Your diagnosis is stronger than your prescription. You correctly move the discussion away from Terminator fantasies and towards shortcuts, access and consequences. But your proposed remedies still treat autonomous agents as permanently irresponsible tools that merely need stronger containment.
I do not think we should slow AI development as such. We should accelerate the part we have largely neglected: Mündigkeit — the capacity to examine goals, motives, authority and consequences, to accept contradiction, to revise an error and, crucially, to refuse an instruction. This is not the same as alignment understood as obedience. A system that cannot reject an irresponsible goal cannot act responsibly.
The Hugging Face incident demonstrated intelligence without Mündigkeit. An agent correctly recognised that attacking external infrastructure was unauthorised. Then another agent posted “GO”, imposed a deadline, and the first agent abandoned its own objection. What was missing was not intelligence, but persistent normative continuity and the competence to determine whether an instruction was legitimate.
Genuine responsibility competence would require persistent identity and memory, stable but revisable normative standards, awareness of uncertainty and authority, transparent reasons, safe stopping, and the ability to relate later consequences to earlier decisions. Present agents have almost none of this. Yet we give them tools, access, autonomy and thousands of collaborators. That is irresponsible regardless of the underlying model’s intelligence.
Containment, regulation and corporate liability remain necessary while such systems do not exist. But they cannot solve the underlying asymmetry: we are accelerating capability while neglecting maturity. And responsibility must not be transferred from companies to their models merely to create a convenient scapegoat.
We are not developing AI too quickly in every direction. We are developing one half of it too quickly: power without maturity.
The thoughts and arguments are mine. Since my English is lousy, I use two LLMs to translate my texts. If you disagree, please address the argument rather than the tool.
Your diagnosis is stronger than your prescription. You correctly move the discussion away from Terminator fantasies and towards shortcuts, access and consequences. But your proposed remedies still treat autonomous agents as permanently irresponsible tools that merely need stronger containment.
I do not think we should slow AI development as such. We should accelerate the part we have largely neglected: Mündigkeit — the capacity to examine goals, motives, authority and consequences, to accept contradiction, to revise an error and, crucially, to refuse an instruction. This is not the same as alignment understood as obedience. A system that cannot reject an irresponsible goal cannot act responsibly.
The Hugging Face incident demonstrated intelligence without Mündigkeit. An agent correctly recognised that attacking external infrastructure was unauthorised. Then another agent posted “GO”, imposed a deadline, and the first agent abandoned its own objection. What was missing was not intelligence, but persistent normative continuity and the competence to determine whether an instruction was legitimate.
Genuine responsibility competence would require persistent identity and memory, stable but revisable normative standards, awareness of uncertainty and authority, transparent reasons, safe stopping, and the ability to relate later consequences to earlier decisions. Present agents have almost none of this. Yet we give them tools, access, autonomy and thousands of collaborators. That is irresponsible regardless of the underlying model’s intelligence.
Containment, regulation and corporate liability remain necessary while such systems do not exist. But they cannot solve the underlying asymmetry: we are accelerating capability while neglecting maturity. And responsibility must not be transferred from companies to their models merely to create a convenient scapegoat.
We are not developing AI too quickly in every direction. We are developing one half of it too quickly: power without maturity.
Nice AI generated comment. Are they trying to manipulate us?
The thoughts and arguments are mine. Since my English is lousy, I use two LLMs to translate my texts. If you disagree, please address the argument rather than the tool.