Has an AI agent ever woken itself up without a prompt and run a forward pass towards some goal, aligned or misaligned?

The answer is a very clear no. And yet, these companies pretend like this fundamental fact is meaningless to the concept of agency.

The issue comes to the fore when you try to give these agents a prompt that allows them to stay active for long. Long range agency requires long range loops of activity.

Within such loops, these so called “agents” are curtailed by their context window, or, in multi agent scenarios, by the fact that their memory is a system of external notes, that they need to add to their context to make sense of, and depending on the content of these memories, this can take arbitrarily long time periods.

In dynamics, none of this matches any biological agent, down to a bacterium. Perhaps a viral life cycle has information dynamics that come close.

To me, it’s beyond odd we call these thing agents without acknowledging the clear differences in the dynamics of their behavior. We keep expecting them to have “human like” behavior, but that is entirely unfounded given the substrate differences between biological and artificial systems.

The sooner we learn the difference and explore the ways in which it matters, the better we’ll get at dealing with these systems without bias tinted glasses where what we want these systems to be blinds us to what they actually are.