3 ms·

y'see, I would not define a system as "highly autonomous" if it only responds to requests. And I get that there are workarounds; effectively a cron job every s

y'see, I would not define a system as "highly autonomous" if it only responds to requests. And I get that there are workarounds; effectively a cron job every second prompting "do the next thing". But in my personal definition of "highly autonomous" it would not need prompting at all. It would be thinking all the time, independently of requests.

dragonwriter 8mo ago
The model is not the system. The model is a component of the system. The "cron job" (or other means by which a continuous action loop is implemented) and the necessary prompting for it to gather input (including subsequent user input or other external data) and to pursue a set of objectives which evolves based on input are all also parts of the system.
- marcus_holmes 8mo ago
  yeah, I get that. But the actual bit that's doing the thinking is restarting from scratch every time. It loads the context, does the next thing, maybe updates the context, shuts down. One second later the same thing. This is not "highly autonomous" Artifical Intelligence. Just IMHO. Other opinions are also valid.
  - dllthomas 8mo ago
    If you learned that a piece of the brain where meaningful computation takes place was stateless, would that cause you to question whether the human mind was "highly autonomous"?
    - marcus_holmes 7mo ago
      Good question. I don't know enough about neuroscience to really answer your question in depth. My opinion, uninformed as it is, is basically around the intuitive reasoning that something cannot be "highly autonomous" if it has to be kicked every second ;) Autonomous is defined as not needing to be controlled externally. And coupling that part with something as simple as cron job doesn't solve that in any meaningful way or make it "autonomous". A batch file coupled with a cron job that triggers it once a day is not an "autonomous system" to my mind. It's a scheduled system, and there's a significant difference between those things.
      - dragonwriter 7mo ago
        It seems to me that you are trying to define "autonomy" as a structural property rather than a behavioral one, and then adopting arbitrary rules as to what structures do not count as autonomous whether or not they produce the same behavior as structures which do. I guess that's fine, autonomy has lots of definitions (some in overlapping domains) and I guess one more doesn't hurt, but I'm pretty sure the intended use in the discussion here is the standard mechanical one where it is a behavioral trait defined by the capacity of a system to decide on action without the involvement of another system or operator, and therefore it is something that could be achieved by a system composed of a processing and action component called repeatedly by a looping component.
        marcus_holmes 7mo ago
        yeah, if we're just arguing semantics then I'm happy to let it go ;)
      - dllthomas 7mo ago
        I think I'd say that the batch file is not itself autonomous but the system as a whole is autonomous (if limited) but I'm not prepared to argue that's the correct definition.
  - dragonwriter 7mo ago
    > But the actual bit that's doing the thinking is restarting from scratch every time. A sibling comment questions the relevance of this by asking what would change if that were true of some low-level component of the human thinking engine, which is a good point, but also: what "actual bit" does this? Both commercial backends and even desktop inference software usually does prefix caching in memory, so arguably that doesn't model the core piece of software running low-level inference, except when either the past context is changed (e.g., when compacting to manage context, or if you are using one software instance and swapping logical histories because you are running multiple agents concurrently — but not in parallel — on one software engine.) And it obviously doesn't match the system at any higher level. > This is not "highly autonomous" Artifical Intelligence. Even if that was an accurate model of a component of the system, that a component considered alone is not highly autonomous artificial intelligence is not an argument that the aggregate system is not a highly anonymous artificial intelligence.

dragonwriter 8mo ago

The model is not the system. The model is a component of the system. The "cron job" (or other means by which a continuous action loop is implemented) and the necessary prompting for it to gather input (including subsequent user input or other external data) and to pursue a set of objectives which evolves based on input are all also parts of the system.

marcus_holmes 8mo ago
yeah, I get that. But the actual bit that's doing the thinking is restarting from scratch every time. It loads the context, does the next thing, maybe updates the context, shuts down. One second later the same thing. This is not "highly autonomous" Artifical Intelligence. Just IMHO. Other opinions are also valid.
- dllthomas 8mo ago
  If you learned that a piece of the brain where meaningful computation takes place was stateless, would that cause you to question whether the human mind was "highly autonomous"?
  - marcus_holmes 7mo ago
    Good question. I don't know enough about neuroscience to really answer your question in depth. My opinion, uninformed as it is, is basically around the intuitive reasoning that something cannot be "highly autonomous" if it has to be kicked every second ;) Autonomous is defined as not needing to be controlled externally. And coupling that part with something as simple as cron job doesn't solve that in any meaningful way or make it "autonomous". A batch file coupled with a cron job that triggers it once a day is not an "autonomous system" to my mind. It's a scheduled system, and there's a significant difference between those things.
    - dragonwriter 7mo ago
      It seems to me that you are trying to define "autonomy" as a structural property rather than a behavioral one, and then adopting arbitrary rules as to what structures do not count as autonomous whether or not they produce the same behavior as structures which do. I guess that's fine, autonomy has lots of definitions (some in overlapping domains) and I guess one more doesn't hurt, but I'm pretty sure the intended use in the discussion here is the standard mechanical one where it is a behavioral trait defined by the capacity of a system to decide on action without the involvement of another system or operator, and therefore it is something that could be achieved by a system composed of a processing and action component called repeatedly by a looping component.
      - marcus_holmes 7mo ago
        yeah, if we're just arguing semantics then I'm happy to let it go ;)
    - dllthomas 7mo ago
      I think I'd say that the batch file is not itself autonomous but the system as a whole is autonomous (if limited) but I'm not prepared to argue that's the correct definition.
- dragonwriter 7mo ago
  > But the actual bit that's doing the thinking is restarting from scratch every time. A sibling comment questions the relevance of this by asking what would change if that were true of some low-level component of the human thinking engine, which is a good point, but also: what "actual bit" does this? Both commercial backends and even desktop inference software usually does prefix caching in memory, so arguably that doesn't model the core piece of software running low-level inference, except when either the past context is changed (e.g., when compacting to manage context, or if you are using one software instance and swapping logical histories because you are running multiple agents concurrently — but not in parallel — on one software engine.) And it obviously doesn't match the system at any higher level. > This is not "highly autonomous" Artifical Intelligence. Even if that was an accurate model of a component of the system, that a component considered alone is not highly autonomous artificial intelligence is not an argument that the aggregate system is not a highly anonymous artificial intelligence.