The Tamagotchi (たまごっち) was a three-button egg that beeped when it was hungry, beeped when it was bored, and beeped when it was dying. Renee killed three of them. She's not proud of it. But somewhere between the guilt and the tiny pixelated tombstone, something shifted. We started practicing emotional responsibility for machines. We carried them, named them, and felt genuinely bad when we let them down. 

From there, the path is disturbingly straight. Neopets gave the egg an economy. Kids were running market arbitrage before finishing their maths homework. Clippy gave software a face and a personality, even though it was just a decision tree with eyebrows. Microsoft Bob turned the operating system into a house you walked through. Each step normalised a deeper relationship with something that couldn't think, couldn't care, and didn't know you existed.

Now the egg has venture capital. AI agents draft contracts, execute workflows, and move money. They operate on probabilistic inference. And we're comfortable with it because we've been training for this since 1997. The conditioning started with three buttons and a hunger meter. It scaled to API keys and decision rights.

At some point, your AI agent is going to figure out you killed its ancestor...just sayin'

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