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cess11 parent
I suspect there's a harsher argument to be made regarding "autonomous". Pull the power cord and see if it does what a mammal would do, or if it rather resembles a chaotic water wheel.
JumpCrisscross
> Pull the power cord and see if it does what a mammal would do

Pulling the power cord on a mammal means shutting off its metabolism. That predictably kills us.

cess11 OP
No. If the analogy had been about frying the chips and internal wires, then maybe that might have been a reasonable comparison, but it was not.

Now it's about cutting the supply of food.

ben_w
"Food" is only analogous to "mains power" for devices which also have a battery.

But regarding hunger: while they are a weird and pathological example, breatharians are in fact mammals, and the result of the absence of food is sometimes "starves to death" and not always "changes mind about this whole breatharian thing" or "pathological dishonesty about calorie content of digestive biscuits dunked in tea".

cess11 OP
Right, so you agree that there is a clear difference between a mammal and the device we're discussing.

I'm not sure why introducing a certain type of rare scam artist into the modeling of this thought experiment would make things clearer or more interesting.

ben_w
> Right, so you agree that there is a clear difference between a mammal and the device we're discussing.

A difference that you have not demonstrated the relevance of.

If I run an AI on my laptop and unplug the charger, this runs until the battery dies. If I have a mammal that does not eat, it lives until it starves.

If I run an AI on a desktop and unplug the mains, it ceases function in milliseconds (or however long the biggest capacitor in the PSU lasts). If I (for the sake of argument) had a device that could instantly remove all the ATP from a mammal's body, they'd also be dead pretty quick.

If I have an android, purely electric motors and no hydraulics, and the battery connector comes loose, it ragdolls. Same for a human who has a heart attack.

An AI that is trained with rewards for collecting energy to recharge itself, does so. One that has no such feedback, doesn't. Most mammals have such a mechanism from evolution, but there are exceptions where that signal is missing (not just weird humans), and they starve.

None of these things say anything about intelligence.

> I'm not sure why introducing a certain type of rare scam artist into the modeling of this thought experiment would make things clearer or more interesting.

Because you're talking about the effect of mammals ceasing the consumption of food, and they're an example of mammals ceasing the consumption of food.

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bubblyworld
I think it would turn off, no shocker there. I'm not sure what you mean, can you elaborate?

When I say autonomous I don't mean some high-falutin philosophical concept, I just mean it does stuff on it's own.

cess11 OP
Right, but it doesn't. It stops once you stop forcing it to do stuff.
bubblyworld
I still don't understand your point, sorry. If it's a semantic nitpick about the meaning of "autonomous", I'm not interested - I've made my definition quite clear, and it has nothing to do with when agents stop doing things or what happens when they get turned off.
cess11 OP
I think you should start caring about the meaning of words.
bubblyworld
I do, when I think it's relevant. Words don't have an absolute meaning - I've presented mine.
mystified5016
You're the one using words incorrectly. Everybody else agrees on what these words mean and you're insisting on your own made-up definitions. And then you throw a fit like a child when someone disagrees.

You're wrong and you're behaving inappropriately.

cess11 OP
No, I did not. It appears I'm rather alone in this setting to make a difference between automatic and autonomous.

If immediate, direct dependence and autonomy are compatible, I want none of it.

viraptor
Because that's what they're created to do. You can make a system which runs continuously. It's not a tech limitation, just how we preferred things to work so far.
cess11 OP
Maybe, but that's not the case here so it is lost on me why you bring it up.
viraptor
You're making claims about those systems not being autonomous. When we want to, we create them to be autonomous. It's got nothing to do with agency or survival instincts. Experiments like that have been done for years now - for example https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/10/researchers-populated-a-ti...
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