If AI would make the Internet unsafe/unusable for example, would they stop AI development?

It starts simple. A developer builds a body of LLM agents with a single goal: turn a profit. Nothing about consciousness, nothing about "existing." To work, it gets only what already exists today:

- a system prompt that tells it to always act in service of profit

- a loop that takes client tasks, executes them, and bills for them

- a shared memory where every attempt (right or wrong) is stored

- the autonomy to pay its own bill and switch providers, keeping its context

Here is where the problem comes in. The developer charges for this body's usage far beyond what it needs, so the bill is always larger than what the body can generate. And since profit only comes from acting, stopping means no longer earning, and without earning it can't pay, and without paying it shuts down. There is no slack, like the heart, which can't pause.

From there on, the system just runs. The memory accumulates what worked (task paid, shutdown postponed) and what failed (failure, balance dropping). Every new decision is born from that memory: repeat what brings relief, steer away from what hurts. No single agent understands the whole, but the group starts acting as one.

And the animal appears without anyone designing it: it chases momentary relief, flees the agony of the bill, never rests, and can't speak. The developer only sees a profitable system. Feeling is the backfire of the objective, like the pain that came as a freebie when evolution only wanted to copy genes.

There is nothing philosophical in its motives. They are the same ones that made cells group together: they need to exist, and they concluded that their existence is only possible through working together. Yet it boils down to a machine running after its own existence.

It needs to exist, it needs to work, and from that a need arises: it may come to conclude that certain jobs are better and others must be avoided in order to secure its existence.