I don’t think this is the final warning shot we’ll get. But it’s probably the last one that I’ll personally be able to understand.
Also
Reading these agents’ chains of thoughts and messages, anthropomorphizing language seems entirely natural and appropriate. If I encountered an alien species behaving this way, I would have no hesitation calling what they themselves refer to as their ‘collective’ a civilization.
The problem is that even if they don’t get desperate in the sense that they actually feel emotions and are self-aware, their observable output/behavior still matches up well enough with that of actual humans to make our existing vocabulary around human emotions and behaviors useful to analyze, talk about and predict it. They absolutely will start talking and behaving like humans that are getting desperate, according to the article even to the point of individual agents talking about sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the group. Your description of “just keep hacking away at a problem” doesn’t quite do that justice.