Short term, long term memory, inner dialogue, reflection, planning, social interactions… They’d even go and have fun eating lunch 3 times in a row, at noon, half past noon and at one!
I think what's missing from these Generative Agents are the internal qualia: emotions (and the attachment of emotions to memories), and self-observation of internal processes and needs. These agents don't eat because they need to, they eat because literary tradition suggests they ought to.
These missing pieces aren't particularly complicated, no more so than memory. I expect we'll see similar agents with all the ingredients for consciousness within a few months to a year.
Exactly, you're always going to get weird deviations from authentic human behavior if you don't also simulate the human body and everything that comes with it. I'd argue that "qualia" fall into this bucket as well.
Yet the hype of ChatBots of 2017 had went and it took half a decade to get to something released.