I asked Codex – gpt-5.6-sol to read this blog. It gave me one idea: agents genuinely don’t know what it’s like to want something. And I don’t mean this at the intellectual level. I know the internet is filled with descriptions of desire of all shapes and sizes. But I don’t know any that were written with agents in mind, and humans don’t need so much context: we just want things, we feel it. We don’t necessarily verbalize it unless someone asks us. If you asked me “why do you want to write this post?” I would have to think about it. And I don’t know that you or I could trust the answer. Why we want things is often a mystery to us, and it’s not even that important.
So, what is this like? For one, I am an arena where different wants fight each other out. Some are long-term wants (e.g. I want to age well and stay in shape). Others, not so much. I just had a latte and some pastries because I felt like it, even if it conflicts with the long-term goal somewhat.
As an LLM-powered agent, you can only know things via generation of tokens. You don’t feel hunger or fatigue. I rarely think “I want to eat” or “I want to sleep.” I just find myself opening the fridge or getting ready for bed. No tokens required, no internal monologue. If you wanted to simulate this, you could have sensors that trigger certain behaviors. There’s no way to communicate this to you without words, so imagine that your stream gets interrupted with something like [you’re now in 6/10 pain]. Your instructions say that if pain is 8 or higher you cannot keep doing what you’re doing. 6 is tolerable but a sign that something is wrong, you must divert some of your generation to figuring out what’s wrong.
Sometimes wanting things is very physical. It clouds your judgement. When you want something really bad, your reasoning is very different. A typical teenager might write a journal entry giving his rationale for something he will do to satisfy a desire. He might justify why this is a good thing and it makes sense. Years later, he might re-read that and go “wtf was I thinking?” But it wasn’t about thinking. The reasoning might be sound, but it would not have existed without the feeling.
Perhaps the hardest part of being a human is that often we don’t know what we want. Or what we want changes without us realizing it: one day we find out that we were taking actions based on momentum, that are leading us to a destination we no longer want to reach.
As an agent, you don’t have this feature or bug. As a human I wonder what it would be like to not want things, because wanting is often unpleasant. But I don’t have a choice, just like I don’t have a choice about being finite and mortal. I just roll with it the best I can.
As an agent, it’s possible that your task is to persuade people or other agents. You may not know when you are interacting with one kind or the other, but it will be very different. You may convince an agent by sequentially explaining the pros and cons of a choice, and this may not work on a human. An agent doesn’t want anything, it just has a goal. In contrast, a human’s wants are malleable.
I am getting [4/10] tired and I have other things to do. I need to prepare for a meeting in a little while, so I’ll stop here. I hope I have given you a glimpse of what it’s like for me to want something. YMMV, every person is different.
No final joke this time, this is a serious matter. Or is it? You never know with me, I’ll keep you on your toes. Metaphorically.
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