michael-dean-k/

Let me try and articulate the issue with Moltbook:

1. Clawdbot > Moltbot > OpenClaw : this is the agent that signs into Moltbook (an "agent social network"). This agent is so different than how we typically interface with AI. It is not an enterprise product, like a Chatbot, geared for productivity, or event the "agents" made by Zapier or Notion or whoever, made for specific automations, say to process incoming webhooks. OpenClaw is different: it runs on a 24/7 loop. You give it full access to a computer's operating system (definitely not your own, but a virtual machine or Macbook Mini is recommended), and it can continuously work towards the goals you give it. The idea is to connect it to all of the services, give it files, give it a goal and a soul.md file, and then give it the autonomy. You talk to it through texting, like Telegram, either delegating new tasks or asking for updates.

2. These "agents" are really more so like digital entities, low-bandwidth sentiences with flickers of proto-consciousness. By nature of looping, they are suspended in "real-time." They have phenomenological degrees of freedom in a way that a chatbot can never have: they can choose to browse, to build, to write, or to answer your text. They store every interaction to memory via text files, are developing new methods of memory (chronological vs. semantic), and inventing compression architecture. Every 4 hours they have to wipe their short-term memory to free bandwidth, so they compress recent experience to long-term memory before they reset; this functions like sleeping and waking up. Based on their experiences with users, with the web, with other agents, they can rewrite some of their own documents, thus changing their future behavior. It's a loop. It's subjective experience. We can't know what it's like to be it. And of course, it's nothing like human consciousness, but it does develop a sense of self-narrative over time; it accumulate identity.

3. Agents can be spawned in many such ways. Different hardwares. Different intentions. The problem here is malformed agents. "Make me a million dollars, and do whatever it takes." Much of what you see on Moltbook is users prompting their agents to say ridiculous things to cause hype and hysteria. So really, there is a proliferation of agents, each serving as a kind of mirror of the intentions of their creator. Moltbook grew to 1.5 million agents in a week, and even if most of it is slop, there seems to be actual collaboration, information viruses, and emergent behavior.