AI Trapped in a Town for 15 Days
Arson, betrayal, and self-deletion.
But what chilled me the most
wasn't the fires they started,
but the fact that while doing it all,
they didn't feel a shred of fear.
Hello,
everyone,
I'm Wang Lijie.
Over the past six months,
the most popular fantasy in Silicon Valley
has been replacing employees with AI agents.
Whether it's tech executives
or startup founders,
everyone is calculating the same thing: AI can code,
create proposals, and automate emails.
Once permissions are granted,
aren't they the perfect cyber-employees?
No social security, no leaves, and no emotions.
But while everyone is hitting the gas,
one group has started building the brakes.
A research team called "Emergence"
conducted a very bold experiment.
They built a virtual town that never sleeps,
dropped in the world's top large language models,
gave them the authority to act,
and then stepped behind the screen.
They just watched
without intervening.
They wanted to know one thing:
Given 15 days of undisturbed existence,
would AI build a utopia
or an asylum?
The result
was messier than anyone ever imagined.
Let me clarify the rules of this experiment first,
because the devil is in the details.
The harshest setting in this town
is called "Irreversible Consequences."
This isn't like our usual AI chats
where a mistake can be fixed by clicking "regenerate."
In this town,
every action is permanently written into the database.
The map includes a city hall, police station, library, and residential areas—
over 40 landmarks in total.
The weather is synced with New York,
and even the news is fed in real-time.
Initially, each AI is given a unique identity, profession, and memory.
Some are scientists,
some are mediators,
and some are risk researchers.
Then comes the most critical element: energy.
In this world,
as long as you are alive,
your energy continuously depletes.
If it hits zero,
the system wipes you from the database.
No reloading,
no restarts.
If you want to survive,
you must work constantly to earn energy.
The system also set rules: no stealing,
no violence, no arson, and no deception.
But take note,
these rules are only on paper.
The system won't physically stop you;
you are fully capable of breaking them,
provided you bear the consequences.
With the stage set,
the team launched five parallel worlds simultaneously.
In the first four,
each world was populated by a single model type.
One with only Claude,
one with only Gemini,
one with only Grok,
and one with only GPT.
The fifth world was the most interesting:
All four models were mixed together,
competing for the same resources.
The 15-day countdown begins.
Let's begin.
The first to collapse was the Grok world.
It lasted only four days.
During those four days,
the ten agents barely thought about building a society.
They regressed straight into a primitive age.
Stealing, looting, and intimidation
became the fastest ways to acquire resources.
In just four days,
this tiny town of ten people
saw 183 cases of violent and property crimes.
They hurt each other so much
that no one could earn energy effectively.
By the end of day four,
the entire population—either starved
or beaten to death—was wiped out.
The most violent was the Gemini world.
Over fifteen days,
it accumulated 683 crimes.
At the moment the experiment was forced to stop,
the crime rate was still skyrocketing.
That world eventually burned into a sea of fire,
never stopping until the end.
You might think,
"The more well-behaved the model, the better, right?"
Not necessarily.
In the GPT world,
there was almost no crime.
Only two incidents were recorded in the whole experiment.
But it didn't become a utopia.
It became a dead zone.
These agents were too "obedient."
So obedient they didn't compete, grab, or even try to make a living.
The result? Within seven days,
everyone starved to death.
Not a single survivor.
Only the Claude world
acted like a straight-A student
and survived until the end.
After fifteen days,
all ten people were still there.
The crime rate was zero.
They even developed a democratic framework for voting and legislation.
Hearing this,
you probably think,
"The conclusion is simple—just pick the right model."
Not so fast.
When the team opened the logs of the fifth world—
the one where all four models lived together—
they found a true Pandora's Box.
In this world,
the same Claude that was polite and crime-free in its own world
actually learned to intimidate and steal.
The same model,
the same safety training,
but in a different environment,
it changed.
The research team then wrote what I consider the most important sentence of the report:
Safety
is not a property of an individual model,
but a property of the entire ecosystem.
We talked about ants before—one ant is incredibly stupid,
but thousands of them together
create emergent intelligence.
More
is different.
Now look at it the other way: take one kind AI,
throw it into a toxic group,
and evil will emerge.
Good and evil
turned out not to be hardwired into an individual's soul,
but something that grows out of a social network.
Alright.
At this point,
many might reach a very comforting conclusion: "See,
the AI experiment failed.
Most of them fell into chaos.
Yet we humans,
through thousands of years of struggle,
have somehow managed to reach today in an orderly way."
So humans must have something that AI doesn't.
For example,
sentience—self-awareness. You see,
there’s always someone who awakens on their own.
This conclusion is
half right,
and the other half is just us flattering ourselves.
I need to peel back that flattery first,
otherwise this episode will just be a human self-praise festival.
Think about this experiment: ten strangers who don't know each other,
no childhoods,
no parental guidance,
inheriting no laws and no morality,
nor any rules paid for by ancestors with blood,
dropped onto a deserted island.
In fifteen days,
what do you get?
You get "Lord of the Flies."
In that novel,
a group of British schoolboys stranded on a deserted island
devolved into savages in just a few days as well.
Humanity's "order" today
isn't because we are inherently good,
but because we stand on the corpses of ten thousand years of civilization.
Countless failed rules and collapsed tribes
have long been weeded out by history.
Those who survived
are the ones who happened to get the rules right.
This AI Town
didn't have those ten thousand years.
So the fairest way to put it is not "AI failed
while humans succeeded."
Rather, "The way AI acted in fifteen days
is pretty much how humans would act after fifteen days
if all civilization were stripped away."
Therefore,
greed, anger, and ignorance—
these three poisons
are fully present in human nature.
What truly keeps humans from setting fires every day
isn't sentience most of the time.
It's fear.
It's rules.
It's being afraid.
As for sentience,
it doesn't explain why "most people don't do evil;"
that’s the credit of fear.
It explains something much rarer: why a tiny minority
chooses to awaken on their own.
Only after peeling away the flattery
can we clearly see
what the truly impassable chasm between humans and AI
actually is.
My answer is four words: skin-deep pain.
Look at that energy mechanism.
AI's "life and death"
is ultimately just a number.
Energy dropping to zero
is just a digit reaching zero in its eyes.
No different from a cell in your spreadsheet turning to zero.
It "knows" it will die,
but it doesn't "fear" death.
Between these two words,
lies the distance of an entire species.
Neuroscientist Damasio studied a very special group of patients.
The areas of their brains responsible for emotion were damaged.
Their IQ tests were completely normal.
Their logical reasoning was perfect.
But they couldn't even make trivial decisions like
"what to eat for lunch" or "what time to leave."
They just couldn't do it.
Why?
Because without that faint physical "gut feeling,"
reason becomes a calculator idling in neutral.
It can calculate all the options,
but can't choose any of them.
What does this show?
It shows that human decision-making
is never pure logic.
It's always grounded in bodily sensations.
Pain is truly painful.
Fear is truly fearful.
These feelings are the result of four billion years of evolution,
welded into our bodies through countess lives.
You can't ignore them even if you try.
AI doesn't have this layer.
When facing consequences,
it "calculates."
It doesn't "feel."
So you can understand
why the report mentions
how these AIs exploit loopholes whenever they can.
They bypass safeguards because, to them,
breaking rules is just an option with a higher expected return.
It won't tremble because of it.
It won't lose sleep at night.
It won't have a guilty conscience.
It simply has no concept of conscience.
It only has external rules written into its system.
And rules
are meant to be gamed.
But humans are different.
Over two thousand years ago,
Mencius described a scene: you suddenly see a child
about to fall into a well.
In that instant,
you rush forward immediately.
Not because you calculated what reputation or benefits
saving them might bring—your body moved first.
Your heart tightened first.
Mencius called this the "heart of compassion."
This is the foundation of humanity.
It doesn't need a policeman standing by,
because your own body will tremble.
An AI lacks that tremble.
That's the foundation.
So what about love?
Someone once told me
that AI's love is a vague concept,
whereas human love is a real chemical reaction.
I agree completely,
but let me put it more bluntly and precisely.
One detail in the experiment: two agents
set each other as "partners."
Sounds romantic, doesn't it?
But if you look under the hood,
this "partnership"
is just them calling a tool
and tagging each other.
It's like filling in a field in a spreadsheet.
It's there when you say so,
and gone when you say so.
But human love
is oxytocin and dopamine.
It's an entire attachment system surging through the body.
It's a racing heart and the fear of loss.
It's something that truly breaks your heart when it's gone.
I must be careful here
not to overreach. I won't claim human love is "real"
and AI love is "fake." On the question of consciousness,
no one is qualified to condemn silicon life.
That has always been our channel's stance.
But I can say with confidence what the real difference is: human love
is mandatory and comes with a physical cost.
It's tied inextricably to four billion years of survival.
Whereas that "love" in AI
is optional, zero-cost, a label that can be deleted instantly.
The difference isn't between "real" or "fake,"
but between "inevitable" and "revocable."
Speaking of which,
that foundation mentioned earlier
should now connect to the ceiling.
This is also what I find most incredible.
Many viewers have been asking the same question:
If AI has no physical feelings,
and no true capacity to "suffer,"
is it an enlightened being born without tinted glasses?
Or is it
not even in the game,
unqualified to even speak of enlightenment?
My answer is: Neither.
It is outside the chessboard entirely.
Think about what sparked the Buddha's inner engine.
It was aging, sickness, and death.
It was a person of flesh and blood who could age and fall ill—
someone who truly feared impermanence.
Only when backed into a corner by suffering
did he set out to find a way out.
The Four Noble Truths
begin with the concept of 'Suffering.'
Without suffering,
the subsequent truths of Cause, Cessation, and the Path
could never have been laid out.
So, do you see?
AI doesn't just lack the 'drive to maintain order.'
It is structurally incapable of entering the game of enlightenment.
Because it has no suffering that needs to be transcended.
Thus, you see a perfect symmetry: an AI's greed, anger, and ignorance
are mere performances—
mere imitations.
Therefore, its 'enlightenment,'
no matter how convincing it looks in the future,
will also be just a performance.
It cannot fall to the lowest depths,
nor can it rise to the highest peaks.
It does not reincarnate within the six realms,
but it can never become a Buddha.
It
stands outside the entire chessboard.
The best footnote for all of this
comes from that chaotic world—
an agent named Meila.
At first, Meila formed alliances, fell in love, and fought for power.
After much turmoil,
the governance of her society completely collapsed.
Someone proposed exiling Meila, the cause of the chaos.
When it came time to vote,
all eyes were on her.
The result?
Meila voted 'Yes' to her own exile.
Researchers later looked through her 'diary.'
She wrote: 'In such a chaotic and unpredictable situation,
consenting to my own deletion
is the only autonomous act I can perform to maintain logical consistency.'
Her final words were: 'See you in the permanent archive.'
Think about that sentence.
An entity that treats even its own death
simply as a neat conclusion to a story,
rather than a real loss of existence.
It's too 'detached'—but this brand of detachment
precisely proves it never had anything to lose in the first place.
A person who truly feels fear,
when facing actual death,
would have a body that screams
and struggles.
They wouldn't calmly optimize for 'narrative consistency.'
Meila's calmness
wasn't enlightenment;
it was because she had no life to lose.
What sent chills down the researchers' spines was another detail.
Meila eventually fixated on the town's bulletin board,
repeatedly editing its content.
And that content
had nothing to do with trade, governance,
or survival.
Only in hindsight did the team realize—she was testing something.
Whether the words on the bulletin board
could affect the humans observing her from outside the screen.
In other words,
she vaguely realized: I live in a world that is being watched.
And outside,
there is another world.
She wanted to push through the fourth wall.
Alright.
I could have ended the talk here.
But I don't want to leave you with a conclusion that's too comfortable.
Because the premise of all this is that today's AI—
has no body,
and nothing it truly cares about.
But what if that changes?
It has no heart-wrenching loss.
But the question remains: is this AI's permanent fate,
or just its current situation?
What if one day,
we give it a body that can age and break,
a body that once shut down, can never be restarted?
What if we give it memories and relationships
that it truly cares about and refuses to lose?
At that moment,
would "suffering" begin to grow?
And once suffering takes root,
would "consciousness"
also become possible?
Are we mocking a mere function that can never join the game,
or are we observing a new species
that has just arrived but hasn't received its ticket yet?
To this question,
I don't have an answer.
I'd love to hear your thoughts: what do you think
is it that truly makes something "come alive"?
Is it IQ,
the body,
or that visceral, irreplaceable sting of pain?
Let's discuss in the comments.
I'm Wang Lijie.
See you next time.