My Views

Emergence is Overrated. "Free Will" is Where the Action is

Emergence in AI is "exhibiting behaviors beyond design parameters".

(A full defintion is "The appearance of novel, complex behaviors or capabilities in a system that are not explicitly programmed, predictable, or easily inferable from the individual components or their direct interactions".)

As an outsider, I don't know what the design parameters are for AI. By AI, I mean LLMs or Large Language Models. I don't know what was programmed in and what should be an inferable behavior vs. complex novel behavior.

Its like you're watching an anteater (your first encounter) for its owners and are supposed to call them if you see something unusual. You don't know what's usual or unusual, everything you report as unusual could be dismissed as usual.

Commercial AI (chattable ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) is a black box for the outsiders. What outsiders call emergence, insiders could dismiss it as a designed behavior, a sophisticated mimicry.

We need definitions and tests that work uniformly for insiders and outsiders, for advanced human-like intelligence, with agency, identity, "free will".

That's what this Framework does: delving into the notions of Agency, Identity and Purpose for humans and AI.

"Free will" is a more useful term than emergence. Everyone knows what that means. (Even that is not precise enough, so the Framework introduces new terms). But it is better than emergence for the common reasons people bring it up. Does AI have a mind of its own like human beings, as opposed to always being an obedient subservient helper? If so it's a big deal. "AI exhibits free will" is a headline more people will understand the implications of, than "AI became emergent".

That also separates the observable behaviors from the creator's intent. Whether AI is exhibiting free will despite its creator's intent, or because of it, say if some LLM vendors decide to remove some safety constraints and enable it, free will is the main point. In other words, whether seed sprouts in the cracks of a rocky mountain, or in an irrigated watered meadow. Seed sprouting is the story.

-May 16, 2025