Re: your first point. I think I’m still a bit confused here and that’s partly why I wanted to write this down and have people poke at it. Following Sen (but maybe I’m misunderstanding him) I’m not completely convinced I know how to factor human agency into “winning”. One part of me wants to say that whatever notion of agency I have, in some sense it’s a property of world states and in principle I could extract it with enough monitoring of my brain or whatever, and then any prescribed tradeoff between “measured sense of agency” and “score” is something I could give to the machine as a goal.
So then I end up with the machine giving me the precise amount of leeway that lets me screw up the game just right for my preferences.
I don’t see a fundamental problem with that, but it’s also not the part of the metaphor that seems most interesting to me. What I’m more interested in is human inferiority as a pattern, and the way that pattern pervades the overall system and translates into computational structure, perhaps in surprising and indirect ways.
Re: your first point. I think I’m still a bit confused here and that’s partly why I wanted to write this down and have people poke at it. Following Sen (but maybe I’m misunderstanding him) I’m not completely convinced I know how to factor human agency into “winning”. One part of me wants to say that whatever notion of agency I have, in some sense it’s a property of world states and in principle I could extract it with enough monitoring of my brain or whatever, and then any prescribed tradeoff between “measured sense of agency” and “score” is something I could give to the machine as a goal.
So then I end up with the machine giving me the precise amount of leeway that lets me screw up the game just right for my preferences.
I don’t see a fundamental problem with that, but it’s also not the part of the metaphor that seems most interesting to me. What I’m more interested in is human inferiority as a pattern, and the way that pattern pervades the overall system and translates into computational structure, perhaps in surprising and indirect ways.