We’re not “relieved” of free will. It’s not an intrinsic property that one “has”. It would be like having “big” or “near”. You don’t “have” big, it’s a relative term.
It’s simply a description of observed behavior. That’s all it really is in the end, even though people treat it as this super mysterious thing.
Why not? It might seem absurd, but can you prove they don’t “choose” to flit about here or there? A super-intelligent AI might also be able to “pierce the veil” and determine the underlying mechanics, like a video game character determining the math behind the random number generator that powers their world.
That’s also only one interpretation of quantum mechanics, mechanistic interpretations aren’t ruled out (though a number of variants have been).
Free will is incompatible with omniscience. People really want it to work, but it doesn’t.
Free will is observer-dependent, and is short for “I can’t predict the behavior of this thing”. For an omniscient observer, there is no thing that it can say that about.
Free will is not an inherent property of a thing, and that’s what trips people up so much.
To ponder it a bit, does a rock have free will? A dog? A human? A super-intelligent AI that we can’t hope to comprehend? Why or why not for each step?
The definition above explains it all. Of course a rock doesn’t, we can predict its behavior with physics! Maybe a monkey does, people disagree on that. Of course human do though, because I do!
Now ponder what the super-intelligent AI would think. “Of course the first three don’t have free will, their behavior is entirely predictable with physics”
This boils down to the best of all possible worlds argument, already well-skewered in Candide centuries ago.
Why create the world exactly the way it was? Is it impossible to create it, so that of their own free will, one more person makes the “right” choice? That’s some sorry omnipotence if so. If not one person, why not two? And so on, until you face the question of, “Why not create the world so that everyone, of their own free will, makes the ‘right’ decision”.
Calvinists are intellectually brave enough to accept the metaphysical consequences of their beliefs. Others, not so much.
What jurisdiction? In the US, factual information that you simply compile likely isn’t copyrightable, there’s been some court cases about e.g. telephone books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.
Won’t stop big companies from harassing you if they feel like it, though. Nintendo is petty enough that they might
Plug for the !ccp@discuss.online community I started to celebrate the creative commons and public domain. I’ve been posting the wikimedia picture of the day there daily, and other sorts of posts including questions like this are very welcome!
Hi from Lemmy 👋
I don’t think it’ll be LLMs (which is what a lot of people jump to when you mention “AI”), they have much higher latencies than microseconds. It will be AI of some sort, but probably won’t be considered AI due to the AI effect:
The AI effect is the discounting of the behavior of an artificial intelligence program as not “real” intelligence.
The author Pamela McCorduck writes: “It’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, ‘that’s not thinking’.”
Researcher Rodney Brooks stated: “Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, ‘Oh, that’s just a computation.’”
LLMs might be useful for researchers diving down a particular research/experiment rabbit hole.
I don’t have any useful speculation to contribute, but here’s a classic chart showing various funding levels towards that goal:
Coming from a slashdot thread from 2012 where some fusion researchers did an AMA type thing:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions
Here’s also a recent HN thread about achieving more energy than we put in:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971377
The crucial bit is this
Their total power draw from the grid was 300 megajoules and they got back about 3 megajoules, so don’t start celebrating yet
The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion. But we have been able to do that for a while now. The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion. A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop. The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion. The gain is greater than one. That’s the important message. And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion. And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.
So it’s still really encouraging, but just a warning that headlines don’t capture the full picture. Bonus fun fact from that thread:
Theoretical models of the Sun’s interior indicate a maximum power density, or energy production, of approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre at the center of the core, which is about the same power density inside a compost pile.
The Bitter Lesson talks about speech recognition instead of synthesis, but I would guess that it’s a similar dynamic:
In speech recognition, there was an early competition, sponsored by DARPA, in the 1970s. Entrants included a host of special methods that took advantage of human knowledge—knowledge of words, of phonemes, of the human vocal tract, etc. On the other side were newer methods that were more statistical in nature and did much more computation, based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Again, the statistical methods won out over the human-knowledge-based methods. This led to a major change in all of natural language processing, gradually over decades, where statistics and computation came to dominate the field. The recent rise of deep learning in speech recognition is the most recent step in this consistent direction. Deep learning methods rely even less on human knowledge, and use even more computation, together with learning on huge training sets, to produce dramatically better speech recognition systems. As in the games, researchers always tried to make systems that worked the way the researchers thought their own minds worked—they tried to put that knowledge in their systems—but it proved ultimately counterproductive, and a colossal waste of researcher’s time, when, through Moore’s law, massive computation became available and a means was found to put it to good use.
Also posted over in !discuss@discuss.online here, since I was reminded of the essay
I posted about this a bit ago, but that likely wouldn’t work:
In a First, AI Models Analyze Language As Well As a Human Expert
https://discuss.online/post/30279537
Any language you picked or invented would just add to the training data and help the AI out.
Lemmy just released 0.19.14, which addresses this somehow, but the announcement is vague:
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-12-08_-_Lemmy_Release_0.19.14
https://discuss.online/post/31855056
Recently some malicious users started to use an exploit where they would post rule violating content and then delete the account. This would prevent admins and mods from viewing the user profile to find other posts, and would also prevent federation of ban actions.
The new release fixes these problems. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to solve this.
I think we generally agree with each other. The existence of an omniscient AI or deity doesn’t change the “experience” of free will. It doesn’t “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observed. It does “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observer, who can now say “This thing exhibits no unpredictable behavior to me”. You and I both think we have free will, because we can’t predict our own behavior. Our experience is unchanged, whether or not some other observer exists or could exist that could predict our behavior.
Agreeing on a frame of reference is exactly my point. “Does something have free will?” requires the follow-up question, “According to whom?”. Just like “I’m far from that rock” requires the followup question, “According to whom?”. The ant might think you’re far from the rock, something else might think you’re near the rock.
To boil it down a bit more, my point is just that you can always replace the phrase “free will” in speech with “unpredictable behavior” without loss of meaning, because that is what people actually mean when they say it, whether they realize that or not.