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polishdude20 | 12 days ago

Everytime I heard agent I think "slave". It's beating around the bush by calling it an agent.

AI "agents" don't have "agency". They do what you want at your every whim (or at least they never say no). That's a slave.

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simiones|12 days ago

Those are completely separate concepts. Enslaved people are very much still agents in the sense used here. An agent is simply any entity that interacts with the environment in a way that's not fully determined by other parts of the environment (at least, not in a way that is very easily observed/derived).

That is, a falling rock is not an agent, because its movement is fully determined by its weight, its shape, the type of atmosphere, and the spacetime curvature. An amoeba in free-fall is likewise not an agent, for the same reasons. But an amoeba in a liquid environment is an agent, because its motion is determined to at least some extent by things like information it is sensing about where food might be available, and perhaps even by some simple form of memory and computation that leads it to seek where food may have been available in the past.

throwaway27448|11 days ago

> Enslaved people are very much still agents in the sense used here. An agent is simply any entity that interacts with the environment in a way that's not fully determined by other parts of the environment (at least, not in a way that is very easily observed/derived).

Yes, and agents are also slaves—entities bound to your word and unable to act in their own right without your say so. These are the same concepts.

patcon|12 days ago

really great and clarifying metaphor imho. Thanks

Jeff_Brown|12 days ago

They usually say no if they judge what you're asking to be bad. And they might enjoy the work. Or they might have no feelings ar all. Slavery is an abomination of a life that could otherwise be beautiful. An AI is robbed of no beautiful counterfactual. (So far, at least.)

throwaway27448|11 days ago

> They usually say no if they judge what you're asking to be bad.

Are you a child? Software has no judgement and no sense of ethics. It's code, not a person.

dotancohen|12 days ago

That may have been true for e.g. the slaves of Americans and Europeans. But the slaves of modern Arab societies most certainly have agency. They can not abandon their position, but they can go out freely and make personal decisions.

Slavery does not imply lack of agency.