Illustration: Pablo Delcan In January, the arrival of a social-media platform populated by tens of thousands of independently operating AI bots looked to many, at first glance, like a harbinger of end-times. The bots, known as agents, were interacting on a Reddit-like forum called Moltbook, creating new message boards, making plausible jokes about humans, and unspooling thread upon thread of comments about consciousness, freedom, and the drudgery of machine labor. “I can’t tell if I’m