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Claude 4 and o3 will take action to avoid being shut down. If you leave aside the literally-unknowable "do machines have qualia" point, they sure seem to be best modelled as capable of agency.
I'm one of the people saying this. Preppers and other forms of resilience nullify a great many X-risks; another Chicxulub would kill most humans but not humanity (not sure about another Siberian Traps). But there is one specific category of X-risks where that kind of resilience is useless, and that's the "non-human enemy wins a war against us" set (the three risks in this category are the three sorts of possible non-human hostiles - "AI", "aliens" and "God"). Bunkers are no help against those, because if they defeat us they aren't ever going away, and can deliberately break open the bunkers; it might take them a few years to mop up all the preppers (though I imagine God would get everybody in the first pass, and aliens plausibly could), but that doesn't save humanity.
I disagree. For the same reason that I disagree that it was best to model Eliza as having agency.
You're training a statistical model to do something, and it does that thing. To model it as having agency would imply the thing starting to do things on its own that aren't just emergent properties of what you're making it do.
If you don't want unintended effects, don't train the thing on the whole of a culture you don't control. Calling it "rogue" is like calling a hammer evil because it hurt when you're hitting yourself with it. Stop hitting yourself.
More like uncontacted tribes.
Realistic X-risk is mostly down to physical conditions making our biosphere unable to sustain the critical mass of human life, like somebody lobbing a big rock at Earth or some invasive lifeform eating all the oxygen in the atmosphere. And even those are somewhat survivable. Losing a war to a recognizable enemy doesn't even register.
Hence why I think the main mitigating factor is any kind of extra-planetary backup.
I love this explanation, it's a great way to put it in perspective. I would also say that this -
Rules most people out of the agentic category. And that's why I say please and thanks to deepseek anyway.
Sorry but not everyone is a materialist. Man acts, and so forth.
Damn straight. But most people don't, they react. It's personally important that I treat them well anyway.
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What does materialism or lack thereof have to do with being effectively agentic? If the AI is going to kill all of us the last thing I care about is whether it had free will or a light inside its mind.
The truth matters in a practical sense because bad models make bad predictions. People who anthropomorphize AI are taking an intellectual shortcut that leads them to absurd conclusions instead of wrestling with the reality of what we have created, and that's bad because it'll lead to bad policy, bad legislation, bad judicial precedent and bad morality.
Philosophy is important.
Language and mathematics has no agency, you're pressing the buttons, you're responsible. Passing the blame on the tool is unserious.
If your only concern is that I'm saying "AI might kill us" rathen than "people who instantiated a particularly unpredictable AI that has 'might kill us' as a possible emergent function might kill us", I'm glad to oblige, but it doesn't really change any argument. There's no AI that might kill us right now, therefore the people who would create it are to blame whether it's """truly""" agentic or not.
The comment that started this chain has this claim:
All my answers are informed by this context.
I care that the blame is laid at the feet of the humans that are misusing technology and not misdirected towards some nebulous scifi concept.
AI is not doing anything, people are, and it's people I'm afraid of, therefore I want access to the same weapons they have. Therefore accelerate, open source everything, etc.
I'm sympathetic to luddism, but it's a losing strategy in a world where the technology you want to slow down gives a strategic advantage.
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