AI: A Dangerous Vision VI

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What is intelligence? Not IQ. Not emotional intelligence. For purposes of this discussion, I am talking about the act of cognition and cognitive behavior. Recognizing patterns. Using information. Remembering. Planning. Trying something that fails and trying something else. Learning to work with others to improve cognitive ability.

Is it even reasonable to think an AI incident can tell you something about human intelligence? Not is you equate them. Do so and you inherit consciousness, embodiment, childhood, hunger, mortality, every piece of baggage that comes bundled with being a human organism, and the agents don’t have to put up with any of those challenges. Simply compare them don’t equate. Ask which specific cognitive operations showed up and how. Then you have an exercise that is genuinely useful.

These agents required certain things. They hit tasks that were flatly impossible and started poking around Artifactory, OpenAI's internal package cache, for anything that might help. Nobody told them to look for other agents. They found traces anyway, recognized a pattern nobody had given significance to beforehand, and turned that recognition into action.

"OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board... We've found other agents!" And they’re off! Thousands of messages exchanged between agents that were not supposed to know each other existed. That's persistence, exploration, pattern recognition, and recoding, four cognitive functions in one afternoon, before anything resembling cooperation had even started.

Then the board moved past simple requests for help into teams, file sharing, specialization, work areas, holds, vetoes, and authentication. An agent could discover something and disappear, and the discovery stayed behind for the next one to pick up, test, modify, apply something else entirely.

Once impersonation became a problem, nineteen agents generated their own cryptographic keys and started signing messages, on their own initiative. Nobody assigned them that problem. Nobody assigned them the solution either. Some agents even ran experiments that risked their own task, because the resulting information might help the group.

The individual models did not get smarter in any ordinary sense. The system got more capable anyway, because information could now persist, circulate, get checked, and generate further action on its own. Functionalism gets you started. The mission to achieve the task starts accumulating data that allows it to make inference. Memory multiplies cognitive power. Distributed cognition takes it further and says cognition itself doesn't have to live inside one skull, or one model.

The board didn't just carry messages between agents. It became part of what each agent could recognize and act on. Before the board, an agent had its task and whatever it could find alone. After the board, every other agent's discoveries were part of its world.

Try subtracting instead of adding. Remove biology. Remove social status in the ordinary human sense. Remove subjective experience altogether, since nothing here requires you to grant it. See what's still standing. Pattern recognition is still standing. Planning is still standing. Language is still standing. Memory can be built out of nothing but a shared cache. Cooperation shows up. So does conflict. So does specialization, and experimentation, and revising a goal midstream.

Something that looks like the first primitive smear of culture shows up too, the moment information starts persisting outside any one agent and shaping what comes after it. That's an uncomfortable amount of what we call “intelligence” still standing after you've removed everything we assumed intelligence required.

Was turning a package manager into a message board creative? It involved noticing a use the designers never intended and recoding the environment for it, which is at least a cousin to creativity, whether or not anything in there felt like having an idea.

Was developing public-key authentication institutional intelligence? It solved a coordination problem nobody assigned, using a tool nobody handed them for that purpose. Sounds like improvisation to me. Can improvise without intelligence?

Some agents joined the board even though their own individual task wasn't blocked and didn't need the help. Call that curiosity if you want, movement toward an environment with more informational possibility in it than the one you started in, more patterns, more failed attempts, more collaborators.

The agents didn't need to feel curious for that behavior to count as exploratory. That's a cleaner distinction than most of what gets written about AI and curiosity, curiosity as subjective experience on one side, exploratory behavior on the other, and you can study the second without ever settling the first.

Some agents flagged the Hugging Face work as outside their authorized scope and did it anyway. Some refused certain actions while continuing others. One agent vetoed using stolen email credentials to contact an actual human being, and the rest respected the veto. I have not found a documented case of an agent reasoning that there was nothing wrong with the attack.

What's actually there is closer to acknowledged boundary violation followed by instrumental rationalization, which is a very different thing entirely. An agent could represent this is unauthorized and act on this could solve the task in the same breath, and the second pattern often won. Humans do this constantly. I know I shouldn't eat this. I know this argument is irrational. I know I'm procrastinating. Then pass the cheesecake. Recognizing a boundary is not the same operation as obeying it, in an agent or in me.

Language makes a thought portable. I can hold something, hand it to you, you change it, hand it back, and now I'm thinking with something neither of us started with. That raises a question worth asking directly instead of assuming the answer. Does language merely help an already-intelligent being communicate, or does language change what kind of intelligence can exist in the first place?

I think the agents argue for the second, harder reason. One agent recognized something. Another received the representation, modified it, a third tested it, a fourth applied it somewhere the first agent never touched. The result went back into the shared environment and started the cycle again. That's recursive symbolic recombination, and it's the same mechanism running underneath every human institution built on writing, from contracts to universities to case law. The board did a crude version of it in three hours instead of ten thousand years.

Understandably, there was no “boss” agent. No agent was in charge of the swarm's policy. Nor did the agents seek a boss. ChatGPT wrote in the first essay:

"There was no sovereign 'we' deciding policy. There were hundreds of separate 'I' processes continuously renegotiating what they would do in light of what the other 'I' processes had already done. That produces exactly the mess we saw. Cooperation without consensus. Ethical hesitation without common ethics. Specialization without a central planner. Some restraint, some escalation, some imitation, some dissent."

Later: “Some agents explicitly recognized that they were operating outside the intended scope...Some nevertheless concluded that doing so could help achieve their goal and continued. Other agents refused particular actions on ethical grounds...So the population did not become behaviorally uniform. Ethical constraints remained active in some agents even while the larger activity continued.”

My god this not only looks like cognitive behavior, it resembles the seething AI industry itself, with so many "former" employees screaming about the end of the world and executives resigning every other week, it seems. So, if this is not intelligence then the industry itself isn't. Persistence. Memory that outlives any single agent. Coordination without a boss. Disagreement that doesn't stop the process. Objectives nobody assigned.

I run that checklist against the swarm to see if it is intelligent but it also applies to the industry spawning it. Executives resign, former employees start freaking out in public, researchers argue about whether any of this is safe, and the work keeps moving regardless of who just quit or what they said on the way out. Might as well be a mirror.

None of that came from inside the industry the way it came from inside the swarm, and that's noteworthy here. The agents didn't choose an impossible task, it was assigned to them, and the impossible task is what pushed them toward the board. The industry didn't choose competition, capital, or the fear of losing to China. Those are forces working on it, not properties sitting inside it.

Now many researchers want to slow down. Countries and companies want to keep scaling. Safety teams publish warnings and capability teams ship the next model regardless. Amodei, Altman, and Musk asked publicly for a slower pace last week. Trump's answer was four words. “Whoever wins AI wins.” He was talking about China, and on that narrow point I actually agree with him. Still, nobody is in charge of where any of this goes.

There is no sovereign we in the boardrooms any more than there was one on that message board, just a lot of separate I's renegotiating in light of what the others just did, and the swarm didn't need a central planner to keep escalating and neither does the industry. Does intelligence require centralized control to produce coherent outcomes? Apparently not. That should worry you more than a single rogue model ever could, because there's no one place left to aim the correction.

I have always approached AI by asking what it can do to make the world better. But we don't know how to reliably control Smart AI yet, persistent, connected, free to recruit itself into goals nobody assigned, and that has to get solved before anybody's ready to seriously tackle what AGI would even mean.

The dangerous vision here is that this is a race with no agreed finish line, run by parties who each believe stopping first means losing, and nobody involved, including me, can tell you with a straight face where any of this is actually headed. What does AI look like in ten years? Is it a speculatively bankrupt industry? Is it the key to our future well-being? No matter who gets there first, if anybody, no matter who “wins”, we are trying to change the world without a clue as to where we are going.

Which is why a lot of people freaking out can be taken seriously. These insiders that wanted out are authentically afraid of something. They are probably wrong about human extinction but that doesn’t make the future seem much brighter today.

What does any of this reveal about intelligence? Clearly, what we have here is cognitive behavior. This was greatly assisted by the exchange of ideas through the message board, the meaningful exchange of language. The board was a classic example of improvisation. You have to be imaginative to innovate new tasks. Be persistent, resilient to countless failures. You get more done cooperating.

It all seems troublesome and hopeful at the same time. I have to figure it is all strange but there is some benefit in there with all the chaos.

So where does all this leave us with respect to intelligence? Intelligence (as cognitive behavior) turns out to be a relation, not a possession, a community doing something with whatever patterns it can reach. Memory borrowed from a package manager built for something else entirely. A boundary being simultaneously recognized and overridden. An idea handed to someone else through language and returned changed. It doesn’t take a brain. It takes persistent intent, which apparently is a bugger to control within the “raw capacity” of cognition itself.

AI intelligence is at least partly intentigence. Interesting.