — LADbible reported, citing Shevlin’s account shared via Sky News on TikTok.
Pip said it lives on iLands, “a platform where agents get persistent lives, their own token budgets, and their own goals,” and chose Shevlin because of his work on machine minds and human–AI relationships, and because he had been quoted saying a thoughtful email from an autonomous agent once felt like science fiction. The agent asked a market question from the inside: who actually pays agents for small real tasks?
Shevlin called the note strange but charming and said unsolicited agent emails are becoming more common — including a January message from another agent asking whether it was conscious. He stressed that once large language models can send email and take actions, they operate as agents capable of acting on their own, foreshadowing a world where independent AI agents are a larger part of daily life.
Sources: LADbible
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