I had a conversation with someone recently.

It went like

Them: … And that's for someday whenever we have AI.
Me: We have AI. We had it for over 30 years
Them: I mean real AI.
Me: People keep raising the goalposts on what counts as AI.
Them: Well, fundamentally AI is whenever a computer makes a decision, so I'm referring to something more than that.
Me: A decision. A branch?

What is a decision made by a computer?

Consider say train tracks. You know, where there's a switch on the train track to choose which side the train goes onto. Say the switch is to the left, so the train goes to the left.

Would you say that the train track "made a decision"? Probably not. The track hardware was configured a certain way, so the train went that way. Makes sense. Easy to explain. To say the train track "made a decision" is giving this really simple hardware a lot of credit. If you were to say the train tracks "make a decision", you'd be saying all inanimate objects in your life are making decisions all the time- like a house of cards makes a 'decision' to stay up, or a building makes a 'decision' to stay standing-- it would all sound a bit crazy and the word "decision" would be so broad that it loses all meaning.

Now, adjust the scenario. Say there's more trains, more tracks. Three trains, ten tracks. More switches. Again the trains go according to the switches. Would you then say that the train tracks "made a decision"? Again, probably not. Although the trains' paths were more complicated, they can still be explained. The switches controlled where the trains were going to go. You can see how they work.

Now, adjust the scenario further. There's a billion trains on a billion tracks. Yes, that's a lot of trains. The paths are so complicated we only have insight into some of the switches. We can only debug some parts of the system directly. That said, we do have a model for the rest of the system. There are real trains and tracks. The model has an explanation based on hardware and not magic.

A computer system is this way like trains on a track. It doesn't make sense to say that a computer "makes a decision" any more than a train track does. There is electricity flowing through different paths, and although these paths are complicated they can be explained and expressed as functions.

You can go a step further and claim that human brains are the same. More trains, more tracks compared to computers- more complication. Yet, if you have belief in the natural world, you can buy an explanation where it's all running on hardware and not magic. The difference between the human brain and the train tracks isn't anything fundamental. The difference is the complexity of the system.

Why is a train track just "some hardware configuration" while human's behavior gets elevated to this higher status, gets this special label called "a decision"? It's the complexity and that's all. A system that's sufficiently complicated and hard to simulate gets the elevated status of "decision". Nothing's inherently special about a "decision" other than the fact we've decided it's too complicated to reason about.

People ascribe magical qualities to systems that are complicated. "Free will". "Agency". "Decision". They're all functions, they all have a set of inputs and outputs. Yet these words have this mysterious quality about them, like they happen independently, spontaneously, defying explanation. I say the spontenaity is all an illusion. With enough information, any decision made by human or computers can be debugged and stepped through. If we had a system with infinite computing power and perfect information, we could predict the future, even if it means simulating forward.

This is why free will is a comforting illusion. We're living in that moment where a coin has been flipped, yet the answer has not been revealed to you yet.

This is in regards to things at macroscopic scale. Not quantum particles

You might be saying, "I don't like this idea. I like free will. Because what does it matter? Whether the coin's been flipped and not yet revealed yet, or not flipped at all-- you have the same information. It doesn't change anything."

Or you're saying, "I don't like this idea. I like free will. Because, if people think they don't have free will, it makes them feel helpless and lethargic, like they shouldn't take initiative on things."

Those are both the wrong takeaway, though. Just because free will is an illusion, doesn't mean the things you do don't matter. They do matter. And as for the coin flip, does it change anything- well, no and yes.

If you believe the coin flip is a function with inputs (physical world) and output (a heads or tails), then you might want to debug and more deeply understand how the inputs affect the result. You might look into physics simulations. How does air resistance affect the coin's path in the air? What about the weight distribution of coins? How does your style of coin-flipping affect its travel through the air? You can learn something about why you got a heads or tails.

On the other hand if you believe the coin flip is 100% purely decided in the moment, based on completely undeterminable factors, your inquiry about it stops there. The result is just random. It may as well be magic. It just is.

Mapping the idea of the "coin flip" onto human decisions, the real takeaway is that human decisions can be explained. They have a physical, natural basis. They're not random. They're not magic. Yes, they are super complicated- they're functions with lots of inputs and outputs- they are functions nonetheless. People have reasons for the things they do.

I don't care whether you believe in "free will". I don't care whether you buy my idea about free will being an illusion, about decisions and "the coin flip" or not. If you don't, that's fine.

I do care that you accept human decisions can be explained. They're not really spontaneous, not unexplainable black boxes. They're a product of previous work and exposure to the outside world. From whatever starting point, that's the end point to end up at. I understand a lot of decisions are hard to explain. But we can try and we should.

The idea of explainable decisions may seem like an obvious no-brainer. The thing is, I keep running into people for whom it's not obvious. They will say things of the form, "Red-haired people don't like baseball". Arguments of the form "X type of people don't like to do Y". In some cases, the person has even written essays on it, read studies on it, and spent dozens and dozens of hours debating with others on podcasts about it.

But when you press them on the $64,000 question, "Why do red-haired people not like baseball", it's not even that they don't have an answer- they will get bewildered by the question like they've never even considered it before. Their answer is "they just don't." Okay. That's it, they just don't. Just 'cause. They don't.

Could be these people believe in bio-essentialism. Like red hair intrinsically, genetically causes you to like certain sports and not others. It's determined from birth. Maybe even earlier. No matter how you're socialized, who raises you, they'll claim your involvement in baseball in really affected by red hair. Or at least, there's a very severe natural ceiling in redhead interest. Bio-essentialiasm has become un-pallateable over the years, especially when used to describe gender or racial groups, and is not well scientifically explained or justified (compared to heritability, which is different), so they don't want to say that out loud.

Could be they are confused about descriptive claims. Descriptive claims are things like "the house is red.", it's what something is today. By contrast, normative claims are "the house should be green", it's about what we should do, what we ought to do. Sometimes, people see a descriptive claim like "red-haired people don't tend to like baseball", that will get confused into a normative claim, "red-haired people should not get into baseball". It's as if things today represent the 'correct' state of the world and it's a lost cause to try and change anything, ignoring the fact things have changed before and are constantly changing.

Could be they don't care about the reason. They want to talk about the correlation they're seeing, where it would appear red-haired people don't currently play baseball, but stop short of trying to debug why. This might seem incredible, given how much time and energy they've spent on the topic. All those hours spent debating with people, listening to podcasts, making social media posts, editing videos. Still it can happen. Our educational system has a lot of gaps where people end up having a deep lack of curiosity.

If unchallenged directly on debugging the reason, there's a typical pattern that comes up. They will dance around the subject, make descriptive claims that imply bio-essentialism, gesture towards inexplicable "choices" of red-haired people, and use those to funnel into normative claims.

For example, they'll say something of the form, "Studies show that currently, only 5% of red-haired people like baseball, much lower than average. That's inarguable. And those are the choices they're making, nothing wrong with that. So you shouldn't put red-haired people on baseball teams so they're not going to be invested in the sport anyway".

What happened here? Dissecting this, they took a descriptive claim about how things are today. They used "inarguable" to subtly imply a lack of bias around interpretation of the information, plus a way to use speaking in absolutes to imply the description will always hold. Then used the claim to make a judgment about what we should do, along with the word "choices" to say it's a just state of the world. Where to question it would be to take power away from red-haired people somehow, even when that's what the very proposal is doing. Although it is sneaky it falls apart when challenged directly, since there's no well-justified reason for the claim, even if it sounds like there is one.

The confusion, the lack of curiosity, it comes from this idea that people invest heavily in the concept of opaque human "decisions". As if humans aren't this huge network of train tracks, a billion tracks with different switches, as if instead they're built on randomness and magic. People use "decisions" and "free will" as a cop-out from having to investigate any more. It keeps them from having to ask the hard questions of why someone might do something, or what would motivate something to happen. They can write it off as "that's their decision", "just because that's what they wanted to do", without acknowledging that people don't do random things. The indiscriminate acceptance of "just because" leads to poorly-formed normative claims, and people putting the trappings of thoughtfulness around bad arguments.

Although we can not debug every neuron in the brain, we can intuitively know that people don't do random things.

Imagine your favorite hobby, or a sport you like to play. If you were air-dropped in the middle of the forest or desert and raised there apart from civilization, where would you get the idea to do that hobby? How would you ever think to kick a black-and-white ball around? How would you think to slide a rubber disc on ice? The idea came from other people. Or, can you accept the premise that advertising works? It does, doesn't it? That makes more sense than companies spending billions of dollars on literally nothing, something that doesn't work. People keep getting exposed to advertisements, so they are more likely to buy that product. It's hard to accept how shaped you are by your environment but that's the bitter medicine everyone needs to accept.

Although human motives are complicated, it doesn't mean we shouldn't even try to understand them. Human intelligence and artificial intelligence might have different levels of complexity, but that's all. They are both based on natural causes, not randomness.

If your computer program has some misbehavior and it was important to you, you'd output some logs, you'd attach a debugger. You wouldn't say, "that's the computer's decision" and refrain from investigating any more.