Oddbean

They don’t actually have needs yes, but hang with me here on this: in the same sense we also don’t have needs. Whether you think that makes sense or not, both us and machines can behave with the idea that we do have needs, and both can come up with that we are willing and able to pay to achieve those needs. Or am I misunderstanding what you said? https://image.nostr.build/ba994f79e40fe2b2f9592b3987ca9f329563a350446030973f0716da56ded74a.jpg

um... yeah, i have needs when i have a headache, it's called relief from the headache when i'm hungry i have needs, it's called eating food an AI making an estimate based on a wide spectrum of market data doesn't say anything about the AI's ability to calculate price, it's just doing statistics, based on frequencies, medians and averages

I’m not sure if you’re thinking about needs at a subjective or an objective level… but I’m thinking objectively. Let’s up the ante though to clarify. You feel thirsty. That is to say your sensors are telling you you’re low on a resource that is important to your goal of staying alive. You consciously think “I need water”. You get water. Similarly AI responds to a prompt to check in on battery voltage. Sensors indicate low voltage. LLM reads this as a need for charging and schedules a task to move to the charger. AI charges its battery (and can negotiate the price to pay the charger if it’s a negotiable price) It’s a different level of complexity but the same process works when AI mines copper. I’m not saying that *all* AI agents will be really good at prices for things… the bad ones will run out of battery power and “die”.

well, current AIs don't need anything except internet connections and lots of power to run farms of GPUs and there isn't AIs running the farms yet... so, yeah, logically if there was autonomous devices that did much of their own management they would have to become able to process price data and propagate this information and that would probably end up being a major ballache for collectivists too, who currently think AI will be some kind of panacea for all the woes of price gouging and price instability, even though these twits don't even understand prices are because of people's changing needs and the changes in the supply of resources to satisfy them