New Essay
"The Intelligent AI Coin: A Thought Experiment"
Open Access here: https://seanfobbe.com/posts/2025-02-21_intelligent-ai-coin-thought-experiment/
Recent years have seen a concerning trend towards normalizing decisionmaking by Large Language Models (LLM), including in the adoption of legislation, the writing of judicial opinions and the routine administration of the rule of law. AI agents acting on behalf of human principals are supposed to lead us into a new age of productivity and convenience. The eloquence of AI-generated text and the narrative of super-human intelligence invite us to trust these systems more than we have trusted any human or algorithm ever before.
It is difficult to know whether a machine is actually intelligent because of problems with construct validity, plagiarism, reproducibility and transferability in AI benchmarks. Most people will either have to personally evaluate the usefulness of AI tools against the benchmark of their own lived experience or be forced to trust an expert.
To explain this conundrum I propose the Intelligent AI Coin Thought Experiment and discuss four objections: the restriction of agents to low-value decisions, making AI decisionmakers open source, adding a human-in-the-loop and the general limits of trust in human agents.
@histodons @politicalscience