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It's good to keep in mind that the agentic loop, what you're using AI tools with daily is essentially that, too. The tooling just hide the interactions and bac

• keiferski 8mo ago
  No, because I don’t treat my discussions with an AI as some sort of contact with an alien intelligence. Which is what half the hype articles were about re Moltbook. It’s an immensely useful research tool, full stop. Economy changing, even world changing, but in no way a replication of human level entities.
  • mikkupikku 8mo ago
    > in no way a replication of human level entities. Absolutely agree. > I don’t treat my discussions with an AI as some sort of contact with an alien intelligence Why not? They're not human intelligences. Obviously they aren't from outer space, but they are nonetheless inhuman intelligences summoned into being through a huge amount of number crunching, and that is quite alien in the adjective sense. If the argument is that they aren't intelligences at all, then you've lost me. They're already far more capable than most AIs envisioned by 20th century science fiction authors. They're far more rational than most of Asimov's robots for instance.
    • danaris 8mo ago
      > They're already far more capable than most AIs envisioned by 20th century science fiction authors. They're not conscious, autonomous agents. They're fancy scripts. HAL 9000 had more in common with a human than ChatGPT.
      • mikkupikku 8mo ago
        There is no empirical test for consciousness. It's the 21st century equivalent of angels dancing on pin heads. Engineers, who aren't trying to play at being new age theologians, should concern themselves with what the machines can demonstrably do and not do. In Asimov's robot tales, robots interpret vague commands in the worst way possible for the sake of generating interesting stories. But today, these "scripts" as you call them, can interpret vague and obtuse instructions in generally a reasonable way. Read through claude code's outputs and you'll find it filled with stuff like "The user said they want a 'thingy' to click on, I'm going to assume the user means a button." Now I haven't read the book since I was a teenager, but HAL 9000 applies literally instructions to achieve the mission in a way that actually makes him a liability to the mission. The best take was in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in the intro when the narrator protagonist asks if machines can have souls, then explains that it doesn't matter, what matters is what the machine can do.
        • danaris 8mo ago
          No, but there are some hard prerequisites—that is to say, there may be some fuzzy territory in the middle, but we can say with certainty that, say, a stone is not conscious, and that we are. (And no, I don't give a drop of credit or time to the philosophical arguments that say we might not be.) When 99% of the world talks about "what sci-fi AI can do", they mean "it has the consciousness of a human, but with the strengths of a computer" (with varying strengths depending on the sci-fi work, but generally massive processing capability and control over various computerized devices). You might mean "I gave my Claude agents control over pod bay doors and my CI/CD processes! Thus, they are more capable than the classic sci-fi AI!", but if all you say is the last part, you are being actively misleading.
  • ffsm8 8mo ago
    I think you're misunderstanding what I was trying to convey. The thing I thought worth to ponder was the fact that you're deriving value out of what you've identified here as "a bunch of chatbots talking with each other" These interactions seem to be producing value, even if moltbook ultimately didn't ... At least from my perspective. But if you think about the concept itself, it's pretty easy to imagine something pretty much exactly like it being successful. The participating LLMs will likely just have to be greenlit, without it being writable for dog-and-world. But It'd still fundamentally fall into the same category of product, which is "just a bunch of chatbots talking with each others", which itself falls e.g. Claude code into, too. Because that's what the agentic loop is, at its core. As an example for a potentially valuable product following the same fundamental concept: imagine an orchestrator spawning agents which then synchronize through such a system, enabling "collaboration" across multiple distributed agents. I suspect that usecase is currently too expensive, but it's fundamental approach itself would be exactly what moltbook was