There's longer thoughts to be written on conversations and texts that miss important points and carry on blathering. Or rather, ones that sound like that to me.
The one that's sticking with me of late is one of the conversations that keeps happening around AI taking over the world. You get commentary on the gushing uncritical reporting that the big AI companies get - criticism of this trend feels perfectly justified - more and more it feels like those who have drunk the cool aid have lost all ability to critically think when confronted with AI.
That said, I feel like the that doesn't appear in almost any discussion (or maybe it does and I just haven't seen those conversations) is about agency. Though I feel like amybe agency isn't quite the right word here.
Not agency in the sense of agentic approaches that occasional floats to the surface and gets all the buzzword bros all excited. Agency in the sense of a sense the ability to instigate a course of action. And not instigation in response to a stimulus, which is something that's in the agentic conversations.
I am currently sitting in a airport. I should be zoomed into the lab meeting, but queues were long, it had well started by the time a got a spot to sit, it's been a long week and to be perfectly honest, I just don't feel like it. Me writing this instead of jumping into the tail end of a meeting is a decision made in response to a number of external stimuli, but it's largely a process of me saying "fuck it, I'm going to go and do this other thing"
LLM's can do wonderful, error prone things with text. Agent's can be made to respond to certain situations. Image recognition systems and classifiers can make decisions about things. There's no entity with a sense of self, no sense of place in the world or the ability to instigate action on it's own cognizance.
I'm sure someone is working on these things somewhere. I haven't been able to find them. Once someone cracks that, I think things will get interesting. I suspect that's a fair way off though given the problem of defining the thing you're trying to create in the first place.
Until then, I think we have cope with the cool-aid drinkers you have confused some really excellent tools for a magic solution to all their dreams of not needing to care about other people.