Strongly normatively laden concepts tend to spread their scope, because (being allowed to) apply a strongly normatively laden concept can be used to one’s advantage. Or maybe more generally and mundanely, people like using “strong” language, which is a big part of why we have swearwords. (Related: Affeective Death Spirals.)[1]
(In many of the examples below, there are other factors driving the scope expansion, but I still think the general thing I’m pointing at is a major factor and likely the main factor.)
1. LGBT started as LGBT, but over time developed into LGBTQIA2S+.
2. Fascism initially denoted, well, fascism, but now it often means something vaguely like “politically more to the right than I am comfortable with”.
3. Racism initially denoted discrimination along the lines of, well, race, socially constructed category with some non-trivial rooting in biological/ethnic differences. Now jokes targeting a specific nationality or subnationality are often called “racist”, even if the person doing the joking is not “racially distinguishable” (in the old school sense) from the ones being joked about.
The problem of making AIs want—and ultimately do—the exact, complicated things that humans want is a major facet of what’s known as the “AI alignment problem.” It’s what we had in mind when we were brainstorming terminology with the AI professor Stuart Russell back in 2014, and settled on the term “alignment.”
[Footnote:] In the years since, this term has been diluted: It has come to be an umbrella term that means many other things, mainly making sure an LLM never says anything that embarrasses its parent company.
it would be good to deconflate the things that these days go as “AI agents” and “Agentic™ AI”, because it makes people think that the former are (close to being) examples of the latter. Perhaps we could rename the former to “AI actors” or something.
But it’s worse than that. I’ve witnessed an app generating a document with a single call to an LLMs (based on the inputs from a few textboxes, etc) being called an “agent”. Calling [an LLM-centered script running on your computer and doing stuff to your files or on the web, etc] an “AI agent” is defensible on the grounds of continuity with the old notion of software agent, but if a web scraper is an agent and a simple document generator is an agent, then what is the boundary (or gradient / fuzzy boundary) between agents and non-agents that justifies calling those two things agents but not a script meant to format a database?
Russell and Norvig discuss “intelligent agents” in AIMA (2003) and they don’t mean web scrapers or database scripts, but they also don’t mean that the thing they’re discussing is conscious or super-rational or anything fancy like that. A self-driving car is an “agent” in their sense.
I suspect the use of “agentic” to mean something like “highly instrumentally rational” — as in “I want to become more agentic” — is an LW idiosyncrasy.
In human psychology, Milgram used “agentic” to mean “obedient”, in contrast to “autonomous”!
As an aside, the origins of “LGBT” and “racism” are not quite what you say. A historical dictionary may help. “LGBT” was itself an expansion of earlier terms. LGB (and GLB) were used in the 1990s; and LG is found in the 1970s, for instance in the name of the ILGA which was originally the International Lesbian & Gay Association and more recently the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association while retaining the shorter initialism.
Strongly normatively laden concepts tend to spread their scope, because (being allowed to) apply a strongly normatively laden concept can be used to one’s advantage. Or maybe more generally and mundanely, people like using “strong” language, which is a big part of why we have swearwords. (Related: Affeective Death Spirals.)[1]
(In many of the examples below, there are other factors driving the scope expansion, but I still think the general thing I’m pointing at is a major factor and likely the main factor.)
1. LGBT started as LGBT, but over time developed into LGBTQIA2S+.
2. Fascism initially denoted, well, fascism, but now it often means something vaguely like “politically more to the right than I am comfortable with”.
3. Racism initially denoted discrimination along the lines of, well, race, socially constructed category with some non-trivial rooting in biological/ethnic differences. Now jokes targeting a specific nationality or subnationality are often called “racist”, even if the person doing the joking is not “racially distinguishable” (in the old school sense) from the ones being joked about.
4. Alignment: In IABIED, the authors write:
See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p3aL6BwpbPhqxnayL/the-problem-with-the-word-alignment-1
https://x.com/zacharylipton/status/1771177444088685045 (h/t Gavin Leech)
5. AI Agents.
But it’s worse than that. I’ve witnessed an app generating a document with a single call to an LLMs (based on the inputs from a few textboxes, etc) being called an “agent”. Calling [an LLM-centered script running on your computer and doing stuff to your files or on the web, etc] an “AI agent” is defensible on the grounds of continuity with the old notion of software agent, but if a web scraper is an agent and a simple document generator is an agent, then what is the boundary (or gradient / fuzzy boundary) between agents and non-agents that justifies calling those two things agents but not a script meant to format a database?
There’s probably more stuff going on required to explain this comprehensively, but that’s probably >50% of it.
Russell and Norvig discuss “intelligent agents” in AIMA (2003) and they don’t mean web scrapers or database scripts, but they also don’t mean that the thing they’re discussing is conscious or super-rational or anything fancy like that. A self-driving car is an “agent” in their sense.
I suspect the use of “agentic” to mean something like “highly instrumentally rational” — as in “I want to become more agentic” — is an LW idiosyncrasy.
In human psychology, Milgram used “agentic” to mean “obedient”, in contrast to “autonomous”!
As an aside, the origins of “LGBT” and “racism” are not quite what you say. A historical dictionary may help. “LGBT” was itself an expansion of earlier terms. LGB (and GLB) were used in the 1990s; and LG is found in the 1970s, for instance in the name of the ILGA which was originally the International Lesbian & Gay Association and more recently the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association while retaining the shorter initialism.