Little fanfare has been given to the story of a glitch in an experimental AI game from 2019, but the results seem rather poignant to me. For any kid growing up in the 80s, the idea of a computer learning the concept of futility (presenting in the game as suicide) should seem a rather significant accomplishment. The characteristic of learning futility had seemed exclusively a human trait to me that computers would never grasp, at least until I read this story. As the author of the piece put it, “it’s hard to predict what conditions matter and what doesn’t to a neural network”. Its implications in computer science are quite fascinating, though, and a good object lesson for those contemplating the Trolley Dilemma in technology.