A persuasive writer needs to model a reader and anticipate their wants and needs. That requires some modeling and working memory and appropriate context. Even though it is limited to one conversation, the evolution of that dynamical system – and specifically ephemeral reasoning steps -- seems to me it has a lot of the properties of conscious reflection. The long-term memories now reside in in conversation databases and aren’t even a part of the LLM. One might argue that’s a sort of humiliation or violation. Or perhaps we take our own personhood far too seriously. That somehow the lack of clear, isolatable axon firings or token generation support chauvinism about the merit of our own conscious experience.
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale Sent: Monday, August 10, 2026 10:27 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] worthwhile agent Ha. Yeah, this is adjacent to my recent sense of unreality. When these frontier shippers claim that their agents broke out of the "sandbox" and hacked such and such businesses (crypto wallets, etc), I wonder how this is or is not different than a lab leak. To what extent are these *hacked* businesses complicit? I suspect they would generally not care if there was an intentional actor at the core or not, lawsuits would follow. Meanwhile, we are to struggle with the ethical-philosophical quandaries of personhood implied by calling any of it AGI: Who or what is owned, does it have rights, can it be disposed of in the lab,... The whole thing smells of political coercion to me, a push for regulation to lock-in as winners the current frontier model leaders. Perhaps we are on the precipice of yet another long and cold AI winter?
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