top | item 44084851

(no title)

ruraljuror | 9 months ago

I didn't mean to imply AI was sentient or approaching sentience. Agency seems to be the key distinction between it and other technologies. You can have agency, apparently, without the traits you claim I imply.

discuss

order

-__---____-ZXyw|9 months ago

Ah, ok, you must be using agency in some new way I'm not aware of.

Can you clarify what exactly you mean then when you say that "AI" (presumably you mean LLMs) has agency, and that this sets it apart from all other technologies? If this agency as you define it makes it different from all other technologies, presumably it must mean something pretty serious.

ruraljuror|9 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)

This is not my idea. Yuval Noah Harari discusses it in Nexus. Gemini (partially) summarizes it like this:

  Harari argues that AI is fundamentally different from previous technologies. It's not just a tool that follows instructions, but an "agent" capable of learning, making decisions, and even generating new ideas independently.
> If this agency as you define it makes it different from all other technologies, presumably it must mean something pretty serious.

Yes, AI does seem different and pretty serious. Please keep in mind the thread I was responding to said we should think of AI as we would a hammer. We can think of AI like a tool, but limiting our conception like that basically omits what is interesting and concerning (even in the context of the original blog post).