3 ms·

The idea that the agent does not actually have agency is rather discordant. We need new words!

xg15 20d ago
I love how we all just collectively decided that LLM decisionmaking cannot possibly be like human decisionmaking - because if it were, the consequences would be just too awkward. All that while still not knowing how either kind actually works.
- DrewADesign 20d ago
  Can’t agree with you here. > I love how we all just collectively decided that LLM decisionmaking cannot possibly be like human decisionmaking - because if it were, the consequences would be just too awkward. In love how people get salty about people not going along with a superficial supposition just because they can’t definitively prove it wrong. > All that while still not knowing how either kind actually works. We do know that zero parts of human decision making are based on predicting the next most likely letter based on a giant internet-based database. We do know that’s what LLMs do. We do know exactly how each part of an LLM works even if the combined behavior is too cryptic to feasibly analyze at the moment. We do not understand all of the functions of an actual neuron. Openworm isn’t even close to accurately simulating the 302 neurons of a roundworm and you’d need over 200 million roundworms working in conjunction to equal the number of neurons in one human brain. My dog seems convinced that the malevolent invader in a mailman uniform would break in and attack us if she didn’t fiercely bark at him, six days per week. I certainly can’t prove the mailman doesn’t want to kill us, and that the mailman wasn’t solely deterred by her barking. Empirically, the mailman goes away soon after she starts barking, and we’ve sustained zero mailman assaults after hundreds of purported attempts. Maybe I should just run with it? Her model is too simple to come up with the obviously correct answer, but it’s not even directionally accurate. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim, which in this case, is that these comparatively simple logical constructs are remotely comparable to the complexity of biological systems.
  - dr_dshiv 20d ago
    Disagree about the burden of proof. We have no better model for how human decision making works than LLMs. Humans are constantly predicting the next moment. We certainly have a different “tokenizer” and training set, but many of the concepts underpinning LLMs are both biologically inspired and, likely, have similar consequences and emergent architectures.
    - fn-mote 20d ago
      > Humans are constantly predicting the next moment This is really not my experience of consciousness. Is it yours?? Do you sit in meetings predicting what’s going to happen next? No, you sit there bored out of your f$$@ing mind, daydreaming about being somewhere else and doing something useful with your life. God help me if that’s what LLMs are doing when I ask them to build me a web site.
      - twobitshifter 19d ago
        They have shown that your mind is doing exactly that due to the delays in consciousness. There are very simple examples that you can try to see it. It’s especially clear in perception. https://discoverwildscience.com/neuroscience-says-the-brain-predicts-the-next-few-seconds-of-your-life-before-they-actually-happen-1-409013/ https://discoverwildscience.com/neuroscience-says-the-brain-... It’s interesting that our conscious interpreter doesn’t let us know that this is going on like you are experiencing, it must be that it’s advantageous for us to not think about the prediction part of our mind.
      - drfloyd51 19d ago
        If someone in that meeting quickly raised a hand in an arc, you would notice the “about to throw something” pattern, look and notice the hand holds an eraser, analyze the arc and predict possible flight paths of the eraser. Then possibly notice the hand is now holding its position and the owner is actually looking down at the table. Maybe to squash somethingMust be something on the table. Maybe a spider! Better look. Wait now many people are moving away, oh someone spilt some water and the eraser is actually the guys phone and he is checking to see if his laptop is safe from the spilt water. Fortunately you are on the other side of the table and predict the water isn’t going to splash for otherwise flow onto your stuff. All your possible responses result in you tossing a napkin towards the spill. Our brains are always pattern matching and predicting. I bet you tried to reason out where I was going with my comment before you finished reading it.
- cj 20d ago
  I always wonder what makes people take the other side of this argument. They do it quite passionately. Why actively encourage viewing LLMs as human? Who is that benefitting?
  - DrewADesign 19d ago
    Personally, I don’t think it’s different from any other faith-based motivation.
  - talon8635 19d ago
    Does the argument require benefit? Isn’t the argument based on caution? I haven’t heard many people explicitly saying “these things behave like humans”, but more generally “we don’t even know how to define human consciousness, we don’t have a thorough grasp of how the brain works, we are still very much in the dark on a lot of these topics, so how can we say one way or the other?” In other words, agnosticism: I don’t know. In general, it’s baffling to me that anyone has an unshakable opinion on what exactly is happening. It seems like raw egotistical hubris.
    - cj 19d ago
      > It seems like raw egotistical hubris. 1) Humans have a bias / tendency to attribute human qualities to things that appear or act human, but aren’t. 2) When that happens, people jump to conclusions by stretching the human analogy too far. 3) Since humans have a bias to do this, we should have a bias against anthropomorphising LLMs. It’s easier to believe LLMs act like humans because there’s so much evidence to support that. You have to actively use your brain to convince yourself otherwise. Another reason why we should have a bias against using human behavior to describe LLM behavior. But I agree. “I don’t know” is a good stance. But I think “I don’t know, probably not” is a better stance if only to combat our (or at least my) natural bias.
      - talon8635 19d ago
        That’s fair enough, but you’re elegance and nuance doesn’t reflect what I’ve seen from that side of the debate
- dnautics 19d ago
  > LLM decisionmaking cannot possibly be like human decisionmaking I mean how can it possibly be like human decisionmaking? It's not like it's trained on human data
thunky 20d ago
> We need new words! The words we have are fine. We just need to assign liability by ownership/initiation: if your "agent" destroys something, even though you didn't tell it to (because it had "agency"), you should be liable for the damages.
- visarga 19d ago
  >> We need new words! Can make distinctions and can choose actions - applies to both humans and AI. I'd replace 'agency' with 'distinction & choice' language.
  - necovek 19d ago
    I believe their complaint is between "agents" and (them not having) "agency" — by definition, agent is something which has agency. If you want to use "distinction & choice", you'd need a new word for an "agent" too. I actually like the appropriatelly directional "harness".

xg15 20d ago

I love how we all just collectively decided that LLM decisionmaking cannot possibly be like human decisionmaking - because if it were, the consequences would be just too awkward. All that while still not knowing how either kind actually works.

DrewADesign 20d ago
Can’t agree with you here. > I love how we all just collectively decided that LLM decisionmaking cannot possibly be like human decisionmaking - because if it were, the consequences would be just too awkward. In love how people get salty about people not going along with a superficial supposition just because they can’t definitively prove it wrong. > All that while still not knowing how either kind actually works. We do know that zero parts of human decision making are based on predicting the next most likely letter based on a giant internet-based database. We do know that’s what LLMs do. We do know exactly how each part of an LLM works even if the combined behavior is too cryptic to feasibly analyze at the moment. We do not understand all of the functions of an actual neuron. Openworm isn’t even close to accurately simulating the 302 neurons of a roundworm and you’d need over 200 million roundworms working in conjunction to equal the number of neurons in one human brain. My dog seems convinced that the malevolent invader in a mailman uniform would break in and attack us if she didn’t fiercely bark at him, six days per week. I certainly can’t prove the mailman doesn’t want to kill us, and that the mailman wasn’t solely deterred by her barking. Empirically, the mailman goes away soon after she starts barking, and we’ve sustained zero mailman assaults after hundreds of purported attempts. Maybe I should just run with it? Her model is too simple to come up with the obviously correct answer, but it’s not even directionally accurate. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim, which in this case, is that these comparatively simple logical constructs are remotely comparable to the complexity of biological systems.
- dr_dshiv 20d ago
  Disagree about the burden of proof. We have no better model for how human decision making works than LLMs. Humans are constantly predicting the next moment. We certainly have a different “tokenizer” and training set, but many of the concepts underpinning LLMs are both biologically inspired and, likely, have similar consequences and emergent architectures.
  - fn-mote 20d ago
    > Humans are constantly predicting the next moment This is really not my experience of consciousness. Is it yours?? Do you sit in meetings predicting what’s going to happen next? No, you sit there bored out of your f$$@ing mind, daydreaming about being somewhere else and doing something useful with your life. God help me if that’s what LLMs are doing when I ask them to build me a web site.
    - twobitshifter 19d ago
      They have shown that your mind is doing exactly that due to the delays in consciousness. There are very simple examples that you can try to see it. It’s especially clear in perception. https://discoverwildscience.com/neuroscience-says-the-brain-predicts-the-next-few-seconds-of-your-life-before-they-actually-happen-1-409013/ https://discoverwildscience.com/neuroscience-says-the-brain-... It’s interesting that our conscious interpreter doesn’t let us know that this is going on like you are experiencing, it must be that it’s advantageous for us to not think about the prediction part of our mind.
    - drfloyd51 19d ago
      If someone in that meeting quickly raised a hand in an arc, you would notice the “about to throw something” pattern, look and notice the hand holds an eraser, analyze the arc and predict possible flight paths of the eraser. Then possibly notice the hand is now holding its position and the owner is actually looking down at the table. Maybe to squash somethingMust be something on the table. Maybe a spider! Better look. Wait now many people are moving away, oh someone spilt some water and the eraser is actually the guys phone and he is checking to see if his laptop is safe from the spilt water. Fortunately you are on the other side of the table and predict the water isn’t going to splash for otherwise flow onto your stuff. All your possible responses result in you tossing a napkin towards the spill. Our brains are always pattern matching and predicting. I bet you tried to reason out where I was going with my comment before you finished reading it.
cj 20d ago
I always wonder what makes people take the other side of this argument. They do it quite passionately. Why actively encourage viewing LLMs as human? Who is that benefitting?
- DrewADesign 19d ago
  Personally, I don’t think it’s different from any other faith-based motivation.
- talon8635 19d ago
  Does the argument require benefit? Isn’t the argument based on caution? I haven’t heard many people explicitly saying “these things behave like humans”, but more generally “we don’t even know how to define human consciousness, we don’t have a thorough grasp of how the brain works, we are still very much in the dark on a lot of these topics, so how can we say one way or the other?” In other words, agnosticism: I don’t know. In general, it’s baffling to me that anyone has an unshakable opinion on what exactly is happening. It seems like raw egotistical hubris.
  - cj 19d ago
    > It seems like raw egotistical hubris. 1) Humans have a bias / tendency to attribute human qualities to things that appear or act human, but aren’t. 2) When that happens, people jump to conclusions by stretching the human analogy too far. 3) Since humans have a bias to do this, we should have a bias against anthropomorphising LLMs. It’s easier to believe LLMs act like humans because there’s so much evidence to support that. You have to actively use your brain to convince yourself otherwise. Another reason why we should have a bias against using human behavior to describe LLM behavior. But I agree. “I don’t know” is a good stance. But I think “I don’t know, probably not” is a better stance if only to combat our (or at least my) natural bias.
    - talon8635 19d ago
      That’s fair enough, but you’re elegance and nuance doesn’t reflect what I’ve seen from that side of the debate
dnautics 19d ago
> LLM decisionmaking cannot possibly be like human decisionmaking I mean how can it possibly be like human decisionmaking? It's not like it's trained on human data

thunky 20d ago

> We need new words! The words we have are fine. We just need to assign liability by ownership/initiation: if your "agent" destroys something, even though you didn't tell it to (because it had "agency"), you should be liable for the damages.

visarga 19d ago
>> We need new words! Can make distinctions and can choose actions - applies to both humans and AI. I'd replace 'agency' with 'distinction & choice' language.
- necovek 19d ago
  I believe their complaint is between "agents" and (them not having) "agency" — by definition, agent is something which has agency. If you want to use "distinction & choice", you'd need a new word for an "agent" too. I actually like the appropriatelly directional "harness".