Hacker News Reader

Coming up with new words and terms in order to escape the comparison smacks of This Time It’s Different. Therac-25 was an Agent for performing radiation therapy - it controlled the radiation machine and made decisions. Autopilot/FSD is supposed to be a tool for the driver and it fails to be a reliable tool by driving into things.

This Time It’s Not Different At All

View on HN

Agent - Something that makes decisions and actions that are not pre-programmed or predictable. Humans are definitely agents. LLM (eg Chat-GPT) are not quite there yet (they don't take action on their own).

Tool - Pretty much everything humanity has made to date. It does a preprogrammed thing or provides mechanical advantage. But it does not act on novel decisions it is making.

The terms come from an AI safety expert that Lex Friedman interviewed recently. [1]

Tesla FSD is almost an agent, though it asks a human to be ready to take over at any time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNr6gPelJ3E

Autopilot is NOT advertised as being able to drive perfectly on its own, and your disingenuous analogies won't change that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com