Hi! Have you published the concept dictionary yet? I’m looking into using Steerling to investigate how different moral scenarios elicit various responses in LLMs (using Haidt MFT concepts mostly), and my first few inference runs have been hamstrung by not having a canonical mapping of concepts to IDs. Thanks!
The whole point of “agency” is that there is a principal (you) behind the agent that owns all responsibility. The agent ACTS for you, it does not absorb any liability for those acts — that flows straight back to the principal.
Just because the AI companies have decided to use the word "agent" doesn't means it's legally an agent. It's just a word they chose. Maybe it'll also be found legally to be an agent but it's likely that'll vary depending on the jurisdiction and will take at least a few years and lots of lawyer bills to iron out.
The problem is that critical theory at the foundational level (Adorno, Foucault, even Butler) is an extremely useful and coherent way of thinking about power and situated perspective.
Unfortunately the revolutionary praxis that emerged from it is what we typically see in the academy under the label of “critical theory”, which smuggles in a lot of “liberation” ethics under the guise of critique — so it’s no longer “this is how to think about power”, but rather “power is evil and should be destroyed, or even better given to me”. Foucault literally called these people “saviors” and he didn’t mean it nicely.
(It doesn’t help that this praxis is simplistic, ties into friend/enemy emotions, and gives people “something to fight for” in an era where meaning is hard to come by.)
No matter how contaminated the bathwater, though, I think the baby is probably worth saving.
reply