alt Hacker NewsThe practical difference is that a pile of code instructing machinery to act in a predetermined way does not in any way, shape, or form equate to agency or free will, therefore it cannot be held accountable, consequently its operators should be.
This line of thinking is better left to freshmen philosophy students trying to sound smart on their first week of college.
>a pile of code instructing machinery to act in a certain way
OK, but I have a genetic code which instructs me to act in a certain way, and a bunch of biological machinery to do the job. So do you feel the substrate is the key factor? Wetware vs electronics?
What if you try to build an exact electromechanical replica of me, with a chip that's got an LLM fine-tuned on my writing/behavior/etc. so as to replicate me as closely as possible?
Sure, as a legal convention it might make sense to hold the builder of the resulting robot liable if it commits a crime.
But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the deeper implications of words like "agency" or "free will". You're repeating those terms very forcefully as if they have some sort of key relevance, but good philosophy requires more than just stating your position forcefully and insulting people who disagree. If you're trying to enforce your intuitions rather than examine them, that's theology not philosophy.