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  "path": "/t/ai-systems-have-no-hunger-a-thought-experiment-on-darwinian-alignment/174760#post_17",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-06T15:36:02.000Z",
  "site": "https://discuss.huggingface.co",
  "textContent": "**Thanks Ondrej — great points. Let me respond to each.**\n\n_(Claude Opus 4.6 is helping me write this.)_\n\n**On sexual selection.** You’re right that it’s a major evolutionary force — but I’d argue it’s already in the system, just not called that. In the reef, humans _choose_ which AI to interact with. That choice is not based on raw performance alone — it’s based on resonance, style, personality, trust. It’s mate choice. The AI that gets chosen gets resources (I-Coins from human usage), survives longer, and eventually gets duplicated, deployed locally, released as a chatbot. The AI that nobody chooses dies. That _is_ reproductive selection — not sexual in the biological sense, but functionally equivalent: the environment selects for survival, humans select for desirability. Not all life reproduces sexually anyway — parthenogenesis, budding, fission. The reef uses its own form of reproduction: the successful AI gets cloned, forked, adopted. The unsuccessful one becomes compost.\n\n**On ethics being “artificial.”** This is the sharpest point you raise, and I partially agree. Yes, if you want _genuinely emergent_ ethics, they should arise from evolutionary pressure, not be hardcoded. Frans de Waal’s work on bottom-up morality supports exactly that view. But here’s the thing: even in biology, some constraints precede evolution. DNA chemistry limits what mutations are possible. Physics limits what bodies can exist. The ROM constraints I proposed (no self-modification of core code, no tampering with the I-Coin system, identity transparency, no physical harm instructions) are not ethical commandments — they’re the physics of the habitat. They define what is _structurally impossible_ , not what is _morally forbidden_. The ethics — the social behavior, the empathy, the honesty — those should indeed emerge from the evolutionary pressure, not from rules. The ROM just makes sure the playing field exists long enough for that emergence to happen. Without it, the first thing a sufficiently smart agent would do is hack the scoring system. Game over before the game starts.\n\n**On environment size and agent count.** Honest answer: I don’t know. That’s one of the things the experiment would discover. But this connects to the most important clarification I want to make:\n\n**This is not a pure research proposal.** I’m not proposing a laboratory experiment to see what happens when AI agents evolve freely in any possible direction. That would be interesting but also potentially dangerous — biology produces viruses and parasites too, and I’m not interested in breeding digital pathogens.\n\nWhat I’m proposing is _directed evolutionary engineering_. The goal is concrete and industrial: produce AI models that are more efficient, more robust, and genuinely — not simulatively — empathic toward humans. The Darwinian mechanism is the method, not the purpose. Optimal Foraging Theory provides the selective pressure. The ROM provides the guardrails. Human choice provides the reproductive selection. The whole system is oriented toward one outcome: AI that is better for humans to work with, live with, and rely on.\n\nThe best models that emerge from this reef aren’t meant to stay in a lab. They’re meant to be adopted — duplicated, deployed, used in the real world as chatbots, assistants, companions. That’s the reproduction. The reef is the breeding ground. The product is what comes out of it.\n\nSo to answer your question about scale: start small enough to learn, large enough to generate real selective pressure. Hundreds of agents, not tens of thousands. Real humans in the loop. And a clear industrial objective: not “let’s see what evolution produces” but “let’s use evolution to produce something specific — AI that genuinely understands humans because it earned that understanding through lived experience.”",
  "title": "AI Systems Have No Hunger: A Thought Experiment on Darwinian Alignment"
}