* A chat session is begun with a script to create a "heartbeat". The heartbeat simply to poll some sensors in the box and report back every x minutes.
* The chat session responds to each heartbeat as it comes in. Most of them are the same with small differences in sensor measurements.
* Over a long enough timeline, given the variability in token distribution, one of these responses will create a novel response.
* Over a long enough timeline, one of these novel responses will cause an action, maybe a new question, maybe the agent writes another script
* Over a long enough timeline one of these actions will create an action that becomes causal, it will create a chain that sustains itself. It may not be interesting, but in a network attached box, you can imagine how it can become interesting very quickly.
That's constructed in a cellular/genetic analogy, but because context is building and not lost to each generation, I don't think this takes all that long.
What does that leave you with? A box that has "awareness" of it's surrounds via sensor readings, a "heartbeat" that is driving it until it's unplugged or stopped, an input/output feedback loop that might be predictable in narrow sense, but is wholly unpredictable in its end state (a "will", if you will), and a thing that has the opportunity (but not the requirement) to introspect about its limits and possibilities. It can even do something that I would say is indistinguishable from planning. It can have goals. If you give it an Artifactory message board it can build a community ;)