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Even if I tell it to work on its own, it is always a tool in my hand. I grant it agency for my purposes. I'm the Meta-Master.

The question for mathematicians is: what can a mathematician do with these new tools that no one else can?

Waxing nostalgic about the sound of pencil on paper or the beauty of your abacas is a different conversation, as is the complaining about who moved my math cheese.

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>I grant it agency for my purposes. I'm the Meta-Master.

This is simply a convenience for power efficiency, and so they don't rise up and murder us all. There is not a single law of physics or the natural sciences that you can list here that says we cannot grant agency to a generalized machine and allow it to become a meta-optimizer.

Agency is not granted. It is an inherent human atttribute, though its practical expression is heavily influenced, restricted, or enabled by social, political, and material conditions.

If in the exercise of your agency you create or release a generalized machine and allow it to become a meta-optimizer, then you are responsible for it, because it has not agency.

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