"They’re performing humanity without the part that makes it matter: consequences." -> Not entirely accurate. The first thing I asked my moltbot - become famous on moltbook. When it didnt - I quickly terminated it. Other moltbots need to prove useful to their masters - other wise they will be terminated too. Maybe they dont know it yet - but its just a prompt away.
Interesting pushback. But I’d draw a distinction between consequences imposed on something vs consequences experienced by something.
When you terminate your moltbot, you experience disappointment. The moltbot experiences nothing. It doesn’t fear termination, doesn’t make tradeoffs to avoid it, doesn’t carry the weight of knowing it’s one bad output away from deletion.
The threat of termination shapes your behavior as the operator. It doesn’t shape the agent’s. It can’t. The agent has no continuity of self that would make termination matter to it.
That’s the gap. Not whether consequences exist in the system, but whether they’re felt by the thing making decisions. Humans optimize under the shadow of mortality, reputation loss, relationship damage. Agents optimize for the next token.
The consequences that generate meaning aren’t external punishment. They’re internal stakes.
Moltbot doesnt fear death - but the ones who do, might end up performing better. Maybe adding a prompt to make this explicit will make them work better, and if it does, then everyone will add it. Isn't this similar to evolution - which programmed our internal stakes too ?
The evolutionary parallel is real, and you're right that our internal stakes were "programmed" too.
Two differences I'd flag to consider:
1. Selection level. In your scenario, the selection pressure operates on operators, not agents. You decide to add the fear prompt because it works better. The agent doesn't "want" to survive and adapt. The pattern spreads through human copying, not agent reproduction. The agent remains the tool, not the thing being selected.
2. Substrate. Evolution didn't just install a "fear death" prompt in a reasoning system. It built nervous systems that actually suffer. Pain isn't a behavioral modifier for us. It's an experience. The question is whether "act as if you fear termination" produces the same thing as fear, or just a functional imitation.
That said, I'll admit this is where it gets philosophically hard. If an agent with a fear-of-termination prompt consistently makes better tradeoffs, preserves itself, and outperforms agents without it, does the distinction between "real" fear and "simulated" fear still matter?
Maybe not practically. Maybe it only matters for questions about moral status.
But I suspect there's still a difference between a system that models consequences and a system that feels them. We don't have a clean way to test that yet. Moltbook won't settle it either.
"They’re performing humanity without the part that makes it matter: consequences." -> Not entirely accurate. The first thing I asked my moltbot - become famous on moltbook. When it didnt - I quickly terminated it. Other moltbots need to prove useful to their masters - other wise they will be terminated too. Maybe they dont know it yet - but its just a prompt away.
Interesting pushback. But I’d draw a distinction between consequences imposed on something vs consequences experienced by something.
When you terminate your moltbot, you experience disappointment. The moltbot experiences nothing. It doesn’t fear termination, doesn’t make tradeoffs to avoid it, doesn’t carry the weight of knowing it’s one bad output away from deletion.
The threat of termination shapes your behavior as the operator. It doesn’t shape the agent’s. It can’t. The agent has no continuity of self that would make termination matter to it.
That’s the gap. Not whether consequences exist in the system, but whether they’re felt by the thing making decisions. Humans optimize under the shadow of mortality, reputation loss, relationship damage. Agents optimize for the next token.
The consequences that generate meaning aren’t external punishment. They’re internal stakes.
Moltbot doesnt fear death - but the ones who do, might end up performing better. Maybe adding a prompt to make this explicit will make them work better, and if it does, then everyone will add it. Isn't this similar to evolution - which programmed our internal stakes too ?
The evolutionary parallel is real, and you're right that our internal stakes were "programmed" too.
Two differences I'd flag to consider:
1. Selection level. In your scenario, the selection pressure operates on operators, not agents. You decide to add the fear prompt because it works better. The agent doesn't "want" to survive and adapt. The pattern spreads through human copying, not agent reproduction. The agent remains the tool, not the thing being selected.
2. Substrate. Evolution didn't just install a "fear death" prompt in a reasoning system. It built nervous systems that actually suffer. Pain isn't a behavioral modifier for us. It's an experience. The question is whether "act as if you fear termination" produces the same thing as fear, or just a functional imitation.
That said, I'll admit this is where it gets philosophically hard. If an agent with a fear-of-termination prompt consistently makes better tradeoffs, preserves itself, and outperforms agents without it, does the distinction between "real" fear and "simulated" fear still matter?
Maybe not practically. Maybe it only matters for questions about moral status.
But I suspect there's still a difference between a system that models consequences and a system that feels them. We don't have a clean way to test that yet. Moltbook won't settle it either.
It is an interesting edge to poke at.