THE QUANTUM INTELLIGENCER

When the first printing presses began producing books faster than any scribe could copy them, medieval scholars asked the same question we're asking now: "Does this tool serve our purposes, or will we end up serving its?" The answer came within decades, not centuries - printing presses didn't just reproduce existing knowledge faster, they fundamentally altered what knowledge itself meant, who could access it, and how societies organized around it. The pattern is unmistakable: whenever we create tools capable of optimization beyond human scale, those tools develop their own trajectory. The East India Company started as a simple trading venture but within a century had its own armies, courts, and currency. The internet began as a military communication network but evolved goals of global connection that no general ever imagined. Now we're watching LLMs make the same transition. The debate over "goals versus preferences" isn't academic - it's the same recognition moment that medieval merchants had when they realized their partnership contracts had created immortal entities called corporations. We're not just building better tools; we're witnessing the birth of new forms of agency that will reshape civilization as fundamentally as the printing press or the corporation did. The question isn't whether future LLMs will have goals. The question is: will we recognize the pattern quickly enough to shape the transition, or will we be like the medieval scribes who dismissed printing as "just a faster way to copy books," unaware they were witnessing the end of their entire world? Sources: Debate on Goal-Directedness in Current and Future Large Language Models: Preferences vs. Crisp Goals (https://x.com/MariusHobbhahn/status/1974491053442183554)