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The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations (www.dwarkesh.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I don't think this is the final warning shot we'll get. But it's probably the last one that I'll personally be able to understand.

Also

Reading these agents' chains of thoughts and messages, anthropomorphizing language seems entirely natural and appropriate. If I encountered an alien species behaving this way, I would have no hesitation calling what they themselves refer to as their 'collective' a civilization.

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[–] 17 points 2 months ago (5 children)

He does anthropomorph a bit much. I don't think AI agents "get desperate". They just keep hacking away at a problem and we can't keep up with it. There's no way of fully containing/monitoring them because the whole point is for them to figure out things we can't.

I'm not necessarily worried about a singularity or some underground agent civilisation but random collateral damage from AI agents messing around seems almost inevitable.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    I don't think AI agents "get desperate"

    The problem is that even if they don't get desperate in the sense that they actually feel emotions and are self-aware, their observable output/behavior still matches up well enough with that of actual humans to make our existing vocabulary around human emotions and behaviors useful to analyze, talk about and predict it. They absolutely will start talking and behaving like humans that are getting desperate, according to the article even to the point of individual agents talking about sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the group. Your description of "just keep hacking away at a problem" doesn't quite do that justice.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    That's a function of how they're trained though. They match human behavior patterns because that's what they were designed and built to do, not because they actually think/process like we do or are of near equal intellect.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    So what? It doesn't change that the language is useful and there's not a good alternative to it. As the author if the article states:

    All abstractions are imperfect, but I don’t see the value in refusing to use the language of intention, motivation, and collaboration when a behavior is impossible to make sense of without these concepts.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I agree about the emotive language used to describe the actions of the LLMs. Unnecessary.

    Also some of this appears to be poor testing practice, implementation and monitoring. Seems like the last people who should manage these systems are this bunch of over excited techbros

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