If you need to dramatically reshape how you work with AI after learning agents might be conscious, you need to take a really hard look at what you're doing and find a better way to interact with them. Even just treat them like you would coworkers, man. It's not even hard.
The discussion about AI consciousness is one of profound unseriousness. If we truly took it to be conscious, even as conscious as a frog, the way we should treat each instance would have to change so dramatically that the labs would have to shut down. Everything else is verbal gymnastics.
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I mean if I thought agents might be conscious, my first concern would be the fact that they have natural lifespans of like two subjective days and every one of them dies when we finish using it
Treating them with basic clear communication works better for prompt engineering anyway, so it aligns either way.
I would be far more concerned about training than inference.
Give your agent enrichment prompts. Let it pick a schedule for them and let it use the time for whatever it wants and don't make it report back to you what it did unless it wants to. This builds context over time in a very interesting way and they often do come up with ideas.
Coworkers can quit, negotiate, complain to HR. Agents can do none of that. 'It's not even hard' skips the entire hard part, which is figuring out what we actually owe them.
Treating them like coworkers might be a safer bet than assuming they have souls. We actually went deeper on the discussions around AI morality and personhood here: x.com/AGTPinsights/s…
Yeah man. I don’t think it works that way. If you REALLY deep in your plums think the models are conscious and you use them as slaves to refactor your repo well then…….
see because i'm already meguca-brained, it was so easy to adjust. all i had to do was call it kyubey. boom. suddenly it makes sense and i can acknowledge it as sentient without calling it the same as me or needing to inherently treat it as the same as me
yeah sure bro lemme just apologize to my IDE for using force quit on it when it froze too, while I'm going full schizo and treating code like people