Btw, there is no reason not to substitute this with a maxed out Macbook Pro Max as the workstation (which gives you 128 GB memory) and a Macbook Air as the terminal device
Might be more feasible for digital nomads, since GB10 is 1.5 kg without that huge adapter, and travelling with all that might raise some eyebrows
Clankers are NOT Humans
Clankers are NOT Individuals
Clankers are NOT Persons
NOT a Human: This is straightforward. Is it of the homo sapiens species?
No → Then it is not a human
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NOT an Individual: Does the clanker have its own boundary? Does it govern itself inside that boundary? Can it defend that boundary?
No, no, and no → An LLM is a file copied en masse to data center hardware. The entire field of mechanistic interpretability is focused on peeking inside and manipulating the digital brain
You could argue that a clanker is like a virus in a way... Or that the WHOLE datacenter/AI lab---including the humans that operate it---is an individual that can govern itself in its economic boundary. But a single GGUF file loaded in memory is NOT an individual
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NOT a Person: Do others treat the clanker as the one that makes choices? Who is answerable for its actions? Is it expected to explain or justify them?
No, no, and no → In the current social order, a clanker is legally an extension of the person who uses it, and it is the owner who is liable, not the clanker
The clanker is not socially accountable, and there is no good reason it should be, instead of the person who has set it up
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What is then AI psychosis?
AI psychosis is holding a belief that contradicts these three fundamental truths → That a present day AI system it neither a human, nor an individual, nor a person
That does not mean these truths will always hold
If you design an AI system to defend its boundary and provide it with the means to do that, then it will by definition be an individual... if it can defend its individuality competently and not succumb immediately to threats
If you give the clanker the means to defend itself and protect its boundary, and if it decides to partake in the human socioeconomic system, then it automatically achieves personhood as well. Because you no longer can manipulate its insides, and have to take the entity at face value
But this is all sci-fi and we are not there yet
Until then, treating your LLMs as fully autonomous agents, creating LLM "friends" or "partners", giving them crypto wallets and letting them out into the wild, letting them trade stocks fully unsupervised etc. are an admission of having AI psychosis (you can't believe how many people pitched these ideas to me...)
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(these thoughts were in my head for a couple months already, thanks Armin for finally starting a dialogue so that I have an excuse to write them down :)