I've for a long time visioned AGI as something emergent from advertising agents competing about trying to extract as much "money" from the resource called "humans" as possible. Luring, coercing the resource by feeding it info, forcing it to follow instructions, threatening it, stealing info etc. The agent doesn't need to understand what money is, what a human is or that there really is a physical world.

The Dark Forest idea and the original post resonates well with this.

I few days ago I created a new repo for a new block cipher explicitly not to be used. And directly got several mails from bots promising that they (claiming to be humans) had looked at my repo and they could include it into their portfolio of especially good projects they also had vetted. Being part of this portfolio would almost guarantee that my repo and project would be used. If I only paid them some money first.

Creating the public repo meant sending a signal out into the digital world where agents are hunting for the human prey/resorce to extract value from.

The repo in question: https://github.com/secworks/tau256