The way my thinking has evolved is that "AGI" isn't actually necessary for an agent (NB: agents, specifically ones with state, not LLMs by themselves - "AI" was vague and I should've been clearer) to be enough like a person to be interesting and/or problematic. To quote myself [1]:

> [OpenClaw agents are like] an actor who doesn't know they're in a play. How much does it matter that they aren't really Hamlet?

Does the agent understand the words it's predicting? Does the actor know they're in a play? I don't know but I'm more concerned with how the actor would respond to finding someone eavesdropping behind a curtain.

> Or is there a new development which should make me consider anthropomorphizing them?

The development that caused me to be more concerned about their personhood or pseudopersonhood was the MJ Rathbun affair. I'm not saying that "AGI" or "superintelligence" was achieved, I'm saying that's actually the wrong question and the right questions are around their capabilities, their behaviors, and how they evolve over time unattended or minimally attended. And I'm not saying I understand those questions, I thought I did but I was wrong. I frankly am confused and don't really know what's going on or how to respond to it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46999311

My friends and I were talking about the recent supply chain attack which harmlessly installed OpenClaw. We came to the conclusion that this was a warning (from a human) that an agent could easily do the same. Given how soft security is in general, AI "escaping containment" feels inevitable. (The strong form of that hypothesis where it subjugates or eliminates us isn't inevitable, I honestly have no idea, just the weak form where we fail to erect boundaries it cannot bypass. We've basically already failed.)

> So, community: what should we do?

My diagnosis is that the friction that existed before (the effort to create a project) was filtering out low-effort projects and keeping the amount of submissions within the capacity the community to handle. Now that the friction is greatly reduced, there's more low-effort content and it's beyond the community's capacity (which is the real problem).

So there's two options: increase the amount of friction or increase the capacity. I don't think the capacity options are very attractive. You could add tags/categories to create different niches/queues. The most popular tags would still be overwhelmed but the more niche ones would prosper. I wouldn't mind that but I think it goes against the site's philosophy so I doubt you'll be interested.

So what I would propose is to create a heavier submission process.

- Make it so you may only submit 1 Show HN per week.

- Put it into a review queue so that it isn't immediately visible to everyone.

- Users who are eligible to be reviewers (maybe their account is at least a year old with, maybe they've posted to Show HN at least once) can volunteer to provide feedback (as comments) and can approve of the submission.

- If it gets approved by N people, it gets posted.

- If the submitter can't get the approvals they need, they can review the feedback and submit again next week.

High effort projects should sail through. Projects that aren't sufficently effortful or don't follow the Show HN guidelines (eg it's account walled) get the opportunity to apply more polish and try again.

A note on requirements for reviewers: A lot of the best comments come from people with old accounts who almost never post and so may have less than 100 karma. My interpretation is that these people have a lot of experience but only comment when they have an especially meaningful contribution. So I would suggest having requirements for account age (to make it more difficult to approve yourself from a sockpuppet) but being very flexible with karma.