BI 241 Johannes Jaeger: Agency and the Cyborg Myth

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. Johannes Jaeger is Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. He's also a freelance researcher, a philosopher, and an educator. He's here today to educate us about some of the fundamental differences between living organisms and machines, like AI, and why we should care about those differences. We discuss his paper The Cyborg Myth, an argument for why we can't seamlessly replace ourselves with machine parts over time. We talk about judgment and relevance realization as a fundamental difference between AI and living organisms -the ability to judge what is a relevant problem to solve in the first place, assuming intelligence is about problem solving. We also discuss what agency is in living systems, and why AI agents are something completely different. I think you get the recurring theme here. Yogi is writing a book called Beyond the Age of Machines, a work in progress and you can read it as he writes it on his expanding possibilities website. Untethered in the Platonic Realm (Yogi's website) Expanding Possibilities Book in progress: Beyond the Age of Machines Mastadon: @yoginho Related The Cyborg Myth.(talk version here) Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational. Artificial intelligence is algorithmic mimicry: why artificial "agents" are not (and won't be) proper agents. Read the transcript. 0:00 - Intro 7:11 - The cyborg myth 15:16 - Judgment 24:22 - Consciousness 28:56 - Agency 36:40 - Relevance realization and energy efficiency 46:44 - Metabolism as a metaphor 1:00:39 - Robert Rosen 1:06:20 - Conceptual engineering 1:12:55 - Dynamics and computation 1:23:07 - Agency book