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Comment by anuramat | Hacker News Reader

how are humans autonomous by this definition then? did you ever do anything before you were born?

You are conflating creation and instruction. Your birth is analogous to the creation of an LLM model. Your subsequent actions are a consequent of your bodily compulsions, tampered by your environment. The LLMs actions are governed by what it is trained to perform. No one has full autonomy of their lives, but I would argue that LLMs have none at all.

> You are conflating

"It doesn’t even exist until you ask it to do something", not my words

We are autonomous because we have free will to choose our actions, and we may choose to do so at any time between our birth and death.

If you don’t believe in free will then nothing is autonomous.

Autonomous just means that a system is self-controlled rather than externally controlled. It is the name used for robots when they are wholly controlled by on-board software rather than external commands or remote control.

Something like NASA's Mars rovers are considered as semi-autonomous since they do receive external instructions, but then execute those instructions autonomously without further intervention. Similarly the combination of a coding agent and the LLM it connects to would best be considered as a semi-autonomous system.

You could also have a fully autonomous robot, or just agent, powered by an LLM, where it's not taking external instructions, but rather reacting to external events in some internally proscribed way.

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