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by ForHackernews 2 hours ago
Kind of grim that this level of analysis is informing UK government policy. Repeatedly, the AI doesn't have the information or access needed through his hacky vibe-coded MCP, and instead of abandoning his flawed artificial test scenario (or fixing it — finding or building a better one) he gives it a name "The sensorium effect" and treats this as some brilliant insight.

Both humans and AI struggle to make sound choices when presented with incomplete or misleading information. This is not a new revelation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns

3 comments

Exactly this, he should've just fixed this, or not written an article about it.

After the 'sensorium effect' (he should've used ancient greek for a +10 bonus to archaic intellectual points), he describes the 'knowledge-doing gap'. i.e. the AI reasons it needs to build X, logs this for 110 turns in a row, but doesn't do it. It doesn't actually specify why not, and whether it is again a limitation of his MCP implementation. If the AI articulates it must do it like the author says, but decides not to, either it doesn't think it must do it, or it does think it must but somehow can't technically execute its own decisions, it can't be anything else.

In fact in the context of 'advising the UK government', this 'knowledge-doing gap' I assume is a technical limitation, is entirely moot. For the cost of 0.00001% of the UK's government you could just hire a human being to execute that which the AI articulates. I'm curious what the results would be if he just did a manual execution of the AI's articulated actions would be.

The fact he doesn't go in to this but just keeps repeating examples of this makes it a pointless article.

> he gives it a name "The sensorium effect" and treats this as some brilliant insight

And of course is unaware of prior work in this area!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

> he gives it a name

It gives it a name. It would be quite surprising if he bothered to come up with this name himself when the whole article is obviously AI written.