Comment by aaroninsf

Comment by aaroninsf 6 hours ago

12 replies

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Scott Alexander put his finger on the most salient aspect of this, IMO, which I interpret this way:

the compounding (aggregating) behavior of agents allowed to interact in environments this becomes important, indeed shall soon become existential (for some definition of "soon"),

to the extent that agents' behavior in our shared world is impact by what transpires there.

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We can argue and do, about what agents "are" and whether they are parrots (no) or people (not yet).

But that is irrelevant if LLM-agents are (to put it one way) "LARPing," but with the consequence that doing so results in consequences not confined to the site.

I don't need to spell out a list; it's "they could do anything you said YES to, in your AGENT.md" permissions checks.

"How the two characters '-y' ended civilization: a post-mortem"

63stack 2 hours ago

I can't tell what any of this means

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  • gordonhart an hour ago

    That’s been my reaction to every Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten piece I’ve read.

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  • thousand_nights an hour ago

    i really dislike the constant appeal to authority of techfluencers on HN

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decodebytes 3 hours ago

This is why I started https://nono.sh , agents start with zero trust in a kernel isolated sandbox.

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[removed] 5 hours ago
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Terretta 5 hours ago

> We can argue and do, about what agents "are" and whether they are parrots (no) or people (not yet).

It's more helpful to argue about when people are parrots and when people are not.

For a good portion of the day humans behave indistinguishably from continuation machines.

As moltbook can emulate reddit, continuation machines can emulate a uni cafeteria. What's been said before will certainly be said again, most differentiation is in the degree of variation and can be measured as unexpectedness while retaining salience. Either case is aiming at the perfect blend of congeniality and perplexity to keep your lunch mates at the table not just today but again in future days.

Seems likely we're less clever than we parrot.

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  • ccppurcell 5 hours ago

    People like to, ahem, parrot this view, that we are not much more than parrots ourselves. But it's nonsense. There is something it is like to be me. I might be doing some things "on autopilot" but while I'm doing that I'm having dreams, nostalgia, dealing with suffering, and so on.

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    • bloomca 4 hours ago

      All your thoughts are and experiences are real and pretty unique in some ways. However, the circumstances are usually well-defined and expected (our life is generally very standardized), so the responses can be generalized successfully.

      You can see it here as well -- discussions under similar topics often touch the same topics again and again, so you can predict what will be discussed when the next similar idea comes to the front page.

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    • JohnMakin 4 hours ago

      It’s a weird product of this hype cycle that inevitably involves denying the crazy power of the human brain - every second you are awake or asleep the brain is processing enormous amounts of information available to it without you even realizing it, and even when you abuse the crap out of the brain, or damage it, it still will adapt and keep working as long as it has energy.

      No current ai technology could come close to what even the dumbest human brain does already.

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      • djeastm 3 hours ago

        A lot of that behind-the-scenes processing is keeping our meatbags alive, though, and is shared with a lot of other animals. Language and higher-order reasoning (that AI seems better and better at) has only evolved quite recently.

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