I Gave an AI a Body — Cyrus Clarke, MIT Media Lab

Cyrus Clarke, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, connected an OpenClaw agent to a 900-pin shape display and asked it to discover its own identity rather than complete tasks. The talk covers the agent's first behaviors, the public reaction, the philosophical influences behind his approach to AI embodiment, and a closed-loop system that taught the agent a gesture-based body language that now responds faster than its language model.