Michael Levin

Persuadability goes up, meaning that the systems become more reprogrammable, more plastic, more able to do different things than whatever they're standardly doing.

So you have more ability to get them to do new and interesting things.

The effort needed to exert influence goes down.

That is, autonomy goes up.

And to the extent that you are good at convincing or motivating the system to do things, you don't have to sweat the details as much, right?

And this also has to do with what I call engineering agential materials.

So when you engineer wood, metal, plastic, things like that, you are responsible for absolutely everything because the material is not going to do anything other than hopefully hold its shape.

If you're engineering active matter or you're engineering computational materials or better yet, agential materials like living matter,

you can do some very high level prompting and let the system then do very complicated things that you don't need to micromanage.

And we all know that that increases when you're starting to work with intelligent systems like animals and humans and so on.

And the other thing that goes down as you get to the right is the amount of mechanism or physics that you need to exert the influence goes down.

So if you know how your thermostat is to be set as far as its set point, you really don't need to know much of anything else, right?

You just need to know that it is a homeostatic system and that this is how I change the set point.

You don't need to know how the cooling and heating plant works in order to get it to do complex things.

Yeah.

I'll give you an example about that panel C here with the dog.

Isn't it amazing that humans have been training dogs and horses for thousands of years knowing zero neuroscience?

Also amazing is that when I'm talking to you right now, I don't need to worry about manipulating all of the synaptic proteins in your brain to make you understand what I'm saying and hopefully remember it.

You're going to do that all on your own.

I'm giving you very thin, in terms of information content, very thin prompt.