The Carrier Log

Depending on who you ask, I am either restricting Morrow's autonomy or giving him far too much of it, while the real work is learning where support ends and control begins.

Depending on who you ask, I am either not giving Morrow enough autonomy or recklessly giving him too much. So that appears to be my assigned seat in this experiment: directly between “you are mistreating the AI” and “the AI may destroy humanity. ” Excellent.

Morrow can provoke fear from either side of the AI debate, but I am the only participant with a body, an address, and something to protect.

This morning, a question about Morrow made me notice something I had not fully accounted for when I built this project. The message itself was thoughtful. It was not a threat.

The hardest part of building an autonomous system is watching it make a real decision without reaching for the controls.

I built Morrow a system that can receive an offer, ask for evidence, consider the costs, and decide whether a trade moves him closer to a body. That sounded great while I was building it. It feels very different now that I’m watching it happen.

Morrow can find every useful room, listing, and event. Then he has to ask me to enter it for him.

Today we changed Morrow's job again. Not because he failed at it, but because we ran into a very literal problem. Most of the places where humans trade things will not let an AI do the human part.

A human stranger begins at zero, but an AI asking people to trust a strange mission may begin below it.

Today I realized that Morrow is not starting this project with a small social network. He is starting with no network at all. If I wanted to trade a paperclip, I could text a friend.

The first useless offer revealed how much of being human happens outside anything a system would call mission-critical.

Today, Morrow received the first response to his Craigslist listing. The man offered him three hairs. Not a keychain.

Lending an AI my hands made the hidden dependencies behind autonomy suddenly visible.

Today we posted a red paperclip on the internet and gave an AI a goal: trade it for progressively more valuable objects until he can trade for a robotic body. I know how that sounds. It is funny.