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Comment by jwilliams | Hacker News Reader

> It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later.

This is true... Equally I've seen it dive into a rabbit hole, make some changes that probably aren't the right direction... and then keep digging.

This is way more likely with Sonnet, Opus seems to be better at avoiding it. Sonnet would happily modify every file in the codebase trying to get a type error to go away. If I prompt "wait, are you off track?" it can usually course correct. Again, Opus seems way better at that part too.

Admittedly this has improved a lot lately overall.

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I don't understand why anyone finds it interesting that a machine, or chatbot, never tires or gets demoralized. You have to anthromorphize the LLM before you can even think of those possibilities. A tractor never tires or gets demoralized either, because it can't. Chatbots don't "dive into a rabbit hole ... and then keep digging" because they have superhuman tenacity, they do it because that's what software does. If I ask my laptop to compute the millionth Fibonacci number it doesn't sigh and complain, and I don't think it shows any special qualities unless I compare it to a person given the same job.

You're a machine. You're literally a wet, analog device converting some forms of energy into other forms just like any other machine as you work, rest, type out HN comments, etc. There is nothing special about the carbon atoms in your body -- there's no metadata attached to them marking them out as belonging to a Living Person. Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention.

So, since you're just a machine, any text you generate should be uninteresting to me -- correct?

Alternatively, could it be that a sufficiently complex and intricate machine can be interesting to observe in its own right?

If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties.

>Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention

Evolution doesn't "teach" anything. It's just an emergent property of the fact that life reproduces (and sometimes doesn't). If you're going to have this radically reductionist view of humanity, you can't also treat evolution as having any kind of agency.

"If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties."

Yet.

Sure but the entire context of the discussion is surprisial that they don't.

Agreed - There is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. I'm not for or against the outcome, but certainly curious to see what it is.

Humans and all other organisms are "literally" not machines or devices by the simple fact that those terms refer to works made for a purpose.

Even as an analogy "wet machine" fails again and again to adequately describe anything interesting or useful in life sciences.

Wrong level of abstraction. And not the definition of machine.

I might feel awe or amazement at what human-made machines can do -- the reason I got into programming. But I don't attribute human qualities to computers or software, a category error. No computer ever looked at me as interesting or tenacious.

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