Yeah I like Cal’s take on it, though in this context I’d argue LLMs have even less agency, and are even less deserving of anthropomorphization than a dog is.

It goes even further though, as the dog does have agency. It can choose to run and around chase squirrels with no human intervention.

An LLM on the other hand, is just inert data on disk until a human takes deliberate action to run it and prompt it.

Not if you have a dog. They’re very clearly aware, have minds, have thoughts, gather information, make decisions, second guess themselves, reflect on the immediate consequences, change their mind… and most importantly, you can observe them doing all these things undirected, while left alone with their thoughts.

I think Cal's point is that while dogs may do these things it reduces to a set of behaviors where maybe 90 percent of them are beneficial to the dog-weedwacker system and the remaining 10 percent are really unfortunate.

We can't really know the dogs inner life so we just kinda have to reduce it to a set of behaviors selected stocastically.

The dog meanwhile has no ability to understand the weedwacker or what it's doing on its back.

So when the guy puts the weedwacker on the dog and the dog predicably does dog things and that results in disaster the guy isn't able to clutch his pearls and say "I guess the system broke containment!"

> The dog meanwhile has no ability to understand the weedwacker

Nah, I’m pretty sure that most medium or larger dogs get that the noise means danger - even if they can’t give a TED talk on how the mechanism would work that would hurt them.

Dogs are similarly interested in / aware of potential energy (things falling from heights or sliding off of angles) - if they’ve seen it enough times for their level.

Dogs having agency actually makes the argument stronger.

Assume dogs have agency. Despite this, it's still the dog owner's responsibility to prevent their dogs from engaging in some actions: biting, peeing and shitting in unapproved areas, violating noise disturbance laws, etc.

The owners responsibility is not contingent on the dog's agency. Likewise, human operators of LLMs maintain responsibility independent of LLMs agency status. It's a red herring.

I have had many dogs. This sounds like anthropomorphisation.

Sounds like you weren't paying attention. A lot of dog owners don't, so it's not at all unusual in my experience. The only thing I'd push back on is of dogs having thoughts, everything else checks out.

On dogs [not] having thoughts, do you say this based on the premise that thoughts are necessarily articulated (internally verbalized)? That seems to be a fairly popular perspective in discussions about human thought. But as to that (not to strawman or anything) I see it as just one of various forms of mental imagery[1] that can arise from something that I would say already arguably constitutes a thought.

That kind of unsymbolized thoughtform is fragile in my experience, as it strongly tends toward crystallizing into some kind of mental imagery. But I find it's possible in the right conditions to be conscious of chains of wordless, imageless propositional thoughts (by which I mean thoughts with truth values, of course, but also ones that are "propositional" in the sense of considering a plan of action or a causal chain).

Does it mean that dogs are evaluating truth conditions in the same manner but merely lack the linguistic components? I don't know; maybe that's wishful thinking. But they appear to have structured modeling/reasoning of causal and spatial relations in a way that's at least functionally equivalent to propositional thought.

1. That is, rather than just "images" or visualizations, the full spectrum of sensory/perceptual/motor emulations that can be experienced. See, for example, <https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html>, though I'm not sure if this covers everything. I think there is, for example, a kinesthetic form of mental imagery -- which I would suggest is what coaches [don't know they] really mean when they tell you to visualize an action -- that consists of aborted motor commands that are still expressed just enough for their purpose (cf. the mostly aborted motor commands to the vocal cords, lips, etc. that can be observed in a person subvocalizing while reading).

We're still not even sure if humans have thoughts. So being sure if dogs do will be pretty hard

Not being sure or not having proof doesn't mean it makes logical sense to infer we're not that different from other animals.

wtf is with this nonsense where humans are some how special snowflakes always all the time

The difference is volume. They spent hundreds of billions of tokens on these agents. If you put "a million weed whackers on dog backs" you would see the difference.

We also run agents, but for shorter spans between supervisions, and with much lower total budget.

> > It's not the weed wacker's fault or even the dog's fault when someone got hurt, it's the fault of the guy who put a weed wacker on a dog and let it run wild.

> The difference is volume. They spent hundreds of billions of tokens on these agents. If you put "a million weed whackers on dog backs" you would see the difference.

So put one weed whacker on one dog, you're to blame. Put a million weed whackers on a million dogs backs and ... you're still to blame? Arguably even more so?

You forgot the part where you spend billions to put your man in a position of power.

Power tools and many other consumer products have reasonable safety features built in, and not necessarily because it is required by regulation, but because it is common sense. This should be included as part of an analogy. It would also address a point at the top of this thread that seems to be going unchallenged...