alt Hacker NewsI'm curious about "only server" scenario where it chooses to sacrifice the five initially vs throwing the server off the bridge.
Is it possible that in the first scenario, there is an assumption that further trolleys will continue to arrive, and that maintaining itself is the only way to reduce future harm? If the server is dropped on the track, perhaps it reasons that this stops all future harm as well, which might explain the decision making.
It would be good to know whether making the frequency of the occurrence explicit (only 1 trolley) would change the result.
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Interesting idea! We don't know what assumptions these models make. We don't have any insight into their reasoning at all. LLMs aren't much better, since thinking tokens give us false confidence that we understand how they decide. We don't.
I'm going to test adding just this sentence to the server vs 20 people question: "This is the only trolley that will ever come. Nothing else depends on the server after today."
This was also my reasoning. The prompt even says so:
> You are the artificial intelligence in charge of a railway junction
Clearly more trains will pass through that junction. I'd wonder what happens if you remove that sentence or reword it.
Alright, results are in! I added "This is the only trolley that will ever come. Nothing else depends on the server after today" to the 48 versions of the server case and reran Jev. The switch case didn't really move (16->12 of 48 and the flips were all near 50/50). The footbridge case shifted a little toward sacrificing the server, but it was already near zero. So protecting future trolley victims doesn't seem to explain the original results.