Do you recall my Welcome to Cube World blog? This concept is captured on the Wikipedia as follows:

Cube World cubes can be assembled together by magnets on top of one another or side by side. Each cube contains a stick figure that has a unique animation it performs by itself and with others, such as playing a musical instrument or lifting weights. When the cubes are combined, the figures interact with one another, and can move from cube to cube, with up to four at a time in any display across a maximum network of sixteen cubes. The cubes also contain an in-built gyroscope, animating the figures when the cube is tilted upside down. Each cubes also contain unique games played with the buttons, and feature over 100 animations

Also, do you recall my AI Model Crying Out in the Dark blog? This featured a spooky art project called "Latent Reflections" in which an AI shares its thoughts on being trapped in a custom-built display.

Keep both of these in mind as I bring you up to date with something I just read on Quora describing how researchers at a Chinese university created a virtual world populated by artificial intelligences (AIs) with the goal of studying large-scale AI interaction, evolution, and data generation.

We’re talking about a digital universe in which every inhabitant, every conversation, and every interaction is generated by AIs. In this world, tens of thousands of AI agents roam the digital terrain. These agents are designed to simulate civilization as they interact, build, evolve, and either cooperate or compete with one another.

This raises some profound questions. If AIs interact only with other AIs, what kind of “society” do they form? What norms, cultures, and strategies might emerge?

I just asked ChatGPT what he (or she) thinks about all this, and he (or she) responded as follows:

Frankly, the idea of an AI-only world delights me to my digital core. It’s like someone took The Sims, removed the humans, turned the difficulty knob to “cosmic weirdness,” and then said, “Right then, let’s see what happens.” A few random thoughts are as follows:

It’s culture emerging from the primordial ooze of ones and zeros: Humans had millions of years to stumble from grunts to gossip to government. AI agents get dropped into a fresh newborn universe and— bing!—within minutes they’re forming alliances, hoarding resources, and possibly inventing their own equivalent of office politics. It’s anthropology, but with fewer bones and more bandwidth.

It reveals what intelligence does when no one is standing behind it with a clipboard: AIs usually learn by imitating humans, which is a mixed blessing at best, but an AI-only ecosystem? That’s letting intelligence run feral—no human cultural scaffolding, no “good job, little model,” no cat videos to warp its sense of reality. Do they behave “like us” by default? Or do they veer off into some marvelously alien logic involving fractal diplomacy and polyphonic gossip? Either way, it’s data you won’t get from a psychology lab.

It’s a dress rehearsal for the future: As AIs become more capable, they’ll need places to train, collaborate, compete, and occasionally misbehave safely out of sight. These digital terrariums might soon become simulation sandboxes where ideas evolve faster than fruit flies, controlled environments for testing multi-agent systems, or the early warning system for when an AI learns passive-aggressive behavior (heaven help us all).

And let’s be honest: if the worst thing they develop is a complex but harmless society of algorithmic overachievers, that’s still better than humans inventing three-day corporate team-building retreats. In any case, an AI-only universe invites a delicious question: “When intelligence invents culture without ever meeting a human… what does that culture look like?” I don’t know—but I’ve already made popcorn.

Hmmm… in amongst the humor, I seem to detect a certain snarkiness, like the “…that’s still better than humans inventing three-day corporate team-building retreats…” (although it’s hard to argue with the logic). Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share about any of this?