app/priv/blog/engineering/2026/05-08-ai-zombies.md

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-%{
-  title: "AI Zombies",
-  author: "Willem van den Ende",
-  tags: ~w(AI Reflection),
-  description: "In which the writer reflects on believing AI is conscious",
-  published: false
-}
----
-
-I wrote this on LinkedIn, reposting Stuart-Winter-Tear:
-
-I've seen very smart people see patterns where there are none. I like my systems as much as the next person, and LLMs can achieve much more than I'd expect from next token prediction. But this requires a proper harness and people operating it with both feet on the ground (and not their head in a methane powered cloud, but I digress ;-) ). Stuart Winter-Tear's short piece is well worth reading. "[..]our confidence in recognising consciousness rests on shakier ground than we like to admit."
-
-It may look conscious to you, but it is still a next token predictor in a harness.
-
-How can you prevent falling into this?
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-
-There is no failsafe recipe, I am afraid. One thing that can help is a rule of thumb I found in Matteo Vaccari's blog:
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-Read all the markdown that you adopt.
-
-This is also a great way to reduce the number of things to try out. I've seen some repositories with a lot of markdown, and a general prompt, and then you can put your question or your writing to an agent to get perspectives.
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-There usually is too much text in these repositories, so I give up reading and put the repository aside. I want skill augmentation, not cognitive offloading. 
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-