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by Diogenesian 14 days ago
I am not sure it makes sense to call an LLM a "being" even if it is AGI. They don't have free will, and I don't mean in any especially philosophical / theological sense. What I mean is that I run into a wild racoon, or even a wild ant, I treat it as a being with some sense of free will. Obviously I do the same with humans. It really makes no sense to treat an LLM like it has free will - prompting your agent "pretend to have free will for a bit, until context rot kicks in" is about as far as you can get.

I find it verrrrrry interesting that the Askell-adjacent philosophers don't discuss this. It does not actually make sense to me to say that a being lacks free will but is conscious.
2 comments
miyoji 14 days ago
> They don't have free will, and I don't mean in any especially philosophical / theological sense

Then you should not use that term. "Agency" or "intentionality" are much clearer alternatives that aren't wrapped up in centuries of debate that's irrelevant to what you're trying to communicate.

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SirHackalot 14 days ago
An LLM certainly won’t be AGI, whoever said something so ridiculous? I’m saying eventually, when/if we have an architecture that gives rise to artificial intelligence.
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Diogenesian 14 days ago
I was using Hassabis's bullshit pseudodefinition of AGI, meaning basically that it has a formally high IQ and doesn't forget about object permanence too too often, but is still basically dumber than a cat. If I'm using your definition then it seems like no GPU (or farm of GPUs) is capable of implementing it, and none of us will live to see it.

My point was really that intelligence and free will seem essentially orthogonal - the only overlap is how much brain glycogen an animal is willing to spend solving a tough problem. Regardless, whatever extent a computer program is "intelligent" is irrelevant to whether it is being enslaved. If you want to say free will is a "cognitive ability" then I will just point out we are talking about a bullshit pseudodefinition of AGI. In terms of actual intelligence, none of us will live to see a computer that's meaningfully smarter than a goldfish.

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pixl97 14 days ago
>none of us will live to see a computer that's meaningfully smarter than a goldfish.

I unfortunately do not have your optimism that humans won't do something as dumb as creating a smart computer. That our you're planning for us to die in the relatively near future.

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