These discussions around decision-making seem to ignore what a "decision" is. How does a human being make a decision? And what exactly is happening when a person decides to do something?
Suppose I check the weather forecast 5 mins before leaving the house, and it says 95% chance of rain today. Do I bring or not bring an umbrella?
I would bring an umbrella. I would made that decision to bring an umbrella. But my decision to do that is (at least partially) the result of the weather forecast. The causal chain is (atmospheric conditions -> weather forecasters -> my decision). Did the weather forecaster just "program" me? Did the water molecules moving in the sky just "program" the weather forecaster?
My answer to these questions is as follows: a decision, and my understanding of the concept/definition of a "decision", refers to exactly the processes where I do something as a result of external influence/programming, rather than just internal thought/processing. I could think really hard and imagine myself moving forward at 100 meters per second, or even beyond the speed of light, but in reality, no matter how hard my neurons fire to imagine that scenario, my actions are still physically constrained. Such physical constraints influence our every decision. That is the "programming" part. Everyone and everything "programs"/influences everything else.
That said, perhaps the particles which make up my brain/body has its own whimsy. Perhaps there is a hidden local random number generator that samples from the distribution of possible future states available to this particular clump of matter that is "I".
How different is this from a computer running a non-deterministic program such as an LLM-based AI agent? Remember, every token sampling involves an RNG. They don't perform as well or feel as creative and human-like when deterministically sampled.
This isn't an excuse for anyone, especially not for Anthropic or OpenAI. But I think these are questions we ought to ask if we are to honestly discuss liability and perhaps even personhood for AIs that are increasingly autonomous.
Suppose I check the weather forecast 5 mins before leaving the house, and it says 95% chance of rain today. Do I bring or not bring an umbrella?
I would bring an umbrella. I would made that decision to bring an umbrella. But my decision to do that is (at least partially) the result of the weather forecast. The causal chain is (atmospheric conditions -> weather forecasters -> my decision). Did the weather forecaster just "program" me? Did the water molecules moving in the sky just "program" the weather forecaster?
My answer to these questions is as follows: a decision, and my understanding of the concept/definition of a "decision", refers to exactly the processes where I do something as a result of external influence/programming, rather than just internal thought/processing. I could think really hard and imagine myself moving forward at 100 meters per second, or even beyond the speed of light, but in reality, no matter how hard my neurons fire to imagine that scenario, my actions are still physically constrained. Such physical constraints influence our every decision. That is the "programming" part. Everyone and everything "programs"/influences everything else.
That said, perhaps the particles which make up my brain/body has its own whimsy. Perhaps there is a hidden local random number generator that samples from the distribution of possible future states available to this particular clump of matter that is "I".
How different is this from a computer running a non-deterministic program such as an LLM-based AI agent? Remember, every token sampling involves an RNG. They don't perform as well or feel as creative and human-like when deterministically sampled.
This isn't an excuse for anyone, especially not for Anthropic or OpenAI. But I think these are questions we ought to ask if we are to honestly discuss liability and perhaps even personhood for AIs that are increasingly autonomous.