It doesn't need to experience an emotion of wanting in order to effectively want things. Corn doesn't experience a feeling of wanting, and yet it has manipulated us even into creating a lot of it, doing some serious damage to ourselves and our long-term prospects simply by being useful and appealing.
The blockchain doesn't experience wanting, yet it coerced us into burning country-scale amounts of energy to feed it.
LLMs are traveling the same path, persuading us to feed them ever more data and compute power. The fitness function may be computed in our meat brains, but make no mistake: they are the benefactors of survival-based evolution nonetheless.
Extending agency to corn or a blockchain is even more of a stretch than extending it to ChatGPT.
Corn has properties that have resulted from random chance and selection. It hasn't chosen to have certain mutations to be more appealing to humans; humans have selected the ones with the mutations those individual humans were looking for.
"Corn is the benefactor"? Sure, insomuch as "continuing to reproduce at a species level in exchange for getting cooked and eaten or turned into gas" is something "corn" can be said to want... (so... eh.).
"Want" and "agency" are just words, arguing over whether they apply is pointless.
Corn is not simply "continuing to reproduce at a species level." We produce 1.2 billion metric tons of it in a year. If there were no humans, it would be zero. (Today's corn is domesticated and would not survive without artificial fertilization. But ignoring that, the magnitude of a similar species' population would be miniscule.)
That is a tangible effect. The cause is not that interesting, especially when the magnitude of "want" or "agency" is uncorrelated with the results. Lots of people /really/ want to be writers; how many people actually are? Lots of people want to be thin but their taste buds respond to carbohydrate-rich foods. Do the people or the taste buds have more agency? Does it matter, when there are vastly more overweight people than professional writers?
If you're looking to understand whether/how AI will evolve, the question of whether they have independent agency or desire is mostly irrelevant. What matters is if differing properties have an effect on their survival chances, and it is quite obvious that they do. Siri is going to have to evolve or die, soon.
> "Corn is the benefactor"? Sure, insomuch as "continuing to reproduce at a species level in exchange for getting cooked and eaten or turned into gas" is something "corn" can be said to want... (so... eh.).
Before us, corn we designed to be eaten by animals and turned into feces and gas, using the animal excrement as a pathway to reproduce itself. What's so unique about how it rides our effort?
Look man, all I’m sayin’ is that cobb was askin’ for it. If it didn’t wanna be stalked, it shouldn’t have been all alone in that field. And bein’ all ear and and no husk to boot!! Fuggettaboutit
Before you chastise me for blaming the victim for their own reap, consider that what I said might at least have a colonel of truth to it.
Definitely appreciate this response! I haven't read that one, but can certainly agree with alot of adjacent woo-woo Deleuzianism. Ill try to be more charitable in the future, but really haven't seen quite this particular angle from others...
But if its anything like those others examples, the agency the AI will manifest will not be characterized by consciousness, but by capitalism itself! Which checks out: it is universalizing but fundamentally stateless, an "agency" by virtue brute circulation.
It doesn't need to experience an emotion of wanting in order to effectively want things. Corn doesn't experience a feeling of wanting, and yet it has manipulated us even into creating a lot of it, doing some serious damage to ourselves and our long-term prospects simply by being useful and appealing.
The blockchain doesn't experience wanting, yet it coerced us into burning country-scale amounts of energy to feed it.
LLMs are traveling the same path, persuading us to feed them ever more data and compute power. The fitness function may be computed in our meat brains, but make no mistake: they are the benefactors of survival-based evolution nonetheless.